For the veteran game designers at Seamless, reviving the space shooter genre wasn’t the only challenge. They also wanted to do it sanely.

“There were no situations of living in the office,” says Stockman. “That's something that we said from the very beginning that we weren't going to have. That we were going to maintain our quality of life and we did that.”

One of the ways they set out to maintain the six-person team’s sanity was to institute a four day week of 10 hours per day. Magaha says it actually worked so well for them that he’s afraid other studios will start copying it.

“It was amazingly productive for us because there's a real incentive that you're where your supposed to be [with the game] so that there isn't the need to go in on Friday,” Magaha says. “And ... you get to have those 3 days to recharge and it just — it really helped because Mondays were really productive for us, which is not usually the case.”

Aside from working long days and short weeks, Magaha believes the team’s realistic approach to setting reasonable goals and achieving them helped keep the Sol development cycle from spiraling out of control.

“We have very realistic limitations,” Magaha says. “We're a very small team. We didn't have a whole lot of money. We didn't have a whole lot of time. We had to focus."

“Our approach was: We know we can't do everything, and if we try to do everything it's not going to be great, so lets try to do less. Lets have less bullet points and lets focus on the core experience that we want to have and lets do that really well.”

Another zombie game didn't do well so now you can't do your zombie game.

The downside of being focused is that you end up leaving good ideas on the floor for the sake of expediency, and the development of Sol was no exception to this rule. Among the ideas left behind during Seamless’ sprint to release were the gravity gun that allowed players to grab debris in the world and propel it at enemy ships, and a scanning ability that allowed you to find the weak spots on capital ships.

Stockman says these ideas were actually fully implemented, but they ended up being kind of boring, and the team just didn’t have time to make them better.

“It ended up being that every time a capital ship came about, you would do the same thing over and over and over again,” he says. “It was very much super repetitive and you always did the same exact thing.

“We could have spun our wheels and come up with a variety of different things, but time was of the essence and we ended up scrapping a lot of that stuff and focusing more on dog fighting. I definitely was like ‘eh that sucks we had to remove it’ but ultimately I think it was much better for the game getting done.”

Some of the ideas left behind may come creeping back in future updates, but the size of the Seamless team definitely puts restrictions on what kinds of challenges they can address.

For Magaha, the limitations come with a silver lining.

“Working with a team this small is great because everybody has a real direct impact on the final product,” he says. “I mean obviously there are also times when you go ‘Man, we could use an extra person here or there,’ but in an overall sense you can take a lot more pride in everything because you know that what you put out there is the result of what everyone in a room decided, as opposed to some marketing test [that] came back and now you're going to change the game, or another zombie game didn't do well so now you can't do your zombie game that you love so much.

“It's much more: ‘What do the people in this room want to do?"