some googling pulls up excerpts from that jason schrier book that mentions how she single-handedly supported the two of them financially while the game was in development and uh, well she sure isn’t listed here huh https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/stardew-valley/credits
the whole “lone genius dude artist” thing is only possible because either the dude was already wealthy or that dude offloaded all of his other responsibilities onto a partner
yeah 99% of the time the genius artist man is totally full of shit lol. fuck that guy
my favorite thing about stardew valley is that it only took a team of ~3 people to make a better harvest moon game than the team of ~30 to 60+ people that had been churning them out for the past like, 15+ fucking years. i hope marvelous felt like garbage after that. i hope this remake of friends of mineral town is actually good, and that they realized they need to put some effort into what they’re doing again. maybe don’t farm them out to TOSE.
It’s gross that he just accepts all of this accolade despite other people also having also put time and effort into his (their!) project. Like, having your name in the credits of published media can probably be a big help in getting a job, and he’s deprived people of that because he apparently still has the mentality of a fucking teenager.
If anyone can find instances of Hageman working PR or any other public facing job, or other published sources mentioning work she did involved in the game’s production, I’ll get her listed on the Mobygames credits.
says a lot about this industry when some venture capitalist dingus investing someone else’s money to fund a game would get credit & a share of the profits but a woman supporting a dude for years on her own income doesn’t count unless she showed up at a press event
man, I came into this thread wanting to feel good about these nurturing games.
One thing Stardew still trails behind the SoS series in, likely due to not having a dedicated writer role, is that all the romancing dialogue is trash. Not as offensive as network television, but only just.
I do have hope in the future of SoS though. The last one I played on the 3DS had a ludicrous eternal grind, in that at the end of each month there was a particular contest (crop, livestock, or cooking) and winning that contest would increase the value of your farm’s brand for that item specifically. Each item could thus be revalued 4 times, and considering the hundred or so items between every crop/animal/recipe hundreds of in-game years would be required to max everything. Offering that kind of time investment is just insane.
But Dragon Quest Builders similarly missed the appeal of the genre just as hard in DQB1, and yet came back and nailed everything in DQB2. I have faith that it’s just a matter of juggling a few numbers and a little context and a big studio production can get it right too.
I don’t know, the romance dialogue has always been pretty flat with very little variation. My biggest issue with SD is just how ugly some of the aesthetics are – specifically, those portraits. You can mod them in the PC version, but if you’re on console you’re stuck with them.
eternower, a 1$ puzzle game pretending to be a td
Place your squares to maximize damage dealt to creeps and maze them correctly, like any mazing TD. Extremely difficult, very minimal.
Damm, and to think that was the only game i bought near the day of release, thinking it would not go far.
Looks like he did have in commom with Chucklefish.
Should we throw the Stardew Valley guy under the bus with no complaints from his girlfriend and nothing to show she did anything but financially support him though?
I mean, I fully financially supported my girlfriend when she went back to school one year ago but it’s not like I would say I co-wrote her thesis
idk why you gotta downplay her contribution, that seems pretty fucking vital to getting a game made
Not downplaying her contribution; the thing is she might not even think like you do and believe that her financial support makes her a co-creator (like I do not believe I am a co-writer of my GF’s thesis) or she might just not have wanted to be in the spotlight
I’m not against the idea of this guy being a douchebag but need way more material than « Maybe he didn’t properly credit her for her financial support? Although she never showed being bothered by that, and we don’t know anything about their own situation and arrangements »
it’s possible! it’s a sensitive subject mainly because:
a lot of domestic labour has historically gone uncredited in this respect, and disproportionately in this direction
a lot of solo videogame developers are assumed to be broke and therefore even more in need of fungible acknowledgement
like I definitely agree that cancelling the guy over it in advance or having that shadow hang over future work with the information we have is not reasonable but it’s also very easy to imagine that she might not have got out of it what he did
Just throwing two cents in, but any game that has required ungodly crunch from staff is also likely neglecting to credit the immense support of individual developer’s families in suffering through this kind of practice. It’s a grey area on where they should be credited and acknowledged for support but I agree this kind of labour is completely whitewashed to preserve the myth of the struggling artist(s). A similar thing happens when discussing any ‘non-creative’ role in game development e.g. PR, marketing, admin, receptionists, janitors, accountants, estates etc. Some of these people do get formally credited but are almost invisible when it comes time to praise a studio, auteur or the industry generally.
i mean, yes, i think crediting a partner who materially supported you is good (check a book’s acknowledgements section sometime, a mention is like the bare minimum) and cutting an ex who materially supported you out of the narrative & proceeds from a project is pretty shitty!
like captainlove said, the games industry and many other creative industries are built on a model of creative people relying on their loved ones for material support while throwing their entire selves into the jaws of moloch full time and attention into a project. and it’s rotten from the top down! it’s bad when an indie dev does it to their partner and bad when AAA asks teams to do it at scale. stardew guy is a symptom of a systemic issue.
but also the idea that this dude’s ex has to open up her life to public scrutiny for this to be a legit criticism of stardew or the industry isn’t great to me? stardew is beloved & an Individualist Indie Dev Success myth. Gamers would tear her life apart and endlessly harass her like they do to every other woman who so much as says “y’all this sucks” about something in the industry. no one should be asked to put themselves thru that
I’ll admit, finding out about this after buying the game (through a bundle, granted, but w/e) and putting several dozen hours into it dampens my desire to recommend the game to others. I still really admire the craftwork done here, though.
I see a little bit of Minecraft in its pedigree as well as the more obvious inspirations because this is one of those games where you could conceivably just play it forever. Watching videos of this game on YouTube and seeing the lengths to which players have gone to customize their farms etc., is sort of mind-bending. I can scarcely imagine putting that much time into it and I’m sitting here at close to 100 hours.
man itd be great if people acknowledged her hard work in this thread a little more instead of demanding evidence. do you want people to have personal lives or do you need records of their actions all day every day so when something like this happens you believe them better
boiling it down to her bankrolling it is bizaree. she tested the game, talked to publishers, managed the programmers time. she was a producer. if she was a man no one would stop themselves from saying she did producer work but because they were dating ‘oh maybe she just bankrolled him’
and of course its years later and her name is taken off stuff so it’s much easier to believe she did nothing than worked hard
ah yes, you see why this affects me now
based on anecdotal experience, it seems like this is a pretty common thing in indie games, though.
anyway, i could never get into Stardew Valley
yeah I mean at minimum I guess this deserves the same journalistic investigation as beloved music duos who have broken up? It doesn’t seem like games should be alone in not having any way to talk about this beyond like, basic incrimination
physical is right. she will be harassed into oblivion if a journalist looks into this
I have a really hard time trusting someone who hired their right hand man whos claim to fame is harassing derek yu and his entire family (derek tried to bury the hatchet bc he thought it was an online bit but pod*nkian went to his HOUSE and threatened his wife. super stand up guy. oh like a year before he got hired he was doing an online camera interview where he aggressively misgenders a transwoman game developer. hes also said horrible things about ME PERSONALLY in livejournal comments but thats honestly the least bad thing he did, im kind of an asshole. i feel like a crazy person remembering what everyone did when they have made zero effort to improve)
so I dunno, firing and breaking up with your partner who got your game off the ground then hiring this winner taints the whole thing for me, credit or not. producer or not.
ive been wanting to do a replay, but something about that peaceful farmlife being partially developed by someone who described many ways in which i should die creates a contrast that doesn’t sit very well with me
also lets practice our acceptance of two things: the person that made stardew may be a dirtbag, but this does not make you a dirtbag for playing the game. defending the developer bc you feel guilty is not the way to go. no one will hate you for playing stardew valley. if they do they would hate you for something else that doesn’t matter down the line
