I love Eric Barone! He sticks to his convictions in the way I wish more video game developers would. He’s made so much money from Stardew Valley that he never needs to work a day for the rest of his life, but he chooses to put in the time to continue releasing free content and working on new passion projects and giving back to the community. He could have monetized the hell out of Stardew, releasing DLCs and hired a huge development team to crank out new content to make him richer until the original game became unrecognizable.
So many game developers have gone down that route, or simply sold off their creation to a company that they know full well plans to do just that.
Also, I just love his mentality about things. He knows that nobody really asked for Haunted Chocolatier, and he doesn’t really care if it’s successful, he just wants to make something new for himself. I hope it is successful, but I’m glad to see that he’s not hinging his hopes on it’s success but instead just enjoying the process of making something, which is really beautiful and I think more people should focus their energies on those kinds of exploits and outcomes.
I think upgrading the RAM as you mentioned is going to make a big difference. While the physical RAM might be soldered to the motherboard, you could buy a fairly cheap SD card or USB and set the system up to use that as virtual memory. It won’t be as fast as actual RAM but it might help and large SD cards are honestly really cheap these days.