Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

by Jason Schreier

  Where he really could’ve used help was scheduling. Some game developers set their project milestones based on what they think will take them the longest to make, while others build schedules around the demos they’ll have to create for public events like E3. Eric Barone had a different approach: he made whatever he felt like making. One morning he might have been in the mood to compose the theme song, and then in the afternoon maybe he’d draw character portraits or obsess over fishing mechanics. On any given day, Barone might look at his 2-D sprites—which by now had graduated from SNES rip-offs to original pixel art—and decide they were all terrible and that he had to start over.

  Hageman and other family members started regularly asking Barone when Stardew Valley would be done. In a month or two, he’d say. Two months later, they’d ask again. Just another few months, he’d say. As time went on, Barone kept extending the window. Three more months. Six more months. “Part of making a game by yourself, when you have no money and you have a girlfriend who wants to have a life together, is that you just have to get people to accept that you’re going to do this, and not try to dissuade you from it,” said Barone. “I had to convince everyone that they should believe in me. Part of that is, if I had just from the beginning said, ‘Oh it’s going to take five years,’ I don’t think anyone would’ve accepted that. I wasn’t even really conscious of this, because it sounds really manipulative, but thinking back, I feel like maybe subconsciously I knew that I had to give it to them in little bits at a time. ‘Oh, it’ll take six months. It’ll take a year. OK, two years.’”

  In mid-2012, after nearly a year of working daily on Stardew Valley, Barone launched a website and started posting about the game on Harvest Moon fan forums, where there were plenty of people sharing his belief that the series had gone downhill. Those same people were instantly drawn to Stardew Valley. The game looked lively and colorful, like an undiscovered Super Nintendo game that someone had dug up after two decades and covered with a fresh coat of paint. The sprites were primitive, sure, but it was hard not to be charmed when you saw Stardew Valley’s jolly farmer pull a little white turnip out of the ground.

  Fueled by the positive feedback, Barone started thinking about how he would get Stardew Valley into people’s hands. He’d already ditched the Xbox in favor of the PC, which had a significantly bigger audience but was dominated by a single storefront: Steam, a massive network operated by the game publisher Valve. Indie game developers couldn’t just slap their games on Steam and call it a day, though: they needed to get Valve’s explicit approval.

  This was a problem. Barone didn’t know anyone at Valve. He didn’t have any publishing contacts. He didn’t even know anyone else who made video games.

  Worried that nobody would even be able to discover the game he’d spent a year making, Barone searched the Internet and stumbled upon a new program that seemed promising: Steam Greenlight. With Greenlight, Valve crowdsourced its approval process, allowing fans to vote on the games they’d want to play. Games that hit a certain number of votes (a number that the famously secretive Valve kept quiet) would automatically get a spot in the store.

  In September 2012, Barone put Stardew Valley on Steam Greenlight. “I thought that the game was basically done,” Barone said. “I thought, ‘Yeah, I could have a game ready within six months.’”

  Shortly afterward, a British developer named Finn Brice approached Barone with a proposition. Brice, who ran a company called Chucklefish, was curious to see what Stardew Valley was all about. “Anyone could see the potential early on,” Brice said. “A PC-platform Harvest Moon that was looking really good was immediately appealing.” Barone e-mailed Brice a build of the game, and soon enough the whole Chucklefish office was gathering around Brice’s desk to watch him play it. Parts of Stardew Valley were unfinished, and it would crash occasionally, but it charmed them all.

  Finn Brice made Barone an offer: in exchange for 10 percent of profits, Chucklefish would serve as a de facto publisher for Stardew Valley. Chucklefish didn’t have the scale and reach of big publishers like Electronic Arts (EA) and Activision, but it did have lawyers, PR people, and other staff who could help Barone with the more tedious aspects of game development. (You don’t really know boredom until you’ve tried to read through a stack of trademark documents.)

  Barone loved the thought of being associated with Chucklefish’s space adventure game, Starbound, which had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in preorders. He also learned that a bigger publisher would demand a much larger slice of the Stardew Valley revenue pie—probably closer to 50 or 60 percent—which made 10 percent seem like a solid deal. “So of course I decided to take that opportunity,” Barone said.

  On May 17, 2013, Stardew Valley earned enough votes to win approval on Steam Greenlight. Thrilled, Barone went to his website to send out an update to his ever-growing base of fans. “I will do my scientific best to get this game into your hands as soon as possible,” he wrote, “without skimping on making it as fun and feature-rich as I can (within a reasonable time frame). I still can’t give an exact release date, it is very hard to predict and I don’t want to make an empty promise. However, you can be certain that I am working hard every day and making continual progress!”

  A few more months. Just a few more months. As development continued, Barone kept repeating that mantra, even though his mind was wandering into dark places. He had started waking up in the mornings with the gnawing feeling that his game wasn’t good enough. “I realized that it was crap,” Barone said. “And I needed to do something better. Like, this wasn’t going to be a big hit or anything.” He started hacking Stardew Valley apart like an overzealous woodcarver, throwing out the features and code he’d spent months writing. “I thought at some point that I was almost done with the game,” Barone said, “but then my mind changed and I thought, ‘OK, this isn’t ready. I’m not happy with this, I don’t want to put my name on it.’”

  In the following months, Barone remade all the sprites. He redrew the characters’ portraits. He scrapped core features, like the procedurally generated section of the game’s underground mine, and he rewrote large pieces of code to make Stardew Valley run more smoothly. After nearly two years spent working on the game, Barone felt like he had improved all his game development skills. He was now a better pixel artist than he had been when he started, he was a better programmer, he was better at visual effects, and he was better at designing audio. Why not take the time to improve all those parts of the game?

  “He redid the portraits probably fifteen times or some crazy amount like that,” said Amber Hageman. “Of course now in retrospect I can see that his art was improving a lot and it was totally worth it. . . . But at the time, he would be sitting and fiddling and changing one person for days and days and days, and I was like, ‘Come on, it looks great, you don’t have to worry about it.’ He’s kind of a perfectionist, and if he didn’t get the right feeling about it, he would want to keep doing it.”

  Money was becoming tighter for the couple. They had eaten into most of their savings, and Hageman was still only working part time as she prepared to graduate from college. To help with the bills, Barone considered putting Stardew Valley on Early Access, a service that let Steam users pay for unfinished versions of games before their final release dates, but he got anxious at the thought of taking other people’s money before his game was done. It’d be too much pressure. Instead he found a part-time job as an usher for the Paramount Theatre in downtown Seattle, working there a few extra hours every week so they wouldn’t go broke.

  Once a month, Barone would post an update on the Stardew Valley website, outlining new features (Fruit trees! Cows! Fertilizer!) and putting on an optimistic face for fans. By the end of 2013, Barone had hundreds of followers watching and leaving friendly comments on each of his blog posts. Yet his morale had tanked. For two years Barone had been in front of a computer every day by himself, developing and playtesting the same game over and over again. Seeds of anxiet
y had been germinating inside him, and they would sprout at the worst possible times.

  “There were points when I was depressed and just thinking, ‘What am I doing?’” Barone said. “I have a degree in computer science and I’m working a minimum-wage job as an usher at the theater. People would ask me, ‘Do you do anything else?’ And I [said], ‘I’m making a video game.’ I just felt embarrassed about it. They must have thought, ‘Oh, this guy is a loser.’”

  Some days Barone didn’t work at all. He’d get up, put on some coffee, kiss his girlfriend goodbye, and then binge on eight-hour sessions of Civilization or old Final Fantasy games. When Hageman got home, Barone would click back to Stardew Valley so she wouldn’t know he was goofing off. “I went through periods of extreme unproductivity,” Barone said. “I would just be alt-tabbing and browsing Reddit and just not working.” Maybe it was Barone’s body trying to get him to take it easy—he hadn’t taken off a weekend in two years.

  “There were certainly points where he was super frustrated and hated the game,” said Hageman. “But he never got to the point where he actually stopped working on it. He would hate the game for a day and work on it to try to make it better, and then the next week he’d be ecstatic about the game. That was just kind of his style.”

  Really, Barone needed a proper break. At the beginning of 2014, he saw Hageman playing with her brand-new tablet and got an idea. He’d put Stardew Valley on pause for a while and make a mobile game: something small and easy, that he could finish within a few weeks. For the next month Barone ignored Stardew Valley and started hacking together an Android game about a surfboarding purple pear. Players would have to use the touchscreen to guide the pear through obstacles and compete for the highest score. On March 6, 2014, Barone released Air Pear to little fanfare. “It made me realize that I don’t want to be a mobile developer,” Barone said. “I actually hate it.”

  Even if making the next Candy Crush wasn’t Barone’s ultimate destiny, the hiatus helped him zoom out a little bit. All those seven-day workweeks had been smothering him. He started taking more breaks from Stardew Valley, writing on his website (where fans had speculated that, because he hadn’t updated in two months, he might be dead) that he was spending fewer marathon sessions on the project, “not only to enjoy life but also to make my time developing Stardew more productive (so that when I do sit down to work I am more focused).”

  After she graduated from college, Amber Hageman started working full time as a lab technician, which helped with their cash problems. (Later in 2015 she would start attending graduate school, where she would receive a regular stipend for her studies in plant biology.) Hageman didn’t mind being the only breadwinner, but as she came home every day and saw how good Stardew Valley looked, she started pushing Barone to let go. “I would be frustrated,” Hageman said. “Well, you know, you’re sick of it—why don’t you just release it?” By the end of the year, Barone’s fans were asking the same thing. Where was Stardew Valley? Why couldn’t they play it yet?

  Writing on his blog in April 2015, Barone yet again addressed the question. “As soon as I know when the game is to be released, I’ll announce it,” he wrote. “I don’t have any intention of being deceptive or secretive.” He added that he didn’t want to write down a date just to have to delay it, and he didn’t want to build more hype for Stardew Valley until the game was ready.* “I’ve been working on Stardew for years and I want it to be released as much as anyone,” Barone wrote. “However, I’m not willing to do that until the game is not only complete, but also in a state I’m happy with. It simply could not be released in its current form. . . . It’s not a finished game yet. It’s tantalizingly close to being a finished game, but it’s also a huge project and I’m just one guy.”

  Being a solo developer came with two major challenges. The first was that everything took a very long time. Because he didn’t have a strict schedule, Barone had a tendency to build 90 percent of a feature, get bored, and move on to something else. Although he’d been working on Stardew Valley for nearly four years, he still hadn’t finished many of the game’s core mechanics, like childbirth and marriage. And it sure was hard to get excited about coding an options menu. “I think that gave me a false impression that it was close, because when you just boot up the game and play it from the first day, it seems like you can do everything,” Barone said. “But then if you actually look into it, everything needs a little more work.” It would take months to revisit these incomplete features and finish them all.

  The second major challenge was loneliness. For four years now, Barone had sat by himself at a computer, rarely talking to anyone but Amber Hageman. He had no coworkers with whom to bounce around ideas, nobody to meet for lunch and a kvetch session about the latest game industry trends. In exchange for complete creative control, he had to embrace solitude. “I think to be a solo developer you have to be someone who’s OK with being by yourself a lot,” Barone said. “And I’m that kind of person. I’m OK with it. But it’s lonely, I have to admit. It’s part of why I got that usher job, just so I could go out and interact with some other people sometimes.”

  Staring at the mountains and trees of Stardew Valley, Barone found himself again unable to tell whether his game was any good. It resembled Harvest Moon, sure. You could harvest crops and go on dates and hang out with cute people at the annual egg festival. But Barone had worked on the game for so long now, he found it impossible to judge the squishier parts. Was the writing good? The music? Were the portraits pretty enough, or should he redo them yet again? “That’s another issue with being a solo developer,” Barone said. “You lose all objectivity about your game. I had no idea when the game was fun. In fact I thought the game was garbage even up until a few days before release, I was like, ‘This game sucks.’”

  Others disagreed. In September 2015, a group of Chucklefish staffers went on Twitch and streamed themselves playing an hour of Stardew Valley. The game still wasn’t finished, but it was close enough. They could show off the basics, guiding along their main character as she cleared debris off her farm and met the friendly residents of Pelican Town. Fans thought it looked great. “Looks and sounds awesome,” wrote one commenter. “You really are a one-man army.”

  “It was becoming increasingly clear the closer we got that this was going to be a big deal,” said Finn Brice. “Even with our faith in the project, it far surpassed what we were hoping for. And what we were hoping for was already several orders of magnitude higher than what Eric expected.”

  At the beginning of 2015, Barone had decided he wasn’t going to add anything new to Stardew Valley. Instead, he said, he’d spend the rest of the year fixing bugs and tweaking small things to make the game feel more fun. It didn’t take him very long to violate that rule. By November he’d added crops, crafting recipes, private bedrooms (that you could visit if you befriended their owners), a quest log, a traveling merchant, and a horse (that you wouldn’t need to feed or care for, so as to keep things “stress free,” Barone told fans).

  Despite those late additions, the game was almost done—except for one key part. Barone had originally promised that Stardew Valley would come with both single-and multiplayer modes, but hooking up the multiplayer was taking far longer than he’d anticipated. As 2015 dwindled and winter started approaching in Seattle—where he and Hageman had ditched the cramped studio in favor of a modest house that they now shared with two other friends—it became clear that releasing the “complete” version of Stardew Valley might take another year.

  Barone spent weeks trying to make a decision. It would feel crummy to release an incomplete game. But fans had been asking him for years when Stardew Valley would come out. Wasn’t it time? Without multiplayer, the game might not sell as well, but he’d been working nonstop for four years. Like Stardew Valley’s silent protagonist, Barone had grown tired of the daily grind. “I was so sick of working on Stardew Valley that I just had to release it,” Barone said. “I just reached this point where all o
f a sudden I [thought], ‘OK, it’s pretty much ready. I’m super sick of working on it. I don’t want to work on it anymore.’”

  On January 29, 2016, Barone announced the news: Stardew Valley would be out on February 26. It would cost $15. Barone had no idea how to launch a marketing campaign, but hey, that was why he’d agreed to give 10 percent of his profits to Chucklefish, whose PR people sent codes for Stardew Valley to journalists and Twitch streamers. Barone had been skeptical about streaming—“I was afraid that people would see it on Twitch before launch and then they’d feel like they’d already seen the game and they weren’t going to buy it,” he said—but early streams and videos generated more buzz for Stardew Valley than any press outlet. That month, it was one of the most popular games on Twitch, appearing on the streaming website’s front page nearly every day.

  During those final February weeks, Barone gave up all pretense of taking days off. He spent every waking hour sitting at his computer (or standing, thanks to a makeshift standing desk he’d created by putting his monitor on top of an empty Wii U box) and fixing bugs. Other than his roommates and a couple of friends he’d asked to check out the game, he had no testers. There was no QA team. He had to catch, document, and fix every bug on his own. “That was hellish,” Barone said. “I didn’t sleep for days.” Early in the morning before his game was due to come out, while trying to fix a pesky last-minute localization error, Barone fell asleep standing at his desk.