Stardew Valley packs the appeal of running a farm into an attractive 16-bit package, but there's more to it than planting crops and selling them. Spread across the titular valley's compact map are a number of ways for you to be both a productive farmer and an active member of the village community. There's so much on offer, in fact, that Stardew Valley employs the dynamics of theme park design to quietly encourage you to attend each and every attraction without forcing any of it on you.
Stardew Valley's world isn't very big. You can travel from one end of the map to the other in a couple of minutes. But that fact goes out the window once you get acquainted with the game's 'attractions' - to use theme park vernacular. Rather than aiming for scale, the map is made to be dense, and is being divided into different sections with unique activities to do in each.
While that simple map could be said to reflect the layout of a theme park by itself the similarities go deeper as each of the attractions come with a waiting period. As anyone who has been to a theme park will know, queuing up for rides is a central part of the experience, and so it is an important part of theme park design. As such, park designers count on you equating queue times with attractions that are worth the wait.
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