Carradice: About the post-mortem by the game developer: It seems like a sound move from the dev to hire a consultant professional in marketing. As much as hiring artists to produce art when required (including writers for helping to flesh out quests and lore). Devs ought to consider the costs and the level of quality achievable for each task, depending on who is going to do it. Including the opportunity costs: time spent with art, story and marketing is time that might have been spent ironing out bugs, improving the mechanics, and so on. If the game delays too much, that is preventing the dev from working in another game.
Jeff Vogel seems to have hit a sweet spot that works for him, largely by trial and error. Knowing his potential audience, his costs, the costs of artists, the production levels that make sense for him, where his strengths lie and where is his personal effort better spent. That, for the kind of games that he is able to produce. For others devs, the equilibrium point might well be different (again, spend in marketers if you do not have a clue of where or how to sell your game and build a brand).
Well the "spend on marketers" is a good idea, but only AFTER you have a quality product. Otherwise you might listen to the marketers during development and end up building "generic basic FPS clone with lame plot no. 11289487", or possibly end up with something like The Outer Worlds (i.e. from a purely development POV, it's a quality product - but it's incredibly bland, boring and soulless).
Definitely agree that one should hire helpers for the stuff that isn't one's forte, or possibly even if it is depending on the project size (more developers == more stuff built in the same amount of time, provided that there's a good, solid, unified vision in there from the beginning, it doesn't get compromised by morons, and there's a good leader (and possibly also a good PM) to ensure things stay on track.
Similarly with writers - hire them if you have a plan, otherwise you'll end up with something like Torment of Numenura or whatever it was.
Why do they do 2D but then make it a real-time action thing?
I was hoping this would be a new, fresh variation on the ideas of the glorious Space Rangers 2 (and its various semi-sequels/variants, including HD). While I wouldn't have expected the inventive text quests or the irritating RTS or the batshit crazy arcade "black hole" modes, I was at least hoping for a nice turn-based combat portion.
Alternatively, I would have been very happy for a variation on Nexus: The Jupiter Incident.
Might check it out anyway, if it's more adventure/rpg/simulation than shooter...
Edit: Only just read the "post-mortem" - the fact that this was apparently inspired by Starflight is piquing my interest somewhat... I had completely forgotten how that (and its sequel) were awesome unique games in their own right - a modern version of those would be very welcome.
