 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 . 
