Author:: [[Jason Schreier]] DateFinished:: Rating:: Tags:: #📩 #🟥 # Blood, Sweat, and Pixels  ## Highlights Being a solo developer came with two major challenges. The first was that everything took a very long time. Because he didn’t have a strict schedule, Barone had a tendency to build 90 percent of a feature, get bored, and move on to something else. Although he’d been working on Stardew Valley for nearly four years, he still hadn’t finished many of the game’s core mechanics, like childbirth and marriage. And it sure was hard to get excited about coding an options menu. “I think that gave me a false impression that it was close, because when you just boot up the game and play it from the first day, it seems like you can do everything,” Barone said. “But then if you actually look into it, everything needs a little more work.” It would take months to revisit these incomplete features and finish them all. The second major challenge was loneliness. For four years now, Barone had sat by himself at a computer, rarely talking to anyone but Amber Hageman. He had no coworkers with whom to bounce around ideas, nobody to meet for lunch and a kvetch session about the latest game industry trends. In exchange for complete creative control, he had to embrace solitude. “I think to be a solo developer you have to be someone who’s OK with being by yourself a lot,” Barone said. “And I’m that kind of person. I’m OK with it. But it’s lonely, I have to admit. It’s part of why I got that usher job, just so I could go out and interact with some other people sometimes.” Staring at the mountains and trees of Stardew Valley, Barone found himself again unable to tell whether his game was any good. It resembled Harvest Moon, sure. You could harvest crops and go on dates and hang out with cute people at the annual egg festival. But Barone had worked on the game for so long now, he found it impossible to judge the squishier parts. Was the writing good? The music? Were the portraits pretty enough, or should he redo them yet again? “That’s another issue with being a solo developer,” Barone said. “You lose all objectivity about your game. I had no idea when the game was fun. In fact I thought the game was garbage even up until a few days before release, I was like, ‘This game sucks.’” ([Location 1150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01NAKSWW1&location=1150))