How Stardew Valley TRICKS you!

How Stardew Valley TRICKS you!

Stardew Valley is an amazing game after 8 years it is still in steam’s top five I have over 200 hours playing it wait that can be right and on top of it all it was made by one dude but I do think that after a while you can see that the

Game is well cheating a little bit hello everybody I’m Gaba and today I want to talk about stardew Valley how the game grabs our attention and how it ends up being a Bittersweet experience I doubt there are many people that are watching this and don’t know it already

But stardew Valley is a 2016 game inspired by older farming simulators like Harvest Moon where the player moves to a farm in a small village and has to restore and make the farm Thrive plant crops take care of animals explore the mines for resources and make friends

With the villagers on the surface it is a cozy farming game but it actually has a terrific game design the game has three pillars first you always have an objective to work on objectives can go from small like cleaning the farm or planting the first crop to gigantic like

Completing the community center or getting to the end of the School mines there is always something to do second it has a massive amount of content seeds have different use and time to harvest so there’s plenty of novelty for experimenting the game also have variable rewards in form of the minerals

You can find in the mines and the fishes you can fish not enough content for you how about a village full of NPCs with their own likes and dislikes schedules and unique events it is a lot third time or better the lack of it the game has a

Day night cycle that forces you to sleep and punishes you if you don’t sleep at your bed not only that but it has objectives that can only be accomplished at certain days like birthdays and others that can only be done at certain Seasons this gives the game a sense of

Urgency and a loop that grounds us and forces us to break the tasks ahead this contrast of always having a lot of options as to what to do within a limited schedule kicks our brain into optimization mode which is always a delight learning what combination of settings will make us progress faster

Through objectives is one of if not the main appeal of the game because of this finally design structure stardo Valley is an incredibly hard game to put down especially once you play it a bit and that ends up highlighting one of the game’s main problems but I’m getting ahead of Myself these series of objectives with different difficulties and paths to accomplish that are always Within Reach are efficient in forming habits on players with even some claiming that it’s therapeutic and countless players claiming they want to play only one extra in-game day and end up playing for hours hours however for me there’s

Always a point where this structure starts failing smaller objectives like quests get pointless as their rewards aren’t meaningful bigger objectives get completed or abandoned NPCs start to feel stale and borderline annoying but for me the worst of it all is when you start to realize that the game you’ve

Been playing for all this time is nothing but a sequence of chores just like washing the dishes or taking out the trash you start to realize that what you’re doing is not fun by itself farming is mind dly boring I actually slapped a couple of times while playing

The game with mining you depend on the mood of the Gods and also it’s pretty trivial when you get the bombs fishing with may be the least offender here but still lacking in combat well combat in my opinion is the worst aspect of the game you may be asking isn’t stardo valy

Supposed to be just a chill game where there are no worries a game to forget how life is guess but actually no what do you really want the good stuff is a game that puts you in a state of flow someday I hope to make a video about it

But flow is basically when the challenge is just right and unfortunately stardo Valley doesn’t challenge you at all mechanically each player will have a different threshold of course but I think that for the the majority of players the daily actions in the game won’t be enough especially after completing the community center which

Signals the later stages of the game with an experienced player without the objectives to be their carrot the boringness of the game starts to show and to add insult to injury now is the time that the player is probably really hooked and all the habitual behavior that I highlighted earlier keeps working

For a good while until the player reaches the same conclusion why the heck am I playing this and that’s why stard VY tricks you it has shallow mechanics but distracts you with a good objective structure a heaping amount of content all beautifully encapsulated in time constrained Loops well that doesn’t seem that bad

Does it that’s because it isn’t as I said the game is awesome and people already fixed this problem by use the MSG of gaming industry mods but I I do think that tweaking the mechanics could Elevate the game a whole lot these changes however are easier said than

Done so I’d like to propose an exercise of what we’d like to see in some newer farming games or maybe even a sequel if you have any ideas I’d love to see them in the comments number one make things harder to perfect the idea here is to add a bit

Of complexity in the results of your actions so that you can make mechanics to interact with this complexity and Achieve perfect results for instance imagine if crops had more stats like juicess Flavor size and more and to achieve Perfection you had to decipher how much water you have to add how much

You have to plow the land or what are the nutrients in the soil even if each of these actions had simple Min games like reloading Gears of War that would in itself add a huge number of objectives and opportunities for expression with mechanics that you can

Master and use that skill to make new experiments for example let’s say you want to learn how to make the best pumpkin well for that you might have to plow the land Just Right add not too much water and make sure you have the correct and enough fertilizers while the plant is

Growing number two add more Synergy there are glimpses of this already in stardo Valley for example the bee houses they produce honey of different variety when placed close to flowers this is great because it’s not punitive meaning you just earn less by not doing it there’s an interaction between where you

Place the bee house and what you plant and it uses affordance brilliantly it makes sense that the honey changes based on the flowers around it and it enhances the immersion of the game and makes the game seem more alive but further this example by asking what impact do bees have on plants or

Maybe what if bees reacted to other things like minerals and other animals keep asking these questions for other produce the game would grow exponentially number three NPCs that are more alive now this is a classic point of criticism by the player base the NPCs are scripted and the gifting system is

Well easily mastered I do you think this is harder to improve than most people give credit for and the NPCs in stardo Valley are undeniably pretty Charming but adding a dash of the Sims and make them have more aspirations relationships and needs would be amazing I know AI is

A Hot Topic these days especially in the gaming industry but I do think there are some incredible things that it could achieve just remember to train them responsibly And that’s it people stardo Valley is an awesome game with a wonderful vibe that is an inspiration to any game developer and has helped people get their lives together a game I’ll always think foundly about despite my hopefully constructive criticisms if you like this kind of video don’t forget to subscribe also I

Made a video about what makes us all so hyped for games go check it out I think you might like it Follow

Stardew Valley is an awesome game but it has some shady stuff going on…

Timestamps:
0:00 – Introduction
0:40 – What is it about?
1:14 – Game Design
3:10 – Habits & Structure Problems
6:00 – Improvement Exercise
9:00 – Outro

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