141–150 of 303 posts
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Did they build the engine from scratch? 114975 man hours on a 2D game is unthinkable!
Building an engine from scratch cannot be the hard part. It’s not complicated. Iterating on all the things that make the game fun is hard, and making all the ”content” in a game like Stardew Valley is very time consuming.
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It's due to fear. Fear of breaking something that may depend on that bad code. Test automation rarely covers every possible case, and nobody wants to be on the hook when some code changes cause other stuff to break.
That, and most orgs simply do not reward or even pretend to care about these kinds of improvements. If you delete bad (but working) code, and replace it with good (and, let's assume best-case scenario - also working) code, what has actually changed for the business? Nothing. Except that in 3 years the junior dev that gets a ticket about doing something in this area will come in and not notice the code isn't a dumpste…
I have worked with many people that spend days replacing good code with bad code because they are ”paying down technical debt”.
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For Stardew Valley, that's 30m copies after 4 and a half years of unpaid, 10 hour a day, 7 days a week work.
Which was all just to sit at the table for a chance at massive success. Nobody sees the extensive graveyard of massive time sink projects that got no traction and went nowhere. Even if they would have been big had they caught on.
Of course everybody sees that, and many can't stop thinking about those things when working on their own project, trying to fight the demons that say "This is a huge waste of time" and so on.
But what is the point of bringing that up when someone explicitly asks for examples of small teams with big success?
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For Stardew Valley, that's 30m copies after 4 and a half years of unpaid, 10 hour a day, 7 days a week work.
It's only work if your sustenance depends on it, or if you bet on it to make it big, if you need to be compensated for it. Otherwise it's a hobby, and enjoying your hobby 10 hours a day, 7 days a week is an envious life, if you can afford it. (Barone specifically could not; he had to have a part-time job as an usher in a theater; that was work.)
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Building an engine from scratch cannot be the hard part. It’s not complicated. Iterating on all the things that make the game fun is hard, and making all the ”content” in a game like Stardew Valley is very time consuming.
Building an engine is a famously huge time sink, to the point where the standard advice is to make a game or an engine, but not both if you want to ship.
But a 2D engine that should only support exactly what the features need from Stardew Valley? Doesn't seem insurmountable, although I wouldn't exactly take that approach myself.
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For Stardew Valley, that's 30m copies after 4 and a half years of unpaid, 10 hour a day, 7 days a week work.
It's only work if your sustenance depends on it, or if you bet on it to make it big, if you need to be compensated for it. Otherwise it's a hobby, and enjoying your hobby 10 hours a day, 7 days a week is an envious life, if you can afford it. (Barone specifically could not; he had to have a part-time job as an usher in a theater; that was work.)
I’ve also found Hardcover.app, which I quite like. It has an API and a slightly more refined UI, but it’s clearly more than one person working on it.
Of course, if your focus is book clubs, Fable is likely the app for you
Pretty nice, 1 dev 3 team members in total and 1 million users? Are there any other products with such a small team and a huge userbase? Does this scale and when the business requires more coding and technical debt comes how do they manage it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did they build the engine from scratch? 114975 man hours on a 2D game is unthinkable!
Building an engine from scratch cannot be the hard part. It’s not complicated. Iterating on all the things that make the game fun is hard, and making all the ”content” in a game like Stardew Valley is very time consuming.
Iterating on the game content itself: _Insane_ amounts of effort, in my experience.
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It's only work if your sustenance depends on it, or if you bet on it to make it big, if you need to be compensated for it. Otherwise it's a hobby, and enjoying your hobby 10 hours a day, 7 days a week is an envious life, if you can afford it. (Barone specifically could not; he had to have a part-time job as an usher in a theater; that was work.)
There is no such thing as a 10-hours-a-day-7-days-a-week hobby.
It is trivial to come up with activities that can consume a lot of time, but don't provide financial rewards.