Month: May 2022

The popular farming sim Stardew Valley starts with you inheriting a plot of land from your late grandfather. You’ll find your grandfather lying in bed with a letter explaining that he left his farm to him. In the original version of the scene, the grandpa’s bed looks rather uncomfortable, like the grandpa is laying on one of those plastic tables that unfolds. Over the years, it’s become a recurring joke throughout the fandom, and recently fans have been creating mods that riff off of the niche meme.

The mods for grandpa’s bed picked up in early April, and they’re all visual jokes that riff on the original shitty bed. The mod featured in the lead image of this article turns the bed into a rather snazzy ping-pong table. Another mod called “Slightly Worse Grandpa Bed” makes the bed just a touch less comfortable by breaking off one leg of the bed frame, leaving grandpa to sleep on an uneven surface. According to the mod’s page, the creator made it “just in case the original grandpa bed wasn’t bad enough.”

Image: Concerned Ape/Switchswatchh

One mod turns the grandpa into the bed itself:

Image: Concerned Ape/Novamare

This one references the popular Family Guy death pose meme. Instead of Peter Griffin on the ground, here we have our grandpa.

Image: Concerned Ape/BeepSignal

Another mod just fully takes grandpa out of the scene. Good riddance! Both this and the Family Guy death pose mod were made by BeepSignal because, in their words, they’re “committed to a bit.”

Image: ConcernedApe/BeepSignal

This isn’t even all of the mods. Other fun examples include a mod to turn the bed into a piece of mail and the piece of mail into a tiny bed, as well as another in which grandpa wets the bed.

Stardew Valley is known for having a vibrant modding scene. Whether it’s adding more delectable food or tweaking gameplay so it’s less frustrating, mods have generously expanded the world of the game in useful and charming ways. These mods don’t bother grandpa. It may seem like it would be a hassle for him, but don’t worry — grandpa’s a heavy sleeper!

The German word “dorfromantik” can be literally translated as “village romanticization.” Its real meaning is more ineffable. In a recent interview with Eurogamer, the developers of Dorfromantik (the game) said the word was “usually used to describe the kind of nostalgic feeling you get when you long to be in the countryside.” Dorfromantik is a state of mind.

This is the perfect name for this chill-out, relaxing game that just came out of an early access year. Dorfromantik is a peaceful game of tile placement: a sort of minimalist, meditative Catan. You build a landscape from hexagonal tiles, creating pine forests, patchwork fields, meandering rivers, spidery train tracks, and higgledy-piggledy little red-brick towns. (No roads, though.) And that’s it. You don’t have to worry about resource production and cost — there is no competition, population or politics. There are no winners, losers, or any other considerations. You are scored purely on how well your tiles match up. Your only goals are harmony and beauty.

Playing Dorfromantik is relaxing. It can even be described as aesthetically cleansing. It is a beautiful and playful way to express your imagination. This is a lovely place. Time doesn’t pass here, and nobody needs anything from you. There is no need to count down as you think about placing the next tile. Take as much time as you want. It’s just as easy to play the game in five minutes while you work sprints, as it is over three hours of blissful relaxation.

Image: Toukana Interactive

None of this is to say that Dorfromantik is aimless or frictionless, however. In fact, it’s quite tightly shaped and controlled. Toukana, a team of four students in game design from Berlin, combines elements of puzzle and strategy games with a clean, well-judged design.

The tiles that you place come from a random stack which is always shrinking. You can earn more tiles through quests to help you keep your game moving, grow your landscape, and increase your score. When you place certain tiles, these quests ask you to combine ever more of the five elements of the landscape: hundreds of houses and water tiles, thousands of trees, and many other tiles. One tile might ask to be joined up to at least 36 other houses, say, while another might require you to gather exactly 13 houses and no more. On completion, some quests raise a flag that rewards you with even more tiles if you successfully close out the town or forest or waterway by surrounding it with other landscape elements so it can’t be expanded any further.

This beautifully simple rule set has ramifications — and to Toukana’s immense credit, those ramifications operate aesthetically as well as in the realm of game balance. Dorfromantik encourages care and strategy, but discourages optimization. It is impossible to succeed with this game if you build a massive metropolis at one end, then a forest at the other, and finally a vast farming field in the third. You will be surprised at the unexpected additions to your landscapes as you complete every quest. It is an extremely simple and well-designed system, which can produce organic results. This is an amazing feat.

Image: Toukana Interactive

The biggest challenges, initially, seem to be posed by the rail and river tiles, which can only be placed next to others of their kind or adjacent to specific terminal points. These can easily create blockages to the expansion of your map as you wait for the “ideal” tile to turn up in the stack. Unsightly knots and gaps appear, in place of the steady, even flowering that you’re instinctively looking for. The rivers and railways can introduce a niggling note of frustration to Dorfromantik‘s calm and satisfying mental tune — but the game would probably be too easygoing without them.

After my first few games of Dorfromantik, the more I learned about the game’s design and tried to engage with it, the worse I would do. My scores kept going down; my stack kept running dry. Was there something else going on? It was too difficult to play the system. I was lumping too many quests together — four or five forest quests in a single body of trees — aiming for efficiency, but in doing so, breaking the game’s steady rhythm. This is not a game of ambition. It can be hard for a mind trained on video game reward systems to break the habit of escalation and learn its languid pace.

I eventually slowed down. I paid less attention to quests and more to tile-matching. You score points for matching the edges of tiles: tree to tree, house to house, grass to grass, and so on. A perfect match along all six edges rewards you with 60 points and an extra tile. More to the point: It looks better. Once I made harmony rather than efficiency my goal, Dorfromantik met me halfway; my scores were better, my runs longer, my maps more beautiful.

Image: Toukana Interactive

This play style is reinforced by one of the subtlest and best additions of the 1.0 update, which highlights matching edges more clearly and gives perfect placements a satisfying pop. Elsewhere, there are new music tracks, all belonging to the genre “extremely tasteful ambient that sounds OK with cows mooing over it.” You can now track more of the meta-goals that reward you with new tile types and cosmetic customizations, including the lovely seasonal “biomes.” And there are several new ways to play, alongside the Classic and anything-goes Creative modes that were already present in early access.

Quick Mode, for one, has a hard limit of 75 tiles and takes somewhere between 10 minutes and half an hour to complete. Hard Mode allows you to fit more tiles and has less quests. You can play with probabilities, quests and other parameters in Custom Mode. Then you can share your settings and the seeds for the tile stack with other players. Monthly Mode is my favorite. It has a set seed with a custom game configuration that changes every month. This should make it a great place to have fun and challenge the community on the leaderboards.

This is all welcome, and it makes Dorfromantik a more complete and rewarding experience. But really, this is one of those games for which early-access status was a bit of a misnomer, not because it had no room to improve or features to add, but because its premise was so fully, perfectly realized from the start. It would be ruined if you tried to add too many things or disturb the delicate balance of friction and flow between logic and naturalism. But the Toukana team knows better than that. The Toukana team is at ease, walking through the country of their minds.

Dorfromantik is out now on Windows PC. The game was reviewed on PC using a download code provided by Toukana Interactive. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.

“What would happen to Apple now that Steve Jobs is dead?” That was the billion-dollar question made by Wall Street, Apple fans, and the company’s employees in 2011.

More than a decade later since Apple’s co-founder died, the Cupertino company is doing better than ever, but a new book by New York Times‘ Tripp Mickle called After Steve tells how Apple became a trillion-dollar company and lost its soul. Jony Ive’s departure from the company was one reason.

In an article published today in the newspaper, Mickle adapts a part of his book and tells the final years of Jony Ive at the company.

It was 2014, and Apple’s future, more than ever, seemed to hinge on Mr. Ive. His love of pure, simple lines had already redrawn the world through such popular products as the iMac, iPod and iPhone. Now, he was seated at a conference table with Tim Cook, the company’s chief executive (…). They both wanted another hit, but Mr. Ive was pushing for a product reveal more audacious than any in the theatrical company’s history.

Jony Ive envisioned the future of the Apple Watch as a luxury product. Not only did he want to build a $25 million lavish white tent to promote the first Watch, but he “regarded a rave from Vogue as more important than any tech reviewer’s opinion.” According to Mickle, “the tent was critical to making the event as glamorous as a high-end fashion show.”

In the end Apple CEO Tim Cook agreed to Ive’s plan, though the designer would later call it a “Pyrrhic victory .”

“.

He told colleagues that the fight over the marketing of the watch and the bigger debate about the event were two of the first times he felt isolated at Apple.

The Apple Watch evolved from being a fashion accessory to becoming a health and fitness device over time.

Post Jobs: Jony Ive and Tim Cook Cook different visions

After Steve Jobs died, Tim Cook was careful about losing Jony Ive. Three years later, in 2014, “former company executives estimated that an Ive departure would erase more than $50 billion from Apple’s market value, or as much as 10 percent,” and this is why Cook decided to go with Ive’s tent idea.

In another part of the article, Tripp Mickle tells how Jony Ive becoming chief of design made him “overwhelmed by managing a staff that stretched into hundreds, multiples of the 20-person design team he ran for years:”

In the midst of those changes, Mr. Jony Ive approached Mr. Cook and told him that he was tired and wanted to step back from the business. Without Mr. Jobs, he had assumed much of the responsibility for the product’s design and its marketing. People close to Mr. Ive said he had found it draining to fight with his colleagues over promotion and had become overwhelmed by managing a staff that stretched into the hundreds, multiples of the 20-person design team he ran for years.

Mr. Cook feared that Mr. Jony Ive’s departure would lead investors to sell shares. To avoid that, he and Mr. Ive reached an agreement for the designer to relinquish daily management responsibilities and work primarily on new products. Part-time work would be his option. The company gave him the title of chief design officer and promoted two of his lieutenants. Only a few people inside Apple knew the truth: Mr. Ive was frustrated and burned out.

The story goes beyond that episode, talks about the iPhone’s tenth anniversary, Jony Ive’s latest product reveal with the Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR, and how a screening of the movie Yesterday inspired him.

“Art requires the right space and support in order to grow”, he stated, according to others present. “When you’re really big, that’s especially important.”

You can read the full New York Times article here about Jony Ive’s departure. A colleague of Mickle also reviewed his book, which you can read it here.