Design Statements

For my design, I chose to model my website after the popular farming game Stardew Valley made by ConcernedApe because I really enjoyed that game growing up in high school. I have fond memories of coming home and playing it and I love 8-bit styles in video games. Stardew Valley is such a widely comfy and calmly accepted game in the gaming community, and ConcernedApe especially gets props for being the sole developer for such a beautiful game. I'd love to run away from all obligations in life and start a small farm in a small village where I could create a quiet and peaceful life.

Smaller design decisions such as why I chose what I did for this website are mostly from inspiration from the game. The color schemes all closely resemble the main playing screen in Stardew. I tried to download the actual typefaces for Stardew Valley, but after watching many tutorials and going on a deepdive about types of typefaces, I decided I was wasting time and instead found 8-bit inspired texts from Google Web Fonts Helper. I tried to make text placement and size intuitive for the site, but I especially like how I made the text vs. picture placement for my activities and dining pages. The float style has become one of my favorites to utilize. I decided to put a chunky border around my images, and when I showed my mom, she commented on how it looked like they were windows, and I actually really like that description so I'm choosing to stick with it. The buttons were a little hard to implement at first but then became second nature after I got them in the header. I made them green to make up for the green leaves in the original Stardew Valley title screen. I added minimal button animations so they pop a little but aren't too obnoxious.

All in all, I really like what I came up with for my website that emulates Stardew Valley. I impressed myself with trying to figure out the design and how I would communicate that to a program. Majority of the problems I encountered were trying to figure out how to make it work the way I wanted to, and luckily for every case, I was able to work it out.