My Experience As My Game Approaches 1 Year In Early Access
My game Starseed is approaching a year of Early Access!
It's been a wild ride, but mostly positive. I just wanted to share how far Starseed has come since release and my experiences.
First the game Updates:
Here's just some of the things I've added:
New Areas:
- Hazardous Forests
- Lava Mountains
- Underwater
- And improvements to others
All these came with more resources and items.
New Machines
- Laser Cutter
- Time Machine
- Weather Machine
- And more + improvements and new features added to existing
Lots of new resources and recipes
- Obsidian, Geodes, Cobalt, Biofuel, etc
- Gases (+ Condensed variants), etc
- Energy Packs, Health Packs
- Many crafting components
Progression
- I added over 20 Upgrades (Over 70 in total)
- Added more achievements (Currently 32
Many quality of life changes, gameplay improvements, ui updates, many fixes, improvements and other things.
I'm hoping to finish it this year.
And now My Experiences:
It's been a fun experience and really rewarding. My game didn't sell crazy numbers but I'm still loving building it! It's been great to interact with players and get feedback. Some love the game others think it's okay but flawed, I've had very little who outright hate it.
Overall this has been incredible, it's of course not for everyone. My low sales would probably send many of you into depression. But I never expected this game to slingshot me into mega financial success. Would I have loved it to do better? Of course, but I am really content with it.
I have learnt a lot, I am a better developer, designer and just better person overall.
Looking back, this game contains a chunk of my life. When I go over certain systems or play it again I get glimpses of what I was dealing with at that specific time (good and bad). There were a few pauses during initial dev due to life circumstances. But EA has been smooth (usual dev time predication inaccuracies but nothing crazy lol), I am more mature and more disciplined now. I take it easy, I scale back. It's all great!
I wrote this keeping in mind the many posts I've been seeing here, those who are breaking themselves trying to achieve financial success. There's been a clear shift here in the last few years, it's become very business oriented. Everyone quoting the same blogposts, the same videos, etc for what to do to be successful. Slowly the art becoming a well oiled machine without room for individuality.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to make a business out of this, but game dev can be for many reasons. So I want to remind us all that there is a spectrum of game dev passion. Some of us just love making games and getting it out there. Some of us want a mix of the two (this is me - but even in that mix it's not 50-50, I'd say it is 85% passion driven for me!). And others want it purely to be a business. I repeat: I'm not attacking anyone! I just want to see more variety and balance of all these things coming together in the world of game dev. And not the business side being 95% of all the posts.
So thanks for reading and good luck to you all.
Remember you get to define what success is to you.
Posted Feb 28, 2026, 1:14 PM UTC