Game Design Perspective: Stardew Valley (2020)
My criticism towards game designers is that they often analyze games from an abstract perspective, leaving out important details that contribute to the success of the game:<p>High frame rate, stability, good quality animations, color palette&#x2F;art style&#x2F;fonts that are consistent with the game fiction, UI usability, soundtrack, community, abscence of cheaters... just to name a few.<p>You can have a great game, but if it&#x27;s unstable, has annoying sound effects, or constant monetization related nagging, or a toxic community or some cringy voice actor or soundtrack or excessive unskippable cutscenes with irrelevant stupid dialogs... the magic in the experience goes away. Everything counts.<p>If you go to a 5 star hotel where everything is perfect but when you try to use the shower it doesn&#x27;t work, your overall rating will be 1 star. For a experience to be gratifying, everything needs to work together.<p>I&#x27;ve read countless articles and postmortems of the style &quot;why X is successful&quot;, and then seen games that follow those documents closely and produce a horrible game. Because they are unable to capture the whole experience.<p>Lately I played a game, Ex-Zodiac, which is a StarFox clone. Only the demo is available, but the author really captured every single aspect that made StarFox great. That attention to detail is what makes games fun.