The studio had to provide engaging driving forces. We didn’t want to tell people what their story was, we wanted them to define that themselves," Bromell exclaimed, adding, "Whereas The Martian is a very specific story, we wanted Astroneer to lend itself to a myriad of stories, all told from the player's perspective as they experience it." To achieve immersive emergent storytelling, it wasn't enough to just create a fun sandbox. "Astroneer, from the beginning, was always thought of and designed to be a sandbox experience. While Astroneer envelopes players in a space-age journey, the game doesn't force a narrative rather, it builds an open playground that facilitates unique emergent stories. Early Access gave us a great environment in which to learn about ourselves and how we best work together and make the necessary adjustments to align ourselves to our goals," Wolpert remarked. "I think we also learned a tremendous amount about System Era as a team, and evolved on that side as well to maximize what we were able to build into Astroneer. With Astroneer being the first title that the studio has released, the Early Access process also provided a strong foundation for the company. While the game made it out of Early Access, which is a threshold many titles fail to cross, this process also provided the studio with insight on how to scale the game long-term, "We also made fundamental design changes to many of the core systems in the game, mostly with the intention of increasing the depth of our systems to support not only a more engaging experience for 1.0, but room for expansion beyond that point." "From a technical perspective, we certainly learned a lot in terms of how we needed to architect our systems to be performant in an open-world context and to serve as pipelines for a continuous stream of content," explained Wolpert the engineer added, "We also learned a lot about the tax that you have to pay when you’re developing a multiplayer game: every new gameplay feature must be built with multiplayer in mind, and this requires extra time and effort over a purely single-player experience." Accounting for lessons learned, he elaborated, "The Astroneer code base, along with our engineering guidelines and best practices, changed significantly over the course of Early Access." This process became an invaluable experience for the studio. Putting their inspirations and the game's design to the test, System Era Softworks released Astroneer into Early Access on December 16, 2016. With Astroneer, we wanted to build a sandbox experience that’d give a moment like that to each of its players, only more specific to them and their own interests on a myriad of planet types." With The Martian, we got to see a very direct, specific experience of someone surviving an uninhabited, challenging planet. "It demonstrated to us that there were folks pining for this kind of experience just as we were," Bromell stated, adding, "In a lot of ways, it became an ‘ideas-bible’ to us we leaned on it for inspiration when it came to emotions felt around survivability and being able to cobble together larger goals from smaller or lesser parts. Outside the gaming world, the film The Martian, which released in 2015 to much fanfare, also played a pivotal role in Astroneer's development. "I learned a lot both from the game itself, but also from Mojang, seeing what it is like from a player’s perspective to play a game that is unfinished and still in development," Bromell stated, adding, "I was playing Minecraft day in and out with the same friends on our dedicated server, and it really felt like we were 'crafting' our own story." Reflecting on how these experiences affected Astroneer, the creative director elaborated, "I still think back on those moments fondly and really wanted to build a game that’d offer that feeling of self-progression." Leaning on the zeitgeist at the onset of the game's development, the studio was inspired by two pieces of art the first of which was Minecraft.
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