 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 . 
