Writing code that does something special for just one single purpose is almost always bad.
In programming, treating things as special as usually bad. BiotanksĮverything worked great, until we wanted to produce colonists in a Biotank.Ī Biotanks requires biomass (a resource) and produces colonists.Ĩ0% of the behavior of an Ore Refinery is matched in the Biotank. There was a system in place for requesting resources, producing resources, queuing offload of those resources, not starting production if no space was available, not starting production if required resources weren’t present, etc. The Ore Refinery requires raw ore and it produces metal. We have Resource Producers, like the Ore Refinery. If we wanted to place a colonist the same way you placed a wall…good luck. In the old engine, a colonist was a colonist. We would rather come to you with no news than bad news. We didn’t even know how long it would take to overhaul the engine. We didn’t want to post that we were overhauling the engine and then a month later post that it failed and we wasted all that time. The biggest reason that we’ve been quiet is because we weren’t sure how successful our engine overhaul would be. I completely understand that we have an obligation to keep all of you informed, and that’s completely fair. When someone criticizes Starmancer, it’s like they’re criticizing me. It’s stressful to put yourself out there all the time and open to criticism. I would guess that most programmers are introverted. I didn’t become interested with programming and computers because I like to go outside and interact with a bunch of strangers. This may sound like an excuse, and maybe it is. 6 straight weeks of doing nothing but Kickstarter.
If we spent 2 minutes handling every single backer, it would take 9200 minutes. It takes around 5 minutes to read and respond to an email, question, criticism, whatever. There was so much to handle in terms of coordinating rewards and communicating with everyone who we needed information from (and who had questions for us). Post-KickstarterĪs a side note, handling all of the Kickstarter things took way longer than we anticipated. Instead, we decided to put all of our effort into making Starmancer. If we made 1 post per week, we’d be using 10% of our time, minimum, on posting. That’s also assuming that you can stay completely focused and motivated all day. So you effectively have 5-6 hours of useful working time a day. Well you still have to eat, use the bathroom, take breaks, whatever. So let’s say that you work for 8 hours in a day. Then you have to come up with some caption and text to go with it.įinally, you have to linger on social media and respond to comments (throughout the week too, not just the day that you make the post).Ī conservative guess is that each social media post takes up at least 3 hours. You have to figure out what you want to post, then you have to figure out how you want to visually portray it, then you have to actually create the screenshot or gif. Posting on social media takes up a lot of time. We’ve been fairly quiet, for 2 (maybe 3) reasons: Time This was the best and only time to do it. Starmancer needed to be flexible, moddable, and have incredible depth. We didn’t want to create one of those games that has severe bugs that never get fixed, even years after release. We wanted Starmancer to have the best future possible. We raised way more money than we thought we would, and Chucklefish reached out to be our publisher. It wouldn’t have been the best game ever, but it still would have been everything that we promised.īut that didn’t happen. Our thought was that if the Kickstarter failed, or if it just barely limped in to the $40,000 goal, we would release Starmancer without any major internal changes.
All of our time frames were based around Starmancer being as unpopular as possible. When we first started the Kickstarter, we had no idea how popular (or un-popular) it would be. We essentially recreated the game from scratch. We’re still using Unity for rendering, animations, input, and some other things, but the rest of back-end is completely new. We’ve (basically) created an entirely new engine for Starmancer. It’s been a long time since the Kickstarter finished, and everyone keeps asking, “What the heck have you been doing?” (and also, “I want alpha”)
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