Concerned Ape (Stardew Valley): I swear on the honor of my family name, i will never charge money for a DLC or update for as long as I live. Screencap this and shame me if I ever violate this oath.
Concerned Ape (Stardew Valley): I swear on the honor of my family name, i will never charge money for a DLC or update for as long as I live. Screencap this and shame me if I ever violate this oath.
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Such an incredible game and a great humble developer. Honestly, there’s nothing I can think of to do to improve the game from a gameplay mechanics standpoint, but there are a few technical back-end things I do wish it had :
- Cross-platform compatible cloud-based save support. I want to be able to play in my same game save regardless of what system I play on. I don’t even mind paying for the game multiple times, but I want to have a singular Stardew account that I can sync somehow between PlayStation, Steam Deck, iOS, etc.
- Cross-platform multiplayer. If I want to play on my Steam Deck and hop into my spouse’s farm on the Switch or whatever… or have them be able to do so on mine.
- Mixing local and online co-op. If my kid wants to play with my spouse split-screen and I want to play on my desktop, again - would love to just be able to do so more seamlessly.
- Dedicated server support.
I know at this point doing those things would be very hard from a technical standpoint since they’d probably require a lot of deep work in a code base that was not built to do any multiplayer to begin with, but I still would love if they could somehow do so or fork the base game to allow it to be done by the community.
The cross-platform saves probably wouldn't be that hard from a technical perspective. The game is written using MonoGame and likely doesn't have that many changes to the core of the game for ports. From what I know about MonoGame (which is admittedly only a little, so I may be wrong!!) the engine abstracts pretty much everything.
I think the stumbling blocks are outside factors. Games often don't update on different platforms at the very same time because console vendors take longer to vet updates. A game save from an updated PC version synced to a console version without the update could break it. Also setting up and maintaining the server infrastructure for syncing is its own can of worms. Certainly doable but it would pretty much require him to outsource that and he may simply not want that.