Feedback Dear Chucklefish Games: What could you have done differently when developing Starbound?

Personally, I don't know much about what's been happening behind Chucklefish Games' doors, but I do believe that they've done quite a good job at bringing Starbound to life. It's taken them about 4 years to develop, but I believe that it's a game that I have no regrets preordering since the very early beta stages. Far from it! I believe that, after all that hard work, they deserve a nice break to enjoy the very game that they've worked together to create, with or without any/all of the mods that the members of the Starbound community, myself included, have been developing. More importantly, however, I believe that the devs should look back at their work, and think about the lessons that they learned, such as what they could've done differently.

If the folks at Chucklefish Games wanted to develop another sandbox game like Starbound (or even an expansion), then I believe that, for starters, they ought to implement a parent-child system for not only their npcs, but also their biomes, items, objects, monsters, tiles, liquids, projectiles, status effects... pretty much everything that has a data set! Such an implementation would've made all sorts of things much less time-consuming to update.

Edit: Also, a good reason why all sorts of players should at least consider investing their time and effort to building bases in not just one planet, but multiple planets? For example, perhaps some tenants would be picky about which biomes they'd want to live on? Perhaps colonies could be made to indirectly influence what happens to nearby planets and star systems, such as improving your colonies' commerce through trade with colonies on other nearby planets, or keeping an evil force at bay (kind of like how, in Terraria, you'd need to keep the Corruption/Crimson from devouring your homelands)? Methinks that these kinds of ideas could be handy features to add in an expansion for Starbound.

I'm curious as to what others, especially the folks at Chucklefish Games themselves, believe they could've done differently when developing Starbound?

 

Of recent memory, their implementation of steam mods is IMO very poor. Mods should have been installed to the mod directory, not some random steam folder.

I also think they could have put more work on the random weapons system. I know the technical possibilities are extremely high, but I think there is a lot more that could have been done.

I think they have done a great job overall. No question there. 1000+ hours devoted to this game.


Ooh yeah, and lighting. Ever hear of Dark out? A failed game similar to starbound. It has amazing lighting and atmosphere. Starbound could use some better lighting. IMO.

 

For the record, I'd like to focus far less on asking what kinds of features should've been added, that sort of stuff, since Chucklefish would've had to cut some planned features during development of version 1.0 (such as space battles or giant wandering monsters). However, the option to save those features for a future game, or even a future update for Starbound, isn't ruled out, much like how Terraria had evolved since it's 1.0 release.

As much as I wish that some features were added, or weren't cut, what I REALLY want to focus on in this thread are the kinds of lessons that the folks at Chucklefish could learn from their development and release of Starbound for their next future projects.

 

I would say coming clean on disabled/removed features in their update blogs. Playing after an update to find that you can't dash in the air or use particle boost is an unpleasant surprise comparable to when a cat wakes up from the trip to the vet to find their claws missing (though not that severe). It feels dishonest, in a way; like they're hoping you don't notice.

 

You can still dash mid-air with the right tech.

I don't see why they should remove those blog posts. They are dated from before the game was released, so it isn't dishonest. Maybe a letdown, but that is about it. Those posts are basically a chronology of their development.

 

I wouldn't have minded if each race had a unique body type and could only fit in their race specific armor. At least they would look more different.

 

At one point that was not the case. They removed regular dash's ability to do that. Only after the big update did they come out with a separate dash tech that could do that.

I did not say anything about removing blog posts and I said it "feels" dishonest - not that it was dishonest - when they remove/disable features without telling us.

 

Really, the only problem they had to me was a communication one.

They simply over promised and under delivered. They could learn to do the opposite... And look much better for it.

That and content. If you make a game as moddable as starbound... The base content and mechanics had better be good. It's not. And the rate of their updates to content was laughably slow. One mod creator seemed to outpace them by months... And that was one guy, in his free time! What does chucklefish have, 6-10 people? What have they been doing? They could learn how to better manage their time. It feels like because they are the publisher, they took it much slower than need be.

 

Mods tend to appear higher in quality because their scope is smaller than the game itself. Modders don't have to deal with engine development at all and could focus entirely on content development. This kind of trend is apparent in all modable games.

Example being that total conversion mod for skyrim. It is very high quality, but they spent zero time on the engine. It was all focused on content.

This can be seen with games that use the same engine too. Fallout 1 was bland and sparse compared to fallout 2 because the developers already had the engine and could work mostly on content.

So l, hypothetically, if chuckle fish did a starbound 2 with the engine they have now, it would probably be much better overall because, again, less time spent on the engine.

 

(but all of the NPCs would still eventually start to lag for no apparent reason)