In light of having a good stash of crowdfunding, what resource, other than time, is currently bottlenecking the development process? Is it the same nature of bottlenecks as a more "normal" game development process, or are there unforeseen challenges due to the way SC is funded?asked by Vic

So this is actually a pretty good question - "what resource other than time is bottlenecking us" - and I would say it's... to answer it in a certain way... it's the gestation period. So there's always that analogy in production of-... especially on things like engineering tasks, right? Where you have so many people working in the same area it becomes less and less efficient, or they can't work in the same area physically, at the same time, on the same code base. We're seeing this a lot in our large world conversion. There's ways that you can break it up, but there are definitely ways in which one guy has to go through it all the way and it's more efficient to do it that way, so you always ask the question, like, is it one of those things where if you, say, have a woman who's pregnant and she will give birth in nine months, if you add nine more women is she going to have a baby in one month? And the answer is no. So a lot of these things, very similar to normal game development, just take a certain amount of time for somebody to go through it and do.In the nature of how SC is being funded being different, it actually.. it interestingly doesn't impact us that much. I would say the openness and the iterative nature with the community impacts us much more. The funding itself, I mean we approach this like building a game, right? So the community aspect and the community involvement part has a lot bigger effect than how we're funded - even though that is through the community. It is nice though to not have visits from... you'd call them the "corporate suits" or whatever... but the publisher, or notes from the publisher, or especially notes from the licensee who is giving you information on how you should respect their property - cause it's our property! So that makes it a lot more fun.

And it's one of those things that... and you mentioned the pregnancy... where there's a misperception that if we're running out of time, just hire more programmers, hire more artists to make it go faster - to kind of give a real world example on your 9 women pregnant...

We're probably the worst two people to talk about pregnant-... anyway...[laughter]

I'm expecting! [pats tummy] ... But yeah, there are some things where throwing more people or more money at it is just not the answer. And that's something that I think every game studio comes to that crossroad at some point where, "do we need to hire more people, or is it just a matter of making sure people remain focused on the task at hand to just streamline the efficiency a little more?"

Yeah, I mean actually you even see that in the time, if you've been following the project for a long time, with the initial studio in Austin being very small. It's very common in game development that at the early stages, having a bunch of people with a bunch of ideas - you know, the "too many cooks" thing is not going to help. So you kind of start small and then you grow and then once you get, "okay, this is our plan for 'X'"... Now, with our plan for 'X' we can have four parallel teams working on 'X' in these, like, very discreet swim lanes - now we can expand four-fold on 'X'. So it's an organic growth process.