In 2006, Stolzer and Goble moved to New York City. They lived in a rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan's Little Italy, where they paid $500 a month and had plenty of distractions. Goble quit his job to work on games full-time, and Stolzer adopted the role of sole provider.

"At the hobby level, one person trying to do all of the work [on a game] just doesn't cut it," Stolzer says. "There's just no way. It would take 17 million years to get any project — any project that he could be excited about — done."

Stolzer found a job working as a chocolatier under a singing chef. Besides the day-to-day creation of sweet treats, she attended lavish parties as a guardian of chocolate fountains — which more people try to stick their heads into than you'd think, she says. Game making was a protracted ambition.

"I was interested, but I knew my job was to get the money so that we could eat," Stolzer says. "I only had a little bit of creative input and feedback at that point."

Goble hated not providing income, but he was working on his first full-time project: a massively multiplayer sandbox game called Neverdaunt:8Bit. The plan was to buckle down, finish it within a year and move on. It actually took about five.

"I quit a pretty decent IT job to screw around on my computer and not make any money for five years," Goble says. "[The last day of work], it was like a party inside of my brain. I don't want to work for somebody else. I don't think I could ever do it again. I would if I had to, but it's not my choice. I like to have all of my time devoted to being creative. When I work for somebody else, it exhausts me."

Goble never stopped making games. His childhood was filled with Lego building and silly offshoots of hide-and-seek. Play is a fundamental aspect of our existence, he says, and video games are a natural expression of that.

"At some point, people stop playing," Goble says. "They stop making games. I don't understand that. It's not so much when did I start making video games, it's why do other people stop?"

For now, Neverdaunt:8Bit exists only in the past tense; Goble took it offline in 2012, after the game could no longer support itself.

"It was a failure in some ways, [and in] a lot of ways it was a huge success," Goble says. "There's this fantasy idea of what a massively multiplayer game could be ... of really being somebody in some other universe, and changing that universe. Accomplishing things in it, as if it were a real place.

"That didn't exist. Not really. You get into a lot of these massively multiplayer games and you're leveling up, and you saved this person the same ways thousands of people before you have saved that person. It's not real. Nothing you do matters so much. That's boring to me."

Neverdaunt was Goble's answer to these problems. It combined the Lego-like building blocks of his childhood with his desire to go somewhere and be someone because of his in-game accomplishments. Players could interact with each other in what he considered a meaningful way, and much of the game's story line was user-generated.

Goble released Neverdaunt as an open beta in 2010. It was well received — even scoring a 2011 nomination for an Independent Games Festival award for technical excellence — but not a huge financial hit. By that point, Stolzer had reached her limit with work. She craved involvement with future games but couldn't help unless she had free time.

"I told Calvin, 'I've donated almost six years of work for you to make these video games,'" she recalls. "'It's your turn. You have to do something to give us money.'"

To keep making games, they had to cut costs. If they could minimize spending enough, it was even possible neither would have to take a temporary job.

The answer turned out to be obvious. Stolzer and Goble moved out of their apartment and built a treehouse in the middle of Vermont's woodlands. Their families were very supportive.