Starbound developer Chucklefish has a few million dollars of funding under its belt, more than enough (one would think) for it to work on its Terraria-in-space game for a long time. But how long exactly? Try nine years. That’s over 100 months or 3285 days. Go go multiplication!
Chucklefish, feeling like it should comment on the problems various Early Access and Kickstarter games have run into in recent times, made a state-of-the-union style post on its blog on Friday.
It’s not particularly long, but it provides all the comfort supporters could possibly want in three sentences:
But Chucklefish could fund the development of Starbound for another 9 years at least. Even if we didn’t make another penny in that time. This includes all our office costs, salaries and every other kind of company expenditure.
Before you ask, yes, the post goes on to explain why Chucklefish, with all its cash, hasn’t gone on a hiring spree to get the game done faster:
I’m afraid it just doesn’t work that way, bringing on a new programmer requires a huge amount of invested time. Programmers need to learn the code base, they need existing programmers to teach them the code base. It takes months of getting up to speed to reap the rewards of that investment. Then you have a huge communication overhead as well as all the businessy time sinks that go along with a new hire. Not to mention finding room to house those additional hires (We would have to move to a bigger office!).
Which lines up pretty much with my experiences in games development. Heck, I have enough trouble as it is keeping my head around my own code.
Starbound health check [Chucklefish]
Comments
2 responses to “Starbound Has Enough Cash For Nearly A Decade’s Worth Of Development”
what about hiring people to do the ‘other’ stuff like artwork and stuff that doesn’t involve bringing a programmer up to speed, so he can get on with programming? Lest it take 9 years to finish it.
Because adding more artists wouldn’t necessarily speed things up? If the current artists can keep pace with the programming, then hiring more artists is a waste of money and leaves most of them getting paid for twiddling their thumbs while waiting for programming features.
So it takes months to get a programmer up to speed. We’ve been hearing that for 8 months now. So… if they had done it then, stuff would be getting done, right?
Let’s also not forget the fact that they either fired, didn’t renew the contract of, or had quit one of their main developers earlier this year. They replaced him. But how can they do that when it’s so hard to do?