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  3. Weekly Update: April 5, 2024

Weekly Update: April 5, 2024

Looking at my task tracker recently I realized it's been ten years since I started work on what would eventually become Starcom: Nexus, the precursor of Starcom: Unknown Space. Actually ten years ago to the day, I followed Unity's "space game tutorial" to figure out how to get a 2D spaceship moving on screen.

I've already written a very long postmortem on the process of creating that game, but I thought this would be a good occasion to look at the question "where does the time go?" Like specifically, having spent well over ten thousand hours developing these games, what am I doing all day?

Using data exported from the task tracker, I went through and randomly sampled blocks of time and categorized them to see what kinds of things I was spending time on, and how much.

I organized the data in two ways: features that players would recognize, and hats that I wear. By "hats" I mean what role/skillset would do this task in a mid-sized game company with dozens of employees. I'm guessing a bit on this one-- while I have worked on game projects with small to medium sized companies, it has always been in a fairly narrow role.

[h2]Features[/h2]


All

Percent


Gameplay

11.7%

General gameplay mechanics and core game logic not included elsewhere

Combat

6.4%

Weapon design, balancing, damage handling, VFX

Community

6.1%

Interacting with players, support, weekly updates like this one, etc

Gameworld

5.5%

Game world specific mechanics: region placement, sector handoff

Shipbuilding

5.5%

Shipbuilding logic

Missions

5.4%

Mission design and creation

Playtesting

5.1%

Playing the game myself to see what's broken, what feels wrong, etc

Anomaly

4.8%

Creating anomalies

UI

4.2%

UI design and programming

AI

3.9%

AI design and programming

Marketing

3.8%

Game promotion, trailer creation, youtuber outreach, etc

Factions

3.7%

NPC design

Music & Audio

2.7%

Music and Sound FX

Planning & Production

2.6%

Deciding what to prioritize, misc stuff not covered elsewhere

Bug fixes

2.5%

Investigating and fixing bugs outside of the normal dev loop

Interaction Systems

2.4%

Anomalies, conversations and general station interactions

Trade & Inventory

2.3%

Trade system, drops, resources and item system

Map & Edgedar

2.2%

Map system and Edgedar (the icons around the side of the screen in the main view)

Localization

2.1%

String symbol tables and translation

Creator

2.1%

Content authoring tool

Save & Load

1.8%

Save system

Crew

1.7%

Crew management, skill check system

Technologies

1.7%

Tech research tree and effects

Planets

1.6%

Planet visuals

Main Menu

1.5%

Parts of the game when you're not in the game

Proc Gen

1.2%

Procedural sector and planet generation

VFX

1.2%

General visual effects like nebulae, non-combat particle effects, etc

Steam

1.0%

Build deployment, store page creation, etc

Business

0.9%

Taxes, paying contractors-- the fun stuff that everyone gets into game dev for

Story

0.8%

Narrative planning

Regions

0.7%

Manual (non-procedural) region layout

Optimization

0.4%

Performance profiling, optimization

Analytics

0.2%

Player analytics review


[h2]Hats[/h2]


Hat

Percent


Programmer

32.9%

Any coding/programming

Game Designer

16.8%

Designing missions, balancing enemies, gameplay tweaking

UI Designer

8.4%

Creation of all the UI systems, icons, layouts, excluding the programming

VFX Designer

7.3%

Particle systems, shaders

QA

7.1%

Playtesting, reviewing player F8 feedback

Producer

6.5%

Planning, interaction with contractors

Community Manager

5.8%

Responding to player emails & discussion forum posts

2D Artist

3.6%

Anomaly images, item images

Marketer/Video Editor

3.1%

Trailer creation, influencer outreach

Writer

2.7%

Writing anomalies, dialogue

3D Modeler

2.0%

Creating ship modules, other models, coordinating concept artist and modeler efforts

Sound Designer/Music Director

1.5%

Creating game sounds, directions for composer

Analytics

1.1%

Choosing metrics, analyzing anonymous player analytics

Business

1.0%

Misc business stuff: taxes, paying contractors, renewing LLC, etc.


This is just the time I spent. There have been several talented contractors who have composed the game's music, created the alien portraits, created 3D models for the modules, etc. It's also not super precise, because a) there are a lot of tasks that don't get tracked and b) this was a random sample. But I think it's ballpark correct.

In other news, I'm continuing to press on with work on Kepler. There's still a chunk of content I want to add, but in the next week or two I'll start thinking about timing for making available for opt-in.

Until next week!
- Kevin