Q&A

The absence of a time limit is a key change from Harvest

Moon. Why did you remove it?

Pretty early on, I just thought, ‘Why should there be a time limit?’ I thought people might want to play for a long time, and I didn't really see a good reason to keep it. Also, I was influenced by open-ended modern PC games where you’re able to keep playing, beyond any sort of storyline, just for the sake of creativity and doing things your own way.

What was the biggest challenge you faced during development?

Staying focused was challenging at times. I never felt like I was going to quit or not finish it, the question was just when. One difficulty was writing the dialogue. Because of the way Stardew Valley works, people will say things on certain days – but they could be anywhere in the world when they say it. So you can't really use any sort of environmental context, you can't have them commenting on their surroundings. It all has to apply to any sort of situation, and then you have to write a great many of those for each character. And, of course, multiplayer, which I had promised would be in the game at release, but it ended up just being very difficult for me to do on my own, and I had a fully functioning and fun singleplayer game ready.

Given Harvest Moon’s long lineage on Nintendo hardware, it seems fitting to have

Stardew Valley on Switch.

Yeah, definitely. I'm a big fan of Nintendo, and I'm excited for it. And [GBA entry] Friends Of Mineral Town is basically the same game as Back To Nature. I think those are the best Harvest Moon games.