Tiy posts on /r/Games about why development took so long, the current state, and the future

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/3eez67/what_happened_to_starbounds_steam_reviews/ctely45

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Hey guys, studio lead here.

Starbound is our first game and we've learnt a great deal about game development and the changing landscape that is the indie / early access scene from developing it. We've done a lot of things right but also made a bunch of mistakes, particularly in the time line department. Luckily I don't think those mistakes will detract from what the final game will be.

Starbound has taken us a very long time to complete. In part that's down to our being relatively new to this, finding our stride, dealing with the problems a new games studio has to deal with - including moving most of the team overseas because remote development wasn't working - but also we've found that our approach to making early access work for us has massively increased the work load required to make the game successful and we didn't count on that.

When we first sat down and estimated how long Starbound would take to complete, we did it with a very standard idea of how we would develop the game in mind. Developing a game in a conventional manner is very logically driven and it's far easier to make meaningful estimates. However as we got into early access (which was a new platform at the time, and people are still figuring out the 'right' way to do it now),we began to realise that standard game development just wouldn't work for an early access title. When a game is developed outside of early access it often (depending on the kind of game) only becomes fun or 'playable' when development is close to complete. We felt we needed every release, early access or not, 10% complete or not, to be playable.

That meant developing a lot of content for unfinished features or developing placeholder features so the game was playable, at the expense of us reaching our intended goals later. At this point we feel like we've developed the game something like 5 times over. Constantly developing sideways so the next early access release is playable, then refactoring and moving forwards between releases.

Up until this point the meat of our development work has been very very front loaded. Starbound has been a very tech heavy project. We've built an engine that is so easy to mod that producing content is incredibly time efficient. The problem is that up until now we've been building content we intend to replace later, we've just been waiting for that engine to be completed so we can actually start pumping out the final content.

Luckily this has come to an end now. The game engine is now close enough to finished that we can finally focus entirely on final content and the game we actually wanted to make. We believe the final version of the game will blow you away.

Here are just some of the things the final game has to offer:

• A colony system that allows you to build your own villages and cities in game, complete with residents that match the way you've decorated your colony. These NPCs have emotional states, interact with other NPCs and the world around them, provide gifts and rewards to the player amongst other benefits.
• Worlds that are far more alive, full of interesting things to find. Unique NPCs to interact with, far more diverse threats, small pre-built colonies to come across and interact with. Challenge rooms and underground dungeons.
• Entirely revamped combat with interesting secondary moves/special attacks, very unique legendary guns/fireable items, interesting armor stats
• A whole set of missions with a storyline and unique characters, end game content, far more interesting procedural quest lines that have an effect on the world
• Now that replayable end game content exists, a decrease in grind across the board and a far more 'sandbox' experience
• A fossil system with unearthing mini-game
• Improved farming and economy
• Improved creature capture and pet system
• A robust modding system, workshop support, servers sharing mods. Pretty much everything in the game is moddable, the vast majority of systems require no scripting or programming knowledge to mod.
• Continued updates and support post release
• A lot more

You can follow progress towards that new version in daily blog posts at www.playstarbound.com as we get closer and closer to our goal.

Here are some very random screenshots of where the game is going.. http://imgur.com/a/3y2Br

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I know this is mainly geared towards people who haven't been following Starbound too closely, but I thought it was still an interesting read.

Side note: The fossil "unearthing mini-game" has already started to show up in the Nightly over the past 3 days.

 

I've always wanted to make a mod, but never got around learning how to do it.

 

Things are looking great! I'm glad the fossil aspect is beginning to emerge!

 

Scenario A: A half-broken, rushed game with content pushed out like children
Scenario B: An amazing game that took awhile to finish but ended up being as amazing as could be

I'm glad they went with Scenario B, they deserve to get as much time as they need

 

A great explanation, not just on the matter of timetables, but on why in-game systems have changed radically or got temporarily dropped.

 

Personally, Im not really touched or influenced by Tiyuri's words, and I just hope that since the engine is almost done, that they just make the right calls and finish the game, hopefully this year.

 

I'm actually not either. Nothing new for me, but hopefully it reassures others.

 

Nice post, raises hope

 

Oh, this doesn't change my attitude about the game, because I knew all this already.

It's just nice to have the words from the developers rather than from me.

 

Well, that sure put a perspective on early acess style of development.
It doesn't seem like a terribly efficient way to develop a game. But sometimes there are just no other choice, I guess. Best of luck to them.

 

I doubt that this year is going to happen. They've indicated several major updates before they're done, and the last major notable update was in January (with a minor, but necessary one in April). They'll probably get the colony update out this year, but I strongly suspect that the other stuff is going to push them into late 2016 at current rate. Optimistically.

 

We've had all of the other stretch goals added (to an extent), but not fossils yet. This makes me sad. Other than pets (which I'm underwhelmed with), I really wanted fossils to be implemented sooner. Alien Archaeology is a subject touched so rarely and poorly in games, only ever really showing "Hey guys, we found an ancient world-ending artifact!" instead of skeletons and actual fossils. All of the inner workings are in the game, including fossils that can be toggled on with the simplest of mods and a station that uncovers what the fossil is, but there are no fossil assets.

On a different note, I'm a little underwhelmed with the development speed. I mean, this gave great insight into the minds of the team, but it just sounds like they made the game and said "Let's just make this!" without planning further. I mean no offense of course, but it really felt like they jumped into a pit of snakes without a whip. Even though we're getting a lot of updates now, they're mostly art assets and tiny details, rather than new or fixed mechanics. The only mechanics we've seen are critter AI, shop interface, challenge rooms (with no rewards still), and the colony stuff that's honestly not that fun. I look forward to when we get updates on those other features more than art assets, and I know those take longer to make than opening MSPaint for a few minutes, but still.

 

Yeah, I said that I would come back to this forum in 2016 but.....o well....
Let me tell you the truth: This game is in fact the exact opposite of development hell...but in a way...the same hell. They are constantly adding new things to this game like hats, npc, biome, colours, interactions, new farming,exploration,adventuring,fighting,drawing,economics,etc.etc.etc., but this can keep up for another 5 years, maybe longer.Nothing really that is intent to REALLY finish this game. Just dragging with all this ↑
I'm shocked to see people are behind this behaviour. Like, really?!
They have a great team of developers, a great budget, EVERYTHING they need and still can't deliver....
I had a conflict with one of the fine young gentleman on this forum (darktre something or whatever) that was positive that the game will came out in full in 2015. O yeah....
I just lost all hope for this game, and if somebody is offendend about my opinion they can ban me freely.

 

Okay, so... they're not adding anything to complete the game except for all those things that are the point of the game. Okay, right, sure... wait, what?

I know, how dare people like to see the things that are the reason they wanted the game in the first place and are what the developers were talking about making the game into!

Wait, what?

Except for all those things they're delivering...

Seriously, I literally have no idea what you think this game is supposed to be if you think that what they're working on and showing off isn't what this exploration/building game with combat features is supposed to be about. You've eliminated virtually every aspect of the game as something not meant to get the game to "final". What do you think this game is, exactly?

 

Always good to see some sincere feedback. People are complaining that development is slow, and maybe it really is, but good development is much harder than it looks like. It's kinda unfair to compare Starbound to similar projects due to Starbound's ambition.

I'm just a little worried that little is being said about optimization. The game doesn't run well on most old machines, and even some modern ones have issues. I hope this is being addressed with the engine completion.

I'm also wondering about how many topics of Tiy's list of "things the final gave will have" have actually been planned and designed already. It's one thing to say "revamped combat system with interesting attacks" and "improved farming and economy", it's a different thing to have a good, solid, feasible plan to turn those promises into reality.

 

Pretty much, yeah. Gotta know everything you need the engine to do before you can start taking steps to cut back on how it does it.

 

That's mostly correct. Micro-optimizations are usually done this way.

However, there's also the problem that the bigger the code base is, the harder it becomes to change stuff, many changes have to be propagated through the code... So you should use the most adequate data structures and algorithms when you can, because having to change them later could become very hard. If you're being smart earlier, you'll have less problem in later development cycles.

There's a balance of both "don't be too lazy and make slow code" and "don't try to optimize too much too early".

 

Well, let's be fair, how much about optimization is there to say? "Yeah we're doing some of that." It's not exactly flashy, and I'm not sure the results at this stage are gonna be super-noticeable.