This time I compare the game design of Stardew Valley and Graveyard Keeper, and discuss why design decisions need to be supported by surrounding gameplay elements.
Introduction
Stardew Valley, released in 2016, is a farming sim/RPG where you assume control of an aspiring farmer who just moved to a farm that they inherited from their deceased grandfather. You have to revitalize and cultivate the land, all the while you’re getting to know the residents of Pelican Town and helping out the community with various tasks and activities.
In Graveyard Keeper, released in 2018, you are bestowed upon the role of graveyard keeper by Death itself, shortly after passing away in an accident. Your main goal is trying to find a way back home, but in order to do that, you have to assist some of the townspeople and clean up the graveyard.
The core gameplay loop of the two games is similar: you get resources through harvesting, combat or by purchasing them, and you process them into various goods that can be used in different ways. Graveyard Keeper uses a lot of the same elements and mechanics that Stardew Valley does, but in the process of integrating them into their own game, developer Lazy Bear managed to suck the fun and convenience from these mechanics, leaving behind a collection of gameplay elements that feel included for the sake of inclusion, not supported by the surrounding gameplay.
In this post, I’m going to look at both games from a UX and game design standpoint to see what makes a game work and what doesn’t. Important to note that for Graveyard Keeper, I’m only taking the base game into consideration, no DLC content is included. Both games were played on the Nintendo Switch, which means the content from the Breaking Dead DLC that is free for PC players was not present in this playthrough.
On the topic of progression: inviting players for more versus obstructing flow to bloat playtime
One of the biggest differences between the two games is that Stardew Valley allows the player to craft their own emergent narrative through a relatively open gameplay, whereas Graveyard Keeper tries to tell a more linear story throughout the game.
This means that in Stardew Valley, you can’t really lose track of story as there is none, and the game focuses on the relationships between the characters instead. As such, there isn’t any hard roadblocks that prevent you from progressing, and you’re free to do everything at your own pace without feeling like you’re being railroaded. The quests themselves have a very nice flow and are reasonably easy to complete, and they usually tie in with recent events that occurred to the player. New areas open up to the player either by themselves or through reaching certain milestones, providing goals to work towards.
Graveyard Keeper, on the other hand, tries to tell a story, which the game has trouble getting to work due to multiple factors. To begin with, the story is really short, so in theory finishing it would not take long. The game tries to compensate for this by obstructing the players from progressing in multiple ways, artificially increasing the playtime through its game mechanics, which can end up in long periods passing without making any meaningful progress in the story, which is why I often lost track of why exactly I was doing something and how it related to my previous actions.
1. Providing goals for smooth progression
Stardew Valley does an excellent job of keeping the players’ interest by providing both short- and long-term goals. The “Story quests” are nicely paced and give the player an introduction to different aspects of the game. Some of them provide goals in increments, some can be completed immediately by procuring the right ingredient, and some can be completed later, when the player meets the requirements (such as reaching a certain level of friendship with a villager). These quests tie in to all sorts of activities players can undertake in the game and serve as an introduction to the different game mechanics.
Aside from these quests, the locals may post “Special Orders” which can be fulfilled by gathering the necessary items through normal gameplay. These tie in to the current season, ensuring that the required items are always attainable, and reward the player with increased friendship with the respective resident or other goods.
These, along with the abundance of items specific to the seasons, give a very nice path of progression towards the various goals the player can reach. It feels there’s always something to work towards on multiple fronts, and helps maintain the player’s interest and flow.
Graveyard Keeper, on the other hand, offers a very nice starting experience with a nice flow that just abruptly disappears early in the game. Throughout my playthrough, I had a constant feeling that the game deliberately set distant goals to cover for the lack of story progression and content by padding out playtime with mindless grinding. Sometimes the player can get lucky and complete a quest rather fast if it coincides with the player’s progression on the tech tree, but other times it felt like reaching the next stage of story progression took forever, each step a grueling chore in the process.
Stardew Valley’s objects are good for selling at the very least, and quests simply utilize some items further, but in the case of Graveyard Keeper, there are items that have no use outside of quests, and the time and energy invested in getting and unlocking these yields negligible returns. I see such items as real missed opportunities, as quests that require heavy investment from the player should give more significant rewards to the player that helps further progression in various areas of the game. Some of these items can completely be bypassed by using other items to substitute them for the quest.
Everything new you unlock in Stardew Valley becomes a permanent feature in the game, but there are several instances in Graveyard Keeper where you sink an inordinate amount of time and resources unlocking something that will be tossed in the bin once the game’s story is done with them. This gave me the feeling that I wasn’t progressing in certain directions because I wanted to, but because I had to. Graveyard Keeper has little to offer outside of the main quests despite a larger cast of characters to work with, and as such it’s easy to lose track of what was one doing in the vast swaths of time between making some progression that always feel minor and inconsequential compared to the time and energy it took to get there.
2. Making time count
Stardew Valley has a time frame of a year, which consists of four 28-day seasons each built up of four 7-day weeks. The seasons each have their unique characteristics, opportunities and resources, and so do the weeks and the days. The residents of Pelican Town even follow their own schedules that change with each weather, day and season, giving the world a lived-in, believable feel.
This cycle makes it possible to break chunks of progression up and extending it in a logical way that makes sense in the game’s world, without it feeling as a deliberate way of slowing progression. There is always something to do with enough variety to keep things smooth.
Days are also important because game saving occurs once the day is up (either by going to sleep at any point or passing out at 2AM), and crop growth and other in-game events are based on elapsed days (with some exceptions). The player only has from 6AM to 2AM to do whatever they wanted on the given day, making it necessary to properly plan out what they want to achieve, as they can miss certain things if not careful. These missed opportunities are sometimes not enough to worry over, as the player can catch up, but there are examples of having to wait one year to be able to complete some task.
Graveyard Keeper works with only a week as the game’s repeating time frame, where each day represents a deadly sin. These days have visitors, who correspond to the respective sin, and drive the game’s narrative. This works on a thematic level, but gameplay variety suffers because of it. Outside of the specific visitors being present, there’s nothing setting the days apart, and the days just flow from one to another without any need for sleeping outside of saving the game. This saving method is the same as how it works in Stardew Valley, but here this design decision is not justified by how the game works and could be replaced by a system where a player can freely save the game at any point.
Forgetting to interact with a visitor on their day means that no progression can be made for an entire week, which can be dreadful in some cases when there’s nothing else to do until then.
Crop growth and other things depend on in-game minutes passed, and the lack of any variety from day to day means that the game has to resort to other ways of spreading out progression: ones that don’t feel part of the game world but more like a big “Fuck you” from the developers to the players. There are hard blocks in the game that can only be overcome by grinding out the required resources. These blocks are what make it apparent how short the game would be and how there’s very little in terms of content that offers replay value. A bigger issue with the current implementation is that the rewards are usually meager, often leaving the player to wonder why certain content or areas were blocked in the first place.
3. Making everyone matter
Now here’s the major difference between how the two games utilize their characters: Stardew Valley gives a role and purpose to all of their characters, and reaching higher relationship values with them reward the player by getting to know there characters more, often witnessing a real growth throughout the game. Increasing friendship with them unlocks various rewards such as crafting recipes or occasional gifts from them, and in the case of 16 characters, opens them up for pursuing a romantic relationship with. The game does a good job connecting the player with every person in Pelican Town, once again helping in making the game’s world a believable one.
While increasing relationships with the townsfolk is optional in most cases, the “Special notices” help provide some short-term goals while working towards a bigger goal, rewarding increased relationship and some material goods. And since it doesn’t take much to increase these relationships, the player might as well do it while attending to their day-to-day business, being rewarded with some fun scenes for their efforts.
In Graveyard Keeper, the characters have not much to do save the select few who matter from the story’s standpoint, and even then it’s not much. In the base game, the player can see their reputation increase with certain characters, only to have this reputation stop midway through the progress bar, leaving no way to reach full reputation with them, shining light on the fact that the base release was feature and content incomplete. Characters playing a bigger role in the early game suddenly stop having anything to do in the progression outside of appearing in select cutscenes.
The game could have opted to have these neglected vendors and side characters give quests that fill in the gap between the main quests, which could also have helped to familiarize the player with the different crafting processes. Aside from giving these characters some purpose, these quests would have provided a nice framework for the player’s progression without holding their hands too much. Awarding some amount money or tech points would have helped the player get closer to unlocking a new technology, improving the game flow a lot. Currently, even if you’re trying to focus on achieving the next objective, navigating the labyrinthine system of the tech trees with its inter- and cross-dependencies, it’s easy to lose sight of what you’re supposed to do for optimal progression, and the way the game’s goals are set, they can feel more like obstacles that are meant to impede your flow rather than provide fun challenges to engage the player.
Now I don’t expect the game to hold the players’ hands all the way through the end, but it’s important to set goals at a reasonable pace with reasonable requirements to uphold the player’s interest and make the connections the players make with the NPCs meaningful. These objectives and goals should act more as an invitation to more, providing enough challenge and guiding the player through everything the game has to offer while leaving enough independence for them.
Having a good reason for gameplay elements
While playing Graveyard Keeper, I encountered certain elements of the game that felt to me like they were implemented off of a checklist, rather than because they were complemented by the surrounding gameplay. Coincidentally, these were elements that are present in Stardew Valley, where they actually play an important part and are integral to the experience.
1. The Energy system
The energy system is a key part of Stardew Valley. The player starts with 270 energy, and increasing this can be done by consuming a Stardrop, a rare resource of which there are only 7 in the game. Many actions in game, such as using tools or fishing consumes some of the player’s energy, which can be restored by consuming certain foods or by sleeping.
Reaching 0 energy has several drawbacks: it causes the player to become exhausted, unable to cast a fishing rod and applying a movement speed reduction. Players can continue to perform actions that cost energy, but upon reaching -15, they pass out, ending the day prematurely and losing 10% of the money they have (with a max limit of 1000 gold). Passing out also has the player start the next day with less energy. Failing to get to bed by 2AM causes the player to pass out, and in this case they have only 50% energy at the start of the next day.
Another form of passing out occurs when the player depletes their health in one of the game’s dungeons. This causes the player to lose items from their inventory at random (tools are exempt) and up to 5000 gold.
Ending the day early may cause the player to miss out on tasks or events they wanted to attend. This can have real consequences on one’s progression, so this sense of risk or danger always makes the player avoid passing out. The system is well-designed: the drawbacks are not game-ending but can cause enough inconvenience where the player might just choose to exit the game without saving so they can re-do the day without passing out.
Graveyard Keeper also implemented the health and energy systems. I felt that the inclusion of these were done just for the sake of including them, as the game fails to support these by not including any sort of downside for depleting the health or energy pools.
Players die when their health drops to zero. They then respawn at their bed with full health and all items intact in their inventory. There are instances where dying is actually preferable than walking back to the house (more on this later), so on top of there not being any punishment for dying, it can actually reward the player. Health can be restored by sleeping, meditating or consuming select items.
Energy, much like in Stardew Valley, enables the player to carry out most tasks, and can be restored by resting, sleeping, or through certain consumables. When energy reaches zero, the player can interact with the world as usual, but unable to perform any action that requires energy.
Now in this game, making certain consumables also cost energy. So once energy reaches zero, and there are no consumables available to the player, the only way to restore energy is by resting. This was enough to dissuade me from cooking entirely, but once I was able to reliably gather honey, cooking was made nigh-obsolete, as raw honey has a relatively huge energy restoration value, without the need to spend time and energy to create it, and it is much easier to obtain than certain cooking ingredients.
Taking the things above into consideration, the energy, health and cooking system feel very out of place in this game as they don’t offer any significant drawbacks or rewards to justify their inclusion. Outside of course using these as the usual obstructions: certain quests require some food to be cooked, but the player can forego cooking for the rest of the game without any impact on the experience.
As a side note, Stardew Valley’s various cooked goods offer a wide range of buffs and benefits to the player, on of the most notable being increased walking speed, and taking the penalties of passing out into account, make cooking a rather integral part of the game. Some of Graveyard Keeper’s food items also provide buffs, but are not notable enough compared to the permanent ones attained by unlocking certain nodes on the tech tree. Alchemy and prayers offer better effects and buffs than cooking, and are unique elements to this game, so removing cooking entirely in favor of these mechanics would have helped reduce inventory clutter among other things.
2. The dungeons in the games
As mentioned above, both games feature enemies that can chip away at your health. In Stardew Valley, these enemies are usually limited to one of the game’s dungeon areas, of which there are several. The most notable of these is the Mines, which become accessible on the 5th day of the game. The Mines has 120 floors total, with an elevator unlocked every 5 levels to make trekking deeper into the Mines easier.
The Mines is a crucial part of the game, as it serves as a place for gathering a lot of resources specific to the Mines, and there are a fair number of objectives connected to this place. There’s a great variety of what each floor houses in terms of enemies and resources, and players can advance to a new level once a hidden ladder is uncovered (by slaying enemies or breaking rocks), but going up using the ladder will take the player back to the entrance. Enemies and resources respawn upon reentering a floor, providing extended utility to this area.
Making progress into the Mines offers substantial rewards in the form of treasures, weapons, rare and valuable resources the deeper the player is, but these are guarded by enemies that increase in difficulty.
All things considered, the dungeons in Stardew Valley offer great time sinks and a plethora of reasons to keep revisiting them, continuously rewarding the player with each trip.
As you may have guessed, Graveyard Keeper also has its own version of this system: the Dungeon. It’s somewhat like the ones in Stardew Valley but much worse on every conceivable level.
The most notable difference is that once the Dungeon is designed as a single-use area. There are 15 levels in total, with access to the last 5 being locked behind quest progression. The enemies don’t respawn ever, and while the player can gather a wide range of alchemical ingredients, the main focus of the Dungeon is housing 3 quest objectives. Once completed, there is no reason to ever return here, especially since most of the resources can be purchased elsewhere.
Unlike the Mines in Stardew Valley, where the floors are more or less just one big chamber with side areas, the Dungeon consists of various rooms that house the enemies, and about a 1000 kilometers of corridors connecting these rooms. There is nothing ever in these corridors, and making them this long only prolongs the suffering of having to clear the Dungeon. Progression deeper into the Dungeon is only possible once all enemies are killed on a floor, so if the player missed a dead-end room and found the exit earlier, they have to trek back through the tedious and long corridors to slay 2 enemies and then all the way back to the entrance to the next floor again. If your inventory is full and want to stash your goods in one of your chests, it’s easier to die and respawn at your house than find your way back to the entrance.
Overall, the Dungeon is one of those elements that feels like it was included because of Stardew Valley had something similar, and perhaps was subsequently made a part of a questline to justify its existence, rather than being an important and justified part of the game world. This element could be removed from the game without having any sort of impact on the rest of it.
In fact, once the player is done with the dungeon for good, it also removes the need for health potions and cooked goods for the most part, taking down other aspects of the game with it.
3. The game’s economy
Stardew Valley has the player gather or craft items, sell them at a profit, and then repeat the process. The more money the player has, the more crops they can plant and expand their operation, resulting in even more money gained. This positive feedback loop is complemented by purchasable rewards that become increasingly more expensive with each upgrade. Certain end-game items cost a stellar amount of money, but farming for them is fun and as the player opens up more of the game, they gain access to a variety of ways income can be increased.
The player can then ship off items using the shipping bin at the farm, which is emptied every night, and the income broken down in an itemized list is shown before the game is saved and the day ends. Alternatively, most goods can be sold off at the local shop for the same price, for immediate payout. There’s no limit how much and what the player can sell, so gathering money is easy peasy, lemon squeezy.
But in Graveyard Keeper, this process is more stressy depressy lemon zesty. For some reason, the developers opted to design a rather realistic but completely unnecessary economic system for the game. Much like some aspects laid out in this post, I feel like this was another measure to impede the player. On paper, this system sounds fine, but in practice it provides a rather poor experience.
Here, the vendors interact with a global market at the end of the day, selling surplus and buying deficient goods. There’s a short section that explains this mechanic on the wiki, but the basic rundown is that the more you sell of an item to a vendor, the less you can sell it for because there’s not enough demand for it. And the prices can go up if the item is not yet fully restocked or whenever you buy that item in bulk. Add to this that vendors carry a very limited amount of the resources, and only buy specific items, so there isn’t a convenient way to offload your products. Making money from your resources becomes a bit complicated to the point where I avoided it if I could, as it just broke the already low flow even more.
Quite honestly I’ve never seen a system like this in any other game, and that’s not a compliment. It is just a testament to the fact that the game tries to hinder the player at every possible turn just to stretch a paper thin game as long as possible. Just like cooking, the whole ordeal of this economy is included as part of unlocking certain quest objectives, and becomes largely obsolete once the story is finished, not really having a place in the overall game.
The key difference between the two game’s economies, that in Stardew Valley, the whole feedback loop propagates further progression and opens up more possibilities and QoL changes for the players, while in Graveyard Keeper I see it as a way to hamstring and slow progression to pad out playtime.
The burden of an expansive game world
Stardew Valley has different areas that each connect to other ones, and you have a very short wait time when you move from one to the next. This helps the player as the areas and their boundaries are well-defined, and all the zones have a point of interest or some purpose to them. The game world is nice and well planned out with zero waste.
Graveyard Keeper, however, has this vast open world without loading screens, which I blame for the abysmal performance on the Nintendo Switch. But outside of performance issues, the game’s world has a lot of unnecessary space that’s just wasted, and when taken into consideration along the other design choices, the design feels more like a way for the game to inconvenience the player.
One outstanding example is the Swamp. The Swamp is a large area which has 2 points of interest: a witch’s hut and a fishing spot. The only notable resources here are iron deposits and hiccup grass. You can gather iron more efficiently at another place, and the latter is only important for one quest in the entire game. What’s frustrating about the Swamp is that the majority of the area is impassable water, and the player has a very narrow and winding pathway to navigate on, made harder if the player is colourblind.
There is a bridge that can be used as a shortcut, but it has to be repaired first which can only be done from the far side. This means that the player has to navigate through this maze 3 times (unless they check up on the material requirements of the bridge beforehand) to eliminate the need for it completely afterwards. The game’s map is full of examples of areas that serve no purpose while just bloating the game world unnecessarily, making traversing it a chore. While the argument could be made that these areas exist to make the world more believable, I think a departure from realism would have served player experience better.
The worst offense is that the game features around 2 or 3 shortcuts that cut down travel time between the player’s house, the church and the town, but these are once again locked behind story or tech tree progression, while the only benefit they offer is a minor quality of life change.
Having a big world for the sake of having a big world does nothing for gameplay but make it harder, especially when one has to hoard resources back-and-forth between different areas of the game. Stardew Valley’s map design took the available timeframe of a day into consideration and the result is an easily navigable game world where every area serves a purpose that aids the player in furthering their progress. In Graveyard Keeper, these big distances that are most cases empty just make traversing harder, especially so when most of the quests require the player to go between specific points, making it more and more likely to miss a visitor, delaying progress on a quest by weeks.
Consistence is key
In a game that is heavy with resource management, I feel that it is of the utmost importance that the actual managing of these items is made as easy as possible. Both games have some nice aspects to this that is not present in the other one, but Stardew Valley’s consistent approach makes short work of any confusion or frustration that could have arisen in a differently implemented system.
1. Stack sizes
Consistence is very important to me, and Stardew Valley manages to deliver in this area. Here, most items can be stacked to 999, with a few exceptions, such as larger objects like furniture. Graveyard Keeper‘s stack limit is seemingly arbitrary, with some items stacking to 100, some to 30 or 50, and some not stacking at all. There really is no reason for this discrepancy, and the stack limit should just be increased on all items to 100, or better yet, 999. The problem is best highlighted by crop waste, a resource you gain when harvesting your crops. There is no other use to crop waste than to turn it into peat using the compost heap. If you utilize most of your field (there’s no reason not to), you will end up gathering more crop waste than you can make use of, as the compost heaps can only take 8 at a time and convert them to peat and maggots over an extended period of time. The fast pace of crop waste collection and the small stack sizes mean you’re going to start to destroy them fairly early, which adds unnecessary clicks and inventory clutter for the user.
2. Item quality
Stardew Valley’s items come in a few distinct qualities (from lowest to highest): basic, silver, gold and iridium. The quality of certain goods are affected by a number of factors, and more or less only important for increasing the sale price. Some quests require items of a certain quality, and higher quality gifts yield more friendship points, but overall the quality has little impact on gameplay.
Item quality is just another tacked-on thing that is yet another example of impeding the player more than serving any kind of purpose in Graveyard Keeper. I already covered how inconvenient selling items is in this game, and the item quality just adds another layer to it. Using the Trading Office, you can only sell vegetables of silver or gold quality. You can’t sell bronze quality, or vegetables that have no quality, which means that these become pretty much obsolete early on. The player cannot buy gold-quality seeds for the majority of the crops (but can for some of them, go figure), and the only way to acquire them is through fertilizers, which just add another layer of tediousness and inconvenience in growing crops, giving the player additional hoops to jump through to perform a relatively basic action. The simultaneous existence of no-quality and variable-quality vegetables is another example of uneven game design.
3. Tool consistency
Stardew Valley‘s tools are very straightforward. They serve a specific purpose, and upgrading them lets you do more with less energy. That’s it.
But Graveyard Keeper likes to convolute things wherever possible. Tools, such as your axe, shovel and hammer, do not get used up, but will require maintenance when their durability gets low. They occupy a separate space in the player’s inventory, taking up no space in the bag at all. This is all fine and dandy, but there are several objects that act like tools, but are not treated as such, and affect multiple aspects of the game.
For example, the player needs to create a chisel to craft certain goods. The chisel works exactly like a tool, but it will be consumed once the much lower durability runs out. It comes in 4 distinct versions: Iron chisel and three different qualities of Steel chisel. One would think that the Steel chisel is a direct upgrade to the Iron chisel, much like the second-tier tools are to the first-tier ones (made from iron and steel, respectively), but they aren’t. You cannot use a steel chisel to carve more basic materials like stone for no apparent reason at all. The added quality of the steel chisels only affects the quality of carved marble and carved wood that two recipes produce, of which the latter goes completely unused in the base game.
Since the you cannot use better quality chisels in recipes that require lower-quality ones, you’re forced to keep crafting these every so often. This creates unnecessary clutter and just complicates a tool more than necessary. A logical solution would be to remove the quality from the chisel and have them be a tool instead like the other ones, as they are very similar in how they work.
Closing thoughts
In this (exceptionally long) piece I wanted to compare two similar games and highlight how absolutely crucial it is to have a well-thought out role for the gameplay elements that are included in the game. Without proper justification, the different pieces end up feeling like a cobbled-together mess with little sense of direction, highlighting the shortcomings of the product.
If the removal of an element would barely affect the rest of the game, is it then integral to it? Would time spent developing other areas could have potentially freed up development time on fleshing out the other aspects of the game that are unique to it, to create an experience with a better flow?
Of course a game can have elements that are there for fun, not having any impact on the game’s overall progression. But then they should not be there to hinder this progression, possibly be separate from the game’s core loop, and have a good return of investment. The above mentioned elements in Graveyard Keeper fail on all of these aspects. This topic is broad and deserves its own discussion.
What’s frustrating is that Graveyard Keeper has a few things going for it: great audio, an entertaining story and nice visuals, but the poorly implemented systems suck the fun out of the game, not letting the good parts shine.
Thank you for reading through this post, I’ll see you in the next one!