Stardew Valley developer planning to add a lot of new features

Stardew Valley is one of the surprise indie hits this year, having sold over 400,000 copies since it’s launch last week, however, the farming-and-life simulator game has some dark secrets that are yet to be discovered by it’s fan base and that is something remarkable to say about the game. The developer also announced that he is planning to add new free content and a multiplayer co-op mode in the future.

PC Gamer interviewed the developer of Stardew Valley Eric “Concerned Ape” Barone, where he revealed that there are still secrets yet to be found by the players. He hasn’t told anyone what they are, but he says he doesn’t know whether they’ll ever be discovered.

Check out a trailer of Stardew Valley below:

Here is part of the interview from PC Gamer:

“It’s not super significant, but it’s kind of just so weird and obscure that I don’t know if anyone will ever do it,” Barone said.

Barone also mentioned that he has ideas to expand every single area of the game and wants to release a “pretty substantial” free content update. He says fans have requested certain things, and he’s definitely open to adding them in.

“People, for example, have expressed a lot of interest in me adding more marriage candidates, especially Shane for some reason,” Barone said. “And I’m definitely open to that. I like all the characters and so I’d be fine with adding pretty much anyone as a marriage candidate. Of course I only have a limited amount of time that I can spend on working on things but I’m going to try to basically expand every area I can.”

The lone developer’s time restraints have made him unsure of when which things will be added. He originally planned for the game to have multiplayer, something that it shipped without.

“I kind of felt like I needed to add co-op because that was something that would make it substantially different than Harvest Moon and would kind of justify its existence at all,” Barone explained. “As the game evolved and gained a lot more character of its own, I felt like its existence was justified regardless of co-op.”

Barone added that he still plans to add cooperative play to the game, though he won’t commit to making an estimate on when it will arrive.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the development process of Stardew Valley it’s ‘Do not make estimates,'” he said. “If you can help it, never make estimates. Because I thought that Stardew Valley was going to be done two years ago, three years ago, right? I was saying ‘Oh, it’ll be done in a few months,’ and then three years later it finally is done. So I just don’t want to make a promise that I can’t keep, or even a suggestion that I won’t be able to live up to.”