Eric’s relationship to games is familiar to anyone who grew up in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s. His older half-brother introduced him to the Super Nintendo—Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound—and Eric checked out copies of Nintendo Power from the library. But it was Harvest Moon that stuck with him as he got older. He adored how it eschewed violence in favor of domestic normality. “I liked that you could have relationships with the townsfolk, and even get married and start a family. That was something you couldn't do in most games I played as a kid, and it made the experience much more personal. That you were living in a world that felt alive, time moved forward with or without your input,” Eric says. “It was easy to imagine that the world was very much alive.”

As he moved through school, Eric read more about the video-game industry—with its underpaid, overworked culture—and he took a swerve. He chose instead to study computer science at the University of Washington Tacoma, graduating in 2011. He tried several times after he left college to get what he perceived as a “normal” job, the kind of job that would’ve allowed him and Amber the everyday life he expected to build. Maybe get a bigger apartment, get married, have a few kids and take them to Auburn’s parks on the weekend. But he was repeatedly unsuccessful, failing to get the jobs he was applying for, and with no clear direction for how to correct his trajectory.

Eric was practical. For a better shot at a job, he needed to improve his skill set. Learning to code made the most sense, and he started teaching himself to program video games. It was supposed to be just practice, the most creative way he could teach himself. He and Amber never even had a conversation about abandoning his job search. This was never supposed to be the thing. And it was at his desk, the same one he’s sitting at, speaking to me now, that he began making Stardew Valley.

The first moments of the game’s life were plain and uneventful. A single avatar—you, the player—floating in an empty void. “I didn’t really have any sort of deliberate plan or anything,” says Eric. “I just had my intuition as to what was the next important thing I should work on.” He started small (Eric’s focus is always on the player) and expanded from there, creating a basic navigable area (the place that would become your personal farm). He then built on the fundamental farming mechanics (crops, livestock, minerals), all of which he researched extensively to authentically re-create their behaviors and scarcities.

He’d do all of this again and again: build a slice of the game and develop it until it was “around 80 percent done” before adding depth, reworking bits or fully redesigning them if he became unhappy with them. The peripheral features—the townsfolk, social aspects, mining and cave exploration, as well as combat—would be added later in the development, but the creative ethos stuck with Eric throughout the entire process.

Create. Move on to something else. Go back and re-create.

Create. Move on. Re-create.

The game’s character portraits—small avatars that appear when you talk to any of the game’s 30 or so townsfolk—were redesigned at least ten times throughout development. First, they were more traditional line drawings. Then Eric tried basic pixel art. The portraits got more detailed—better-looking hair, a different shade of hair, add a headband to the hair. He kept making and remaking, the changes becoming smaller and more intricate with every new redesign until, to most people, the differences were so subtle you'd think they weren’t important. He’d lose whole days just fiddling with things he’d made days, weeks, or months ago.

“I put in thousands of hours on pixel art just to get better at it and better at it,” he says. “I just persevered and forced myself to learn. You realize the thing that you thought was good actually isn’t. You realize why and you improve on it. And that’s just an endless cycle.” Every part of the game was made with this kind of maddening meticulousness. Eric needed hundreds of lines of dialogue for the three dozen or so townsfolk you can interact with. He wrote and rewrote those lines for several months straight, over and over, every single day. He also created over a hundred individual cut scene moments for them—all of which needed to be tested. Each tweak, of which there were thousands, required him to reboot the game to refresh the game’s code. “It was definitely a struggle to keep my sanity,” he says.