There's a fairly famous story about the creation of Mario 64 that explains how the team at Nintendo figured out 3D movement for its revolutionary platformer. "We were working on something really simple—deceptively simple, even, from the perspective of the team that would go on to finish the huge, final game," said director Shigeru Miyamoto in a roundtable for the game's strategy guide, handily replicated here. "There was a room made of simple Lego-like blocks, and Mario and Luigi could run around in there, climb slopes, jump around, etc. We were trying to get the controls right with an analogue 3D stick, and once that felt smooth, we knew we were halfway there."

That makes me think about the one unifying element of all great Nintendo games—basic actions always feel good. It might be the way throwing a boomerang feels in a 2D Zelda game, or running up a wall while transformed into a cat in the Wii U's Super Mario 3D World, or moving in morph ball mode in any Metroid Prime. Great Nintendo games start with that, for me, then the rest of the magic comes from art, sound and level design. Its games come from a wide range of studios, and yet it's something I notice about them time and time again. 

"For me personally I think Nintendo are just the masters of putting a smile on your face," says Finn Brice, CEO of Starbound developer Chucklefish. I visited the studio late last year to check out the Advance Wars-like Wargroove. "And I think that’s what we try to bring to our games, it’s what we’ve learned from Nintendo. We want people to buy our games and not just appreciate the mechanics and not just tell a good story, but we want the moment-to-moment experience to make them feel good."

Nintendo-style games felt like they lived outside of the PC's sphere when I was a kid in the '90s—a few platformers like Jazz Jackrabbit and Earthworm Jim aside, it just wasn't where you found the types of games that you'd see on the SNES or N64. We now live in a very different time. Indie games and the digital marketplace mean we've seen a ton of games with Nintendo DNA, made by creators who grew up with those old consoles. From Metroidvanias to 2D platformers to Zelda-likes, there's a variant of pretty much every old Nintendo game type. Hell, there's even a pornographic WarioWare-like. 

"Before there are any levels made or anything concrete is created for a game I'm working on I always make the movement feel right and I finalise it before I do anything else," says Tommy Refenes, co-creator of Super Meat Boy, when I relay Nintendo's process of figuring out Mario's movement in three dimensions. "For Super Meat Boy it took three months of figuring out how I wanted Meat Boy to move and what I wanted him to be able to do and how I wanted the player to be able to accomplish those things. Super Meat Boy Forever was exactly the same. I believe it's crucial that level design and controls fit together perfectly and I'm hard pressed to find a Nintendo game where it appears they don't share the same belief." 

"Something that marks Nintendo’s games out for me is their commitment to fun," says Jonathan Biddle, whose next game is the lovely-looking co-op game The Swords of Ditto, out next month. Biddle previously worked on Stealth Bastard. "They treat the pursuit of fun as being a worthwhile endeavour in and of itself. In fact, they take it very seriously! While other developers might focus on storyline, or impressive cutting-edge technology, Nintendo instead double down on squeezing as much enjoyment out of their gameplay as is possible. Because their teams are smaller than their competitors, if they focus on this type of quality game design, they can punch above their weight—something they have been doing consistently well at for decades."

"My work has typically been structured in the same way," Biddle continues. "I've always worked from the small details outwards, trying to make something that is enjoyable on the lowest level, and built the larger systems in support of that, rather than, for example, creating a world and setting a game within it. Also, as much as I enjoy it in other games, I'm not one for putting complex meanings in my games. I generally like to make something fun; a toy, something to be played with, something that hopefully makes people smile."

'Small details' is something that Chucklefish picks up on as a Nintendo trademark, too, citing how Luigi would whistle the Luigi's Mansion theme tune in both of those games as you played. "The tiny attention to making you entertained in every aspect of the game, I think it’s what really defines [a Nintendo game]," says Rodrigo Monteiro, lead programmer and producer on Wargroove. 

For Chucklefish, too, the team finds players gravitating towards smaller details in Starbound. "The things people discuss when we see them discussing areas of the game, are weird tiny interactions or quotes in the game rather than grand experiences," says artist and designer Jay Baylis. "It's like, 'I stumbled across a graveyard and someone happened to be crying near it, and I thought that was a relative and I thought they were really sad about their relative dying', and that’s a random interaction in the game. But that's a small thing they remembered the most."

"The main quality I think Nintendo brought to game design, if not innovating it than at least doing it the best early on, is having games teach players how to play games while playing," says Thomas Happ, creator of Metroidvania game Axiom Verge. "The important thing to remember is that games are a learning experience from beginning to end. I always try to keep the player learning new things and applying what they learned. You never want to bring in some difficult element before you have trained them to surmount it because that leads to frustration. And before the player achieves mastery of something you need to have something new come up or there will be a period of boredom, which is what kills games."

How it was, or how you remember it? 

You can see the look of series like Metroid, Zelda and Mario filtering down to other indie games—and not just from the SNES era. Last year's Rime reminded me of Wind Waker before anything else, and Owlboy developer Simon Stafsnes Andersen cites the cel-shaded GameCube game as an influence in giving his game's characters a recognisable shape, as well as ensuring that each environment feels interactive. 

If you're going to make a SNES-looking game for the modern age, though, it's never as simple as borrowing a style. "I think when people try to make games look like old games, it’s often to their detriment," says Chucklefish's Baylis. "I see a lot of 16-bit RPG-looking games, and they’re objectively nice, but they don't look inspired because they look like a SNES game, rather than looking how you would remember a SNES game. I think that’s key. You've got to find people’s rose-tinted memories."

"For example, Stardew [Valley] to Harvest Moon," says Monteiro. "I can’t speak for how Eric [Barone] was thinking when he developed it, but I think that Stardew captures the experience you remember having in Harvest Moon but not necessarily the experience you actually had in Harvest Moon."

Wargroove, which riffs heavily on Nintendo and Intelligent Systems' long-dormant Advance Wars series, offers a similar challenge to the team at Chucklefish. "People have said with Wargroove, the graphics are basically the same as Advance Wars," Baylis says. "When it's not actually the same as Advance Wars—they remember Advance Wars being that good, and then you look back and it just doesn’t look anything like the same—it looks very different to it." While the colour palette and style immediately puts you in the mindset of Advance Wars, the detail on the map is a world apart. Nostalgia only gets you so far.

It's interesting to see the ways this has looped back around for Nintendo. Indies are now swarming to the Switch, and there can be real benefits to developers getting their games on that platform. It means those console owners are getting the types of games that Nintendo isn't releasing at this point in time—games that made the PC their home years ago. 

Project Spellbound, the mysterious magic school RPG from Starbound developer and Stardew Valley publisher Chucklefish, finally has an official name: Witchbrook. Chucklefish CEO Finn Brice announced the name on Twitter earlier today. 

We spoke to Chucklefish about Witchbrook's influences last year. Brice said "the most obvious ones were Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley," adding that combat draws on early 2D Zelda games. Brice also talked about the game's in-depth relationships, which he described as "very young adult literature in a lot of ways." You can find more details here. 

A release date for Witchbrook has not yet been announced. 

Food in games usually just gives you a buff or maybe health regeneration, but designers still work hard to make it look appetizing. Stardew Valley might not be Final Fantasy XV in terms of hyper-realistic meals, but its pixel treats are nonetheless tempting. If you’ve ever wanted to tuck into a Farmer’s Lunch or a Miner’s Treat then Everett and Helena, of Stardew Valley Recipes and Stardew Kitchen respectively, have got you covered.

Stardew Valley’s food is abstract: you transform a few disparate ingredients into fully fledged meals as if by alchemy. Everett and Helena use these in-game recipes as a foundation, take the spirit of each dish and then turn it into something you can actually eat. Helena’s recent Cheese Cauliflower is a good example: in-game, Pam provides a "recipe" that only asks you to combine a single cauliflower and a block of cheese. Helena created a full dish including pasta, breadcrumb topping, and a beer-based sauce (in tribute to Pam, who loves Pale Ale.)

Everett’s been working on creating these recipes for almost two years, and has covered almost all the game’s food, including a few bonuses that are referenced but that you can’t actually make. "I was working on the Sous Chef achievement [to cook 25 food items], and I realized that all the recipes in-game seemed doable in real life," he tells me. "I’ve never had any professional experience with cooking at all; everything I know is from my parents, grandparents, and YouTube videos, but I wanted to give it a shot."

Helena’s blog began several weeks ago, and she too describes herself as "a dedicated but decidedly amateur cook." The two take different approaches in their descriptions—Helena’s instructions are more narrative, often conversational and jokey, but both are entertaining and easy to follow.

Cooking blogs inspired by games aren’t new—Helena cites the now-defunct Gourmet Gaming as one of her inspirations—but Stardew Valley is a particularly good fit for the genre. Its focus on wholesome living, locally sourced ingredients, and food as a community project (through characters who share recipes with you and events like the pot luck) all translate well into the blog projects.

For Everett, the community that’s sprung up around the blog has become a large part of his enjoyment. He invites people who have tried his recipes to submit pictures and tells me that he loves to "hear tips and suggestions from a whole crowd of people."

Helena is particularly looking forward to foraging for her food: "I think it's much easier to get excited about eating something fairly unglamourous like chard or a swede if you've actually come into contact with the earth it was growing in and worked to have it be something you can enjoy," she explains, enthusing about the potential of finding fiddlehead ferns in the wild. Then she adds, as something of an afterthought, "I've heard fiddleheads contain carcinogens if you don't cook them properly, but the adrenaline of avoiding getting poisoned is part of the appeal of foraging, I think." (Sourcing wild food is indeed much more complex and potentially dangerous in real life than in Stardew Valley—it’s probably best to leave this to those with experience, like Helena, who used to work on a farm.)

Potential poisoning aside, Stardew’s ingredients have caused other hurdles. "Some of the recipes have vague or weird ingredients in the game, like Pale Broth [made with just two White Algae] and Strange Bun [Wheat Flour, a Periwinkle, and Void Mayonnaise]," Everett explains. For those recipes, he’s stuck with the spirit rather than the game’s instructions, creating a Turkish-style yoghurt soup and a snail-stuffed bread.  

Helena hasn’t quite decided how she’s going to approach those yet: "I think I’m going to try to keep each dish as true as I can to either the ingredients or the appearance and it’ll probably have to be the latter on those two… I'm pretty sure I could get away with treating the Void Mayonnaise in the Strange Bun as a kind of custard and coloring it with that activated charcoal that seems to be a super trendy ingredient at the moment, though God knows what I'd do with the rest of the charcoal and there's still the periwinkle to think about."

But even standard ingredients can be tricky. Everett described his issues sourcing seafood: "I live in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere and far from the ocean," he says, and Helena has her own reservations. "I do try to keep loosely kosher so all the shellfish recipes are going to be a challenge… Although the only kosher rule I really stick to is avoiding pork."

Nonetheless, she’s looking forward to experimenting. "I'm optimistic that [recipes I’m nervous about] will turn out better than I expected and raise my confidence with that kind of thing in future," she says. She also laid out her goals for the blog, including her desire to keep her food "unpolished" so that "people can see what I'm doing and think 'hey, I could do that!'… I want to make it clear you don't need any real training or special facilities or equipment to derive joy and pride from making food and trying new things in the kitchen."

With that in mind I, something of a kitchen disaster, decided to get stuck in. Everett suggested a handful of his recipes, all of which sounded very healthy and wholesome except for cookies. Which I chose.

In-game, cookies are made from just three ingredients—Wheat Flour, Sugar, and an Egg. Everett’s recipe is, thankfully, not much more complex. He categorizes his recipes by difficulty (cookies are 'easy') as well as other factors like whether or not they’re vegetarian so that people can find food that suits them.

My hour or so of baking was lovely, though definitely closer to Helena’s self-described "busy person cooking to unwind after work or when they have time at the weekend" style rather than Everett’s beautiful presentation. In other words, the cookies I made tasted extremely good, but they weren’t especially pretty. I severely underestimated the amount they would spread during cooking, and came away with a slab rather than individual bites, but that was on me rather than Everett. Besides, it was nothing that couldn’t be fixed by taking a knife to it, tray-bake style.

"Since Stardew Valley is my favorite game, being able to create content from it has been extra enjoyable," Everett says, and having baked his cookies, I can see why. There’s an appeal to taking something from a game and making it physical. We do it with merch, hobby crafts, and cosplay. 

But everything’s better with food involved, and the fact that Stardew Valley makes food an important part of its warm and welcoming environment means bringing that food into our own lives—no matter how clumsily—can bring that same feeling with it. In sharing their expertise, Helena and Everett have made that possible for even the most inexperienced cooks. 

This article was originally published February 2018.

Stardew Valley update 1.3 is the big one, ie, the one that will introduce (official) multiplayer functionality. And according to creator 'ConcernedApe' the functionality has been completed, thanks to the work of Chucklefish's Tom Coxon, who has "done all the network coding to turn Stardew Valley into a multiplayer game."

As for when it's coming, that'll be after some rigorous QA testing. "Work on the new features is done, and we’ve sent all the new text off to be translated into the different languages," ConcernedApe wrote.

"Meanwhile, we are working on bug fixes. Once we’ve received the translated text and integrated it back into the game, we’ll begin a serious QA phase involving thorough testing of all new features in both multiplayer and single player contexts. When that is finished, the update should be ready for a public beta.  I am still shooting for a spring release for the beta."

Spring, for the sizeable portion of the population not based in the northern hemisphere, including Australia, means an autumn release. More info will come closer to the beta, but in the meantime, that image embedded above demonstrates how the new signs will look. You can read the full post here.

This story was originally published in January. Happy Valentine's Day, PC gamers!

Together, Vana Springer and Adam Stevens poured hundreds of hours into the goldenrod soil of Stardew Valley. They watered the ground, they smelted the ore, they nurtured happy little rectangles of crops and livestock, all from the comfort of their dual-TV oasis. Obviously Adam knew that Vana wouldn't believe him when he claimed he had uncovered a fresh Easter Egg laying dormant in the meadow. After all, she knew every nook and cranny of Pelican Town—the tastes and proclivities of its citizenry, the renewable inventory at the Jojamart, the cosmic secrets waiting patiently in the depths of the mine. 

However, she didn't know that a few hours before Adam armed himself with a shovel and planted tulip bulbs in a chain of tiles until he spelled out a blocky, screen-filling "MARRY ME?" It was silly, it was swelling with light under the crisp morning sunshine, it was perfect.

"As soon as she came in the door I told her to go check out the bottom corner of the map. She goes down there and sees the 'A, R, and Y' and was like, 'what is this?'" laughs Adam, bundled together with his fiancée on their couch. "I had walked around and gotten down on one knee next to her, and she was like 'What, what's happening?' And I asked, 'Will you marry me?'"

Adam was in a rush. The tulips hadn't sprouted all the way from the dirt, and he test-ran the plan about four or five times to make sure he was able to get in position before Vana discovered the makeshift shrine. He documented the moment on his iPad. It is, and will remain, the happiest day of his life.

Vana tells me their proposal story got mixed reviews from family and friends. Some, like her dad, couldn't imagine anything more precious or more personal. Others, like her soon-to-be brother-in-law, were more dismissive: "What are you gonna get married in a Chuck-E-Cheese now?" she remembers with a narrow smile. 

Those are the predictable reactions from people who cannot, or will not, understand the transformative power of Stardew Valley. The quiet monotony of tilling those sun-dappled fields is either profoundly fruitless or a mind-altering sensation depending on your particular disposition, and frankly, it's difficult for the converted to articulate why all that digital hinterlanding can be so resonant. What I will say is that Stardew Valley is as close as we have to a utopia simulator. It opens with the pipe-dream of abandoning your cubicle to live off the land, and the only win condition is to live happily ever after. What better place to inscribe your holy matrimony? What better place to fall in love? To Vana and Adam, it made all the sense in the world.

"We tried to play Rocket League together, and we tried to play Pokemon together, and we get really competitive," says Vana. "With [Stardew] it's relaxed. The way the timing works, it feels like we can play alongside each other, and discovering new things together."

"The idea that you can look at each other's farms and get ideas from it—it's cooperative. That's a big part of it," adds Adam.

Adam and Vana posted a screenshot of their engagement on the Stardew Valley subreddit. Adam's sprite, in his straw hat and red flannel, stands on the question mark at the end of the proposal and stares through the monitor with those big, 32-bit  eyes. It was adorable—a rare taste of sweetness on an angry internet—and the community rewarded them with 3,000 upvotes. Eric Barone, Stardew's sole programmer and a constant presence in the community, dropped by to offer his own salutation. "Congratulations! I wish you both the very best!" (I imagine he's a de facto VIP, if he chooses to attend the wedding.) 

Adam and Vana's very public infatuation is part of a broader trend in the Stardew community. Every week the subreddit is visited by distilled wholesomeness; a daughter who asks to borrow dad's "farming game," a husband and wife adapting the in-game recipes to real life. 

My favorite, and probably the best example of the effect Pelican Town has  had on the gaming psyche, is this image from Ulf Sandberg, 33, in Sweden. Two tall glasses of red wine, two PCs, two Stardew Valleys. "Saturday evening with my wife." It could easily double as the family Christmas card.

Ulf plays with his wife Cecilia on weekends. Like Adam and Vana, they use a dual monitor set-up and sit side by side. They always make sure to log out on the same day, and together they've racked up 320 hours across four separate playthroughs. Cecilia makes the beverage choice—soda, beer, wine, or a single-malt—and the nights melt away in the narcoticizing milieu you find when you've spent a long time in love with the same person. 

"It's super relaxing. You can talk to each other a lot while playing. It doesn't require a super gaming computer or twitch reaction times," says Sandberg. "It's also a very diverse game, with so many different things to do. I like designing elaborate farms with lots of decorations, end up using up all my wood and stone while Cecilia instead goes down in the mine and beats up slimes, mines a thousand ores and completes her collections and achievements. Something for everyone."

Sandberg says his favorite memory with Stardew happened this past June. Midsommar is one of the most important holidays in Sweden, where the locals burn off the endless light of the solstice by dancing around maypoles and binging on massive dinner parties. Ulf and Cecilia felt the usual festive obligations, but they were stressed, tired, and didn't want to face the crowds. "We decided, 'Hey, we're grown-ups right? We can do what we want,' and ended up playing eight straight hours of Stardew," says Sandberg. 

In spring, Barone will finally release his highly touted multiplayer module, so that the international community of outdoorsfolk can finally play in each other's pastures. This is good news for everyone, but particularly for the Stardew couples. "As soon as we heard it's a possibility we've been talking about it," says Vana. In the near future she will have a husband in real life and on the homestead, and I couldn't imagine it any other way.

Stardew Valley has often been called a game about escapism. Last year it won a Steam award called, "The World Is Grim Enough, Can't We Just Get Along?" That's clearly true; the cosmopolitan stresses of our political culture don't feel as pressing when we're watering our potatoes. 

But I also feel that sells the game short—as if it's only capable of presenting a false reality, rather than expressing some optimistic truths about the human condition. The fact that Stardew has allowed people in love to feel close, to facilitate their affection through a stack of fat turnips, is wonderful. A game like Stardew Valley can be where you hide from the world. It can also shows you what's important.

The last we heard from Chucklefish regarding Stardew Valley's forthcoming multiplayer mode was that they were "pushing that beta back to Q1 2018 in order to make room for polish and QA." Today, the game's creator 'ConcernedApe' tweeted out a single screenshot, showing a four-player LAN game in progress.

There are a couple of interesting things about that screenshot. The first is the two houses side by side, one of which is made of stone unlike the regular wooden cabins. Looks like we'll be able to be neighbors with our friends. The other new thing is the flamingo right there in the middle of the crops, which is presumably a new kind of scarecrow. That's not much in the way of new additions to go on but we'll take anything we can get.

In a subsequent tweet ConcernedApe confirmed that work on the new single-player content he's adding to the game (including the long-awaited profession-respec) has been completed, and he's now "shifted all my attention to getting multiplayer ready!"

In the meantime, if you can't wait to get farming with your friends, here's our guide to using the unofficial 'Makeshift Multiplayer' mod.