Back at the end of August we travelled to Seattle to attend PAX West and had the incredible opportunity to spend half an hour with none other than Eric Barone, AKA ConcernedApe.
If you don’t know who Eric is, he’s the creator of Stardew Valley; the smash hit farming game from 2016, which is still to this day getting substantial updates.
We got to talk about his hobbies outside of gaming, why he still comes back to work on Stardew Valley, and how it was making bosses for a change for his new upcoming game Haunted Chocolatier.
Note. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. Also, if you'd like to see the video of our chat, you'll find it at the bottom of the page.
Nintendo Life (Felix Sanchez): I know you grew up playing a lot of Harvest Moon, but what other games shaped you growing up?
Eric Barone: So I played a lot of RPGs. Final Fantasy, EarthBound, Chrono Trigger, and Zelda games, that kind of stuff.
What kind of Zelda games did you play?
The first one that I played was Link's Awakening for the Game Boy, and I really loved that game. And then I played… Let’s see, A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask...
Which one do you like the most between Majora's Mask and Ocarina?
Well, I'm kind of an Ocarina guy. I know a lot of people love Majora's Mask more and they say it's the underrated King, and it's cool, but you know, Ocarina of Time was very special and nostalgic to me. I think with Majora's Mask, with the moon coming down, the time pressure kind of stressed me out.
It’s funny—
It's funny coming from me with Stardew Valley. I know. [laughs] I should think about that.
I know you do everything yourself, you have so many hats on. How do you structure that?
I don't really have a structure, it's more just kind of what I feel like doing at the moment, with a big picture in mind of how all of this is gonna fit in, of course. There might be one area of the game where I do everything for that area at once, but I think the nice thing about solo dev is that you can kind of just follow your whims. One day I might just feel like doing music, so that's just what I do. So, yeah, I'm not very structured in the way I go about doing things. It's kind of spur of the moment.
So, I really like the Stardew Valley board game, so I wanted to hear what your hobbies are outside of video games. Do you play board games yourself?
I do. I wouldn't say I'm a huge board game person, but I do enjoy them. The Stardew Valley board game was kind of inspired by... Have you ever played Eldritch Horror?
No, I haven't.
Okay, well I was a little bit inspired by that, which I guess [is] a nerdy board game a little bit. [chuckles]
I've played the Stardew board game with my friends and it's just so funnily structured. I don't play a lot of co-op games myself, but here it just works really well. We even put on the Stardew Valley soundtrack and it works perfectly.
I'm glad you appreciate it. How do you find it in terms of difficulty?
I feel like it's really good. In the final year you're really like, "Okay, we need to do this before it ends." So it's always very close and I really like that. There was this one time when we simply did not win.
Yeah, when we were testing the game, we played so many rounds of it. And I felt like it was in a pretty good place when we were consistently barely winning on the last run.
Yeah, that's what you want.
To answer your question about what I like to do other than making video games, the answer I often give is that all the stuff that went into solo dev — music, art, writing — those are all my hobbies. And so being able to combine them all into my work is really satisfying. I get to do all my hobbies in my work.
Out of all the different things in the game, what do you like to do the most?
I'd say probably my favourite — if I had to pick one — is probably the music. Before I even got into game dev at all, my main hobby was music, like playing in bands in high school.
What did you play?
I played guitar.
Lead guitar?
Yeah, lead guitar.
Hell yeah!
I was in metal bands.
Oh, really? That’s awesome!
But then I kind of got into more like computer music and just composing stuff. And then I was in this kind of experimental computer pop group for a while. But that was always kind of my dream as a teenager, to be a musician. Just being in weird indie bands and play[ing] shows and stuff like that.
So that was my original passion. But you know, there's part of me that likes all the different aspects. Sometimes I'll be, “I want to code today,” because that stimulates a certain part of the brain.
I remember I was watching a podcast you did with Reason. I think it was a two-hour podcast where you just talked about the music of the game and you even showed a track from Haunted Chocolatier that was a boss theme. I have that stuck in my head all the time. [*hums the melody*] So talking about bosses, there's not really bosses in Stardew Valley. Was it challenging suddenly making a boss?
For Haunted Chocolatier?
Yeah. Can you talk about that?
Yeah, no, I'm happy to talk about that… to a degree. Designing bosses is a whole new ball game from anything that's Stardew. And I think I wanted something different. I wanted a challenge because I want to keep growing as a game developer. I didn't want to just do exactly the same thing again. I know a lot of people say, "Haunted Chocolatier looks like it's just a copy and paste Stardew Valley." But they haven't played the game, so they don't really know. But yeah, designing bosses is kind of an art form all unto itself, and I'm still learning stuff. And some of the bosses are going to be like, "Hopefully you'll see my progression throughout the course of the game."
Like which ones you did first?
Yeah, exactly. But I think even a boss can be simple but still fun. What matters at the end of the day is fun. I think that's the main thing I care about.
You don't want to make it too easy. That's a really hard balance to strike.
Yeah.
So, if you work on something for seven years, you're going to be burned out, right? But you keep coming back to the game. You're even working on this new game, but you keep adding new stuff [to Stardew Valley].
That's true. I have so many ideas for Stardew. I feel like I could work on it for the rest of my life, and just keep improving it, adding more stuff to it, more content, fleshing out the existing content. That's the main thing I want to do is flesh out the existing content. And okay, here's another thing: It's so popular.
Yeah, it's sold like 30 million copies? It's insane.
Something like that. So, because of that, I feel like I want to keep it alive, keep it fresh, delight the fans, because it's just fun to engage with that. It's a rare opportunity I have that there's so many people who love this game and will play whatever update I make. And what I love to do is create things and then share them with people and give people experiences. And Stardew is such a good platform for that because it is very popular and it's still really active.
So it's kind of hard. I don't want to see it fizzle out, I want to keep it alive, but then I also want to make a new game. So I'm always like—
It's a hard balance.
It is.
And you're only one person who makes it.
Well, I do have some help on Stardew updates now.
What part do you get help on?
Basically mostly the coding. The technical stuff.
You also got help with the multiplayer aspect right?
Yeah, true. It's like, you know, with the creative stuff, I'm very particular and I want to make sure that it's my vision. But with the programming, I'm more like, does it work? You know, the players don't really get to see under the hood on the code.
I totally get that. For example, with video editing, sometimes I wish someone could just watch through it to be like, does this work?
Well, there's also just areas where I'm just not that good at or I don't have the knowledge to do really deeply technical stuff. I'm kind of a gameplay programmer, you know? It's just I'm not an elegant programmer. Make it work, make it fun for the player - that's my angle.
So, I work remote[ly] myself. I don't really hear or see my co-workers other than on the screen. When you work on a game for so long, that must be quite lonely. How did you deal with that?
It helps that I'm a pretty solitary person in general. I think I'm just kind of good at that. I tend to get into my own world with my creative pursuits and then I just lock in. I mean, yeah, it is a little bit lonely. And when you are creating something like Stardew Valley or making a game by yourself, you know, for the most part, there are some sacrifices you have to make. But, I don't regret it. I mean, this is a dream come true for me to see something that I made blow up and a lot of people love it.
You probably get asked a lot what your favourite music track in Stardew Valley is, but what's the most underrated one? The one that people don't really talk about, but it's just one that you're really proud of.
I like the town theme. I’ve never seen anyone talking about it, but I think it really has a good vibe to it. And there's these kind of basic... I call them 'the country songs' and there's a town theme, some of the shop themes. There's one that plays in Marnie's shop and they just have this feelgood [mood], sets the tone and the vibe of the game. People latch onto the big tracks like Moonlight Jellies or the winter songs that really hit hard, but I [like] the subtle atmospheric ones that give this country vibe to the whole town.
So, there's a lot of great sound effects in Stardew Valley. Did you make all those [with] synths, or did you go record stuff in real life too?
Most of them were just synthesisers. I would just go in and tweak the waveforms until I got something that sounded right. There were a couple of things that I recorded. Notably, when you break rocks in the mines, there's this rock sound, yeah I was out on the lawn at my parents' house and I was just throwing rocks.
Oh, that’s amazing!
But most of them are synthesisers. And then there's a few, the ambient soundscapes, which I got on royalty-free websites.