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.
Features
| 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 |
Hats
| 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