The structure of the game that surrounds this content is going to change substantially. “There's no set thing a person does – as things to do come in, people just do them.” “It's a very fluid environment,” Rhopunzel, one of Starbound's artists, tells me.
This frees our programmers up to work on bug fixes and engine features.” Our artists aren't simply drawing pictures – they're adding new guns, weapons, monsters, all sorts of things. We set out to build our engine and our toolset so that you're able to add new content to almost any part of the game without any programming knowledge whatsoever. He goes on: “the more content in the game the better the experience becomes. “We're now at a stage where almost all of it is done and we can throw ourselves into the content-and that just doesn't take as long.
“What has taken so long in developing Starbound is the technology, not the content,” Tiyuri says. The game is in a position now where sweeping changes can be made to content without requiring substantial changes to the underlying engine. It's this goal that is informing the next stage in Starbound's life.