 It took "fifteen man-years" and three actual years to develop the game. In a 2006 interview, lead designer Johnson said, "I had never really designed a game before ... It's funny looking back on it now — just by happenstance I ended up creating a very open ended system where players could go anywhere and do whatever and a story sort of unfolded." Ybarra stated that the game was almost cancelled more than once, and came out about a year behind schedule. Johnson was guided by Archon designer Paul Reiche III during development. Reiche advised him to draft a "story network" that would highlight all the most important points of the story and list the in-game objects necessary to advance from one to the next. The designers rewrote the script multiple times. The group designed what they called a "fractal generator", which took six man-years to develop and allowed them to increase the number of planets in the game from 50 to 800. They created a separate ecosystem generator over the course of two man-years of work. The alien names were created by randomly combining syllables until they had names they liked, and their code for simulating communications was rewritten four times before completion.
