“It was very scrappy,” says Barone. “It was just me in the corner of our studio apartment on a cheap IKEA desk and my budget computer, just working on it.

The oldest known photo taken during Stardew Valley's development But back in the early days of development, it would have been difficult to guess that the training exercise would become a household name. Stardew Valley recently crossed the 15 million units sold milestone, with sales showing no sign of slowing down even years after the Harvest Moon-like farming simulator first launched in 2016.

The initial plan, Barone explains, was to make something he could put on his resume to impress possible employers.Įmployment is no longer a concern for the developer. Unable to land a job out of college, he decided to increase his skill set by making a small title in the C# programming language. “It started out as kind of a practice to get better at programming,” Barone says, talking about the earliest inception of his mega indie hit.

In fact, he didn’t even begin by thinking about a game. Similarly, Eric Barone, creator of Stardew Valley, didn’t begin by thinking about a development studio. We would listen to the other studio argue, sometimes explosively, about games, and we just kind of put our heads down and were trying to work away.” “There were rats in that building and human poop on the doorstep the first day we went to take possession as it were – and I use that term in the broadest possible sense. “It was three of us in a room, in another studio that they were letting us borrow,” recalls Bourassa. And, though the project has now surpassed 5 million copies sold, and its hotly anticipated sequel recently entered Early Access on Epic, the first step to getting there wasn’t what anyone would call glamorous. When asked about how they envisioned the future when they started their Vancouver-based company in 2013, Red Hook Studios co-founders Chris Bourassa and Tyler Sigman answered almost in unison: “We didn’t.” The duo left their previous employers behind to launch the Lovecraft-inspired studio, but, as Sigman explains, “it was always about the game, it was never about the company.” The game he’s referring to is Darkest Dungeon, a gothic, dungeon-crawling RPG where your party’s mental status is just as vital as their physical one.

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