Stardew Valley - Indie Farm Game

Good developer, not a very enjoyable person to contact

Noted. Then again … not uncommon that a developer can come across that way, Notch et al.

Oh so true!

ConcernedApe used to be great to contact and talk to. I mean at go-live you could actually send him your corrupted save file and he would fix it and send it back.

I bought this during the summer sale and fired it up, only to find out really quickly that you can only save at the end of the day when you go to bed. I mean, WTF? That seems like a seriously bent design decision. That sure took the wind out of my enthusiasm sails, so to speak. I put it down and haven’t been back. Not sure I will ever.

It’s what the Harvest Moon series did for a long time. It also makes you committ. I mean there aren’t a lot of games in the genre but the go to bed to save and live with your day was common for some time.

I’m sure he’s nice, but back when I contacted him about press inquiries it took him weeks to reply, which I just bought the game at that point and moved on, with a pretty terse reply about how I could go buy the game myself.

I mean, whatever, but it doesn’t make me want to like someone. He is, by far, not the first person to be like that.

Do like the game a lot.

I can understand your initial thought, but it’s not really a game that needs a, “save anywhere,” system. It saves when you sleep, which can be any time of the day you want to do it.

Part of that process is not needing to even worry about it, as it does so every day. You get paid for crops turn-ins, you get new weather and luck effects, you see crops grow and animals produce things and all of it revolves around that one-day time period. So it comes back to the game playing aspect of forcing you to do well, or poorly for an entire day (or until you sleep.)To give it any other method would trivialize the gameplay quite a bit.

It’s no different than any number of games that force you to go back to a certain point to save, or pass a checkpoint to save, etc.

I’m happy with Stardew Valley’s bed saving approach, but a similar approach in This War of Mine aggravates me to the point of not wanting to play it. It’s funny how the same approach used in similar but different games can have such a dramatic appeal difference.

Uh oh. I picked that game up last weeked (as a two-for one) and have yet to fire it up. What’s the issue with that save system for it? More difficulty between save times?

I’m assuming Coldsteel wanted to be able to quit when life intervened and then resume at the same point.

Fundamentally, I don’t think I enjoyed TWoM enough to warrant the longer play sessions that once-a-day saving forces. Obviously your mileage may vary.

Specific to Stardew Valley though, I’ve enjoyed this game so much that if I have to bail before I have a chance to save or if I er, replay a day to save scum a bad decision, then that’s okay with me! :)

Yeah, exactly that. I try to avoid games with spread-out mission save points and the like because life intervenes a lot. Games that save your progress when you exit, I’m fine with though, even if it has save points. I guess I don’t really understand why this one doesn’t save on exit.

Have you seen the way it saves? It’s ridiculously inefficient. Saving a gamestate during the day instead of at the sleep breakpoint would bloat the files to like 300 MB!

I’ve got the spare space.

You guys and your checkpointsplaining! We savebabies know all the balance and technical arguments already.

At some point I need to get to the end of year three. I think all my fences need repairing.

I stop playing Stardew at that point where I stop being time efficient and productive and just want to see what comes next. If I remember with my main character I finally managed to marry Penny(?) I think. There’s apparently something with children you can do… My forests are doing pretty well I think…

Another character I started from scratch and tried one of the new modes but didn’t get very far into that.

Chucklefish’s new game. Also Switch version of SDV is coming. CEO’s twitter account:

I picked this up for the Switch and it’s great. The save and load times are super long, though. I hope that improves with future updates. Saving at the end of the day takes ~ 45 seconds now.

Wow, that’s long enough that they should have something to distract you while it’s saving. Do they display a nice saving animation at least?