Evenings After the Day Job: How This Family Project Works

Blocks Beyond The Stars has no studio, no budget, and no deadline. It has a family: me (Marcel) at the keyboard, Justus (10) as merciless lead tester and idea machine, and Verena, who keeps the whole thing grounded. How a game gets made under these conditions — a look behind the scenes in the literal sense.

The rhythm. Development happens in the evenings and on weekends. That sounds like little time, and it is — but it enforces a discipline that bigger projects sometimes lack: when there are only two hours per evening, you build the important stuff first. Meanwhile, over a thousand automated tests make sure the weekend's feature doesn't wreck Tuesday's.

The cycle. Almost every release follows the same pattern: an idea is born (often at the dinner table, often from Justus), it gets built, then comes test night — Justus gets the new build, usually unannounced, and within minutes finds what three weeks of development overlooked. His bug reports start with "Dad, why…" and are more precise than many an issue tracker entry. Then we fix, release, and the devlog honestly states what a kid found.

The openness. The whole project is open source and will stay that way. By now friends are testing along, our first external contributor gifted us a Linux build, and the family project is slowly becoming a family-and-community project. Exactly the direction we're hoping for.

The why. There is no business plan. There is a boy who says "there should be real factories", and a father who builds some in the evenings. Everything else — the servers, the tests, the releases — is just the machinery to make sure that sentence ends up in a game anyone can play.