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”)

Well, this is what we’ve been doing:





New Engine

We’ve (basically) created an entirely new engine for Starmancer. We’re still using Unity for rendering, animations, input, and some other things, but the rest of back-end is completely new.

We essentially recreated the game from scratch.

Why Would You Do This

When we first started the Kickstarter, we had no idea how popular (or un-popular) it would be. All of our time frames were based around Starmancer being as unpopular as possible. 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. It wouldn’t have been the best game ever, but it still would have been everything that we promised.

But that didn’t happen. We raised way more money than we thought we would, and Chucklefish reached out to be our publisher.

We wanted Starmancer to have the best future possible. We didn’t want to create one of those games that has severe bugs that never get fixed, even years after release. Starmancer needed to be flexible, moddable, and have incredible depth. This was the best and only time to do it.

But Why So Quiet

We’ve been fairly quiet, for 2 (maybe 3) reasons:

Time

Posting on social media takes up a lot of time.

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. Then you have to come up with some caption and text to go with it.

Finally, you have to linger on social media and respond to comments (throughout the week too, not just the day that you make the post).

A conservative guess is that each social media post takes up at least 3 hours. Maybe more.

So let’s say that you work for 8 hours in a day. Well you still have to eat, use the bathroom, take breaks, whatever. So you effectively have 5-6 hours of useful working time a day. That’s also assuming that you can stay completely focused and motivated all day.

That means each week has 25-30 hours. If we made 1 post per week, we’d be using 10% of our time, minimum, on posting.

Instead, we decided to put all of our effort into making Starmancer.

Post-Kickstarter

As a side note, handling all of the Kickstarter things took way longer than we anticipated. 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). It takes around 5 minutes to read and respond to an email, question, criticism, whatever.

If we spent 2 minutes handling every single backer, it would take 9200 minutes. That’s 153 hours. 6 straight weeks of doing nothing but Kickstarter.



Introversion

This may sound like an excuse, and maybe it is. I didn’t become interested with programming and computers because I like to go outside and interact with a bunch of strangers. I’m introverted. I would guess that most programmers are introverted.

It’s stressful to put yourself out there all the time and open to criticism. When someone criticizes Starmancer, it’s like they’re criticizing me.

I completely understand that we have an obligation to keep all of you informed, and that’s completely fair.

But we’re humans, too

Engine Failure

The biggest reason that we’ve been quiet is because we weren’t sure how successful our engine overhaul would be. 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.

We didn’t even know how long it would take to overhaul the engine.

We would rather come to you with no news than bad news.





The Old Engine

In the old engine, a colonist was a colonist. A wall was a wall. If we wanted to place a colonist the same way you placed a wall…good luck. This pertained to everything.

Here’s an example:

Resource Producers

We have Resource Producers, like the Ore Refinery. The Ore Refinery requires raw ore and it produces metal. Raw ore and metal are resources. 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.

Biotanks

Everything worked great, until we wanted to produce colonists in a Biotank.

A Biotanks requires biomass (a resource) and produces colonists.

Colonists are not resources.

80% of the behavior of an Ore Refinery is matched in the Biotank. The remaining 20% is special.

In programming, treating things as special as usually bad. Writing code that does something special for just one single purpose is almost always bad. It’s a failure to abstract.

Old Implementation

For reference, here’s how we actually implemented Biotanks (in the old system).

