Dan Trufin · Refueling Developer

I think maybe not lessons, but there's also lessons. But mainly, I kind of like how the team started doing a lot more than just programming or designing: we started having our guys know how to build UIs from scratch, and that helps us, for example, now with the refueling UI. We can just build our own UI. Art is just going to come at the end and make it pretty, but we can build it completely functional, get all the gameplay done without having to depend on external teams and kind of waiting for them to finish. All of these external teams have a backlog of tasks till next year, at least. And if you have to wait for them, it's slow. So we kind of streamlined, and we learned a few tricks that we didn't know before. So now we are a lot faster in iterating. We did the mining UI, we did the refining UI. So now we're pretty much at the point where we can just get the ball rolling as soon as we have anything with UI that needs to get done. Other than that, stuff from mining that will apply here, lessons we've learned: we'll have to see how we deal with economy. Mining has had a lot of ups and downs with economy, and we'll have to see how we do this without getting the players into a state where basically refueling this patch is profitable, next patch is not so profitable, and they stop playing refueling-type gameplay just because it's not a profit thing. So this is something that's probably going to be a bigger thing that we have to do throughout the game. That economy needs to be good every quarter we release, and it needs to be good for all the types of gameplay, not just the new one we release. But yeah, it's a work in progress. We're still learning here.