I’m wondering why the dev team is working on MP, and even on platform designer when the engine designer isn’t even finished. Shouldn’t you finish one project before you start or work on another?
The engine designer needs to interact with the platform designer, everything about it will need to interface with how the car designer and the tycoon side of the game works. If we completely finished the engine designer before working on the car designer, it’d be quite possible that we’d need to go back and make changes to the engine designer to make everything work together nicely, as it is we’re already going to be going back to the engine designer to both fix some art work that looks like it might not fit into the car properly, and tweak some stats (like economy) on the basis of how it fits into the car designer stats calculation.
At this point finishing the engine designer is a known quantity, it’s just adding more art work, sound and stats for all the other engine types really, the platform designer and the tycoon side of things are much more up in the air and much more of a design challenge at this point, so we want to get them more nailed down first. Once we have a playable game where you can design an engine, put it in a car you’ve designed, and then get your company to build and sell it, then we’ll go back and add all the extra content to the car and engine designers (aka, the easy part)
Multiplayer was simply a weekend side project that turned out to be so much fun that we decided to finish and release it. It’s only really taken up a few weeks of development time, but gives us a solid base for building the full on multiplayer mode of the finished game, AND gives players something new and fun to enjoy.
TL;DR: You don’t finish one part of the game completely then start on the next, unless you want to end up totally reworking the “finished” part.
Hope that explains the logic behind what we work on when.