Stardew Valley

About

Selling over 15 million copies since its release in 2016, Eric Barone’s Stardew Valley has become a cult favorite amongst gamers of all kinds. The relaxing soundtrack, lovely aesthetics, and variety of mods make the game a joyful yet engaging getaway.

The role-playing storyline begins with the player inheriting their grandfather’s crumbling farm property. To rebuild it, players select an aesthetic theme and get to work in clearing out the old and tending to new crops and livestock. Their custom character can also engage in various hobbies, creating new relationships with townsfolk, going on quests for monetary or material gain, and more. Stardew Valley is an open-ended RPG, so the possibilities are endless!

Since Stardew Valley’s popularity took off immediately, the original developers chose to expand the game’s reach by adding different languages and, later on, more platform options. I contributed to the localization of the game. Localization is the process of producing video game content for specific regions, which is essential because it signifies that the game was developed specifically for that target market, making it more comfortable and enjoyable for the player.

Challenges

Although it was my first time working with XNA game development, it didn’t take long to understand how the framework functions. One of the main challenges with the localization of Stardew Valley was generating custom text in different languages without breaking the grammar rules in each language.

Since the game includes an abundance of text, we wanted to ensure that each language’s wording flowed nicely and made sense, erasing any possibility of distracting the player with odd translations. Our team also wanted to make sure that the localized text matched up perfectly with the UI and UX designs.

Approach

Our game development team had a specific approach to localizing Stardew Valley in order to get the best result possible. We created a custom module i.e., a localization module for the entirety of our project. This approach made the process much more manageable because it kept all localized text assets in one place.

Additionally, our resolution allowed us to introduce the single-responsibility principle SRP into the project. The single-responsibility principle declares that each computer program function should be responsible for itself, allowing the programming to be more complex in development as a whole yet simpler to manage individual aspects.