 SpaceChem took about a year with a team of seven people from around the globe to create: Barth was responsible for design and production, Collin Arnold and Keith Holman handled the programming, Ryan Sumo created the visuals, Evan Le Ny the music, Ken Bowen the sound and Hillary Field created the game's narrative. The development costs were around $ 4,000, with the team working on the game during their spare time on weekends. Barth considered this a risk-cutting measure; if the game did not succeed, the team still had their full-time jobs they could continue. The team used the C # language built on the Mono framework for the game which would allow for easy porting to other platforms beyond Microsoft Windows. Initially, they had considered using Microsoft XNA for ease of porting to the Xbox 360, but later opted to consider other release platforms, requiring them to switch to the more portable Mono framework.
