[atmanactive]

I must say that recently, playing similar games always resulted in disappointment and frustration due to bugs. From Astroneer, No Man's Sky, Elite Dangerous, Conan ... they all start nice, but as the player choices branch out, and the save state swells, after a while it turns into an unplayable bug fest, each and every time. In last few years, the only games I could really enjoy thoroughly turned out to be single-player. It's almost as creating persistent, open-world, multiplayer creative games bug-free seems like an impossible task. What's your approach to this problem?

[weatherfused]

Being a solo dev could possibly give me an advantage here because I've been able to design the game with engineering feasibility in mind - compared to larger studios which can have a disconnect between product and engineering. In addition, a big source of bugs can be having a larger engineering team where each team member has a fragmented knowledge of the entire codebase - making a change to one part of the code and causing a bug in a different part.

I designed the game to hopefully be within my abilities to comprehensively test and ship - there are few players on 1 single-threaded server for a world, there's a limited way that they can interact with the world, and the planets are handmade with specific bounds. Nothing is infinite and I can easily test the limits of the game. I'm also not going to launch multiplayer until I'm certain that it's stable and I've hopefully solved every known bug.

With many of the bigger games, it's almost impossible to test all the different ways you can hit their limits, and they have tighter timelines where they launch with many known bugs. They may also apply a business mindset to it e.g. if it's a bug that only affects 0.1% of players, it won't affect revenue much regardless of how gamebreaking the bug is, and they may be willing to just let it be.

[atmanactive]

Yes, I agree. If only I could get my money back...

So now we believe that corporatitis can only make bug-infested games, and that the only way to make a super-complex simulation bug-free is to have a single brain god-mode overview and understanding of the whole codebase. Could be.

Keeping my fingers crossed for your success and looking forward to playing your game. Good luck.

[weatherfused]

Despite having lots of employees, I think their games may still be too large in scope for their timelines and resources. Thank you very much!