Surviving a Team Collapse: What I Learned When Everything Fell Apart
I joined Hometopia as a UI developer. Within a year, the team went from 15 to 5 people, and I became the lead programmer. Here's what that taught me about persistence, pragmatism, and shipping games.
I joined Hometopia as a UI developer. The game had been in development for four years, with about a year left until Early Access. The UI was in rough shape, and they needed someone to fix it.
What I didn’t know was that I’d stay through a team collapse, become the lead programmer, and learn more about game development in two years than I had in the previous four.
The Setup
When I joined, the team was about seven people. The game was ambitious—a multiplayer home decoration sandbox with building, customization, and social features. It had potential, but under the hood, things were rough. Four years of development with rotating technical hands had left the codebase full of tech debt.
My job was UI. I worked with the game director and artists, fixing broken flows and removing frustrating UX. That part went well. But I could see the deeper problems: performance issues, lighting bugs, systems that barely held together.
The technical leadership was burned out. Some didn’t seem to care anymore. I started speaking up about the problems I saw, and slowly, people began listening.
The Collapse
Early Access launched. It didn’t go well.
The launch was too ambitious. Reviews were harsh. Players encountered bugs and performance problems. The situation was bad.
What happened next was worse. The technical leadership left. The publisher started making cuts. The team went from fifteen people to five.
I stayed.
Why Stay?
Honestly? I believed in the game. Underneath all the problems, Hometopia was genuinely fun. The core loop worked. The art was charming. It just needed someone to fix what was broken.
The five of us who remained made a decision: we weren’t going to let this game die. We’d cut what we couldn’t maintain, fix what we could, and ship updates to the players who stuck around.
The Recovery
We established a sustainable rhythm. One major update every month or two, smaller patches in between. We focused on the fundamentals: performance, stability, bugs that actually affected players.
I ended up touching everything. Memory optimization, because the game ran poorly on lower-end machines. Lighting and post-processing fixes that had been broken for months. New gameplay features that players were asking for. DevOps, because someone had to keep the builds working.
The publisher relationship was difficult. They wanted faster progress, more people. We knew the codebase couldn’t handle that—we’d tried before, and new people would get productive just in time to be reassigned elsewhere. We kept our heads down and focused on what we could control.
The Multiplayer Crisis
Then came the multiplayer problem.
We brought in someone who was supposedly experienced with networking. He worked on it for weeks. When we finally tested his implementation, it didn’t work. He’d been faking progress reports.
We had to let him go, and suddenly multiplayer was my problem.
I built the entire system from scratch in under a month. Netcode for GameObjects, Steamworks integration, the works. My colleagues helped with testing, but the architecture was on me. It shipped, and it worked.
That’s when I stopped thinking of myself as “just a UI developer.”
What I Learned
Persistence matters more than pedigree. I wasn’t hired to be the lead. I became the lead because I stayed when others left and did what needed to be done.
Small teams can move faster than big ones. With five people, we had no coordination overhead. Everyone knew what everyone else was working on. Decisions happened in minutes, not meetings.
Cut what you can’t maintain. We removed features that were draining resources without adding value. It hurt, but it let us focus on making the core experience solid.
Tech debt is a choice. Not always yours, but you still have to deal with it. The question isn’t whether to address it, but which parts to address and when.
Ship something. Players don’t care about your internal struggles. They care whether the game works and whether it’s getting better. Regular updates, even small ones, build trust.
The Ending
The game remains in Early Access. Funding was eventually pulled, and development stopped. That’s the reality of the industry—sometimes good work isn’t enough.
But I don’t regret staying. The team that remained turned a failing project into something stable and playable. We shipped dozens of updates. We fixed problems that had been broken for years. And I learned that I can handle pretty much anything a project throws at me.
Sometimes the most valuable skill is persistence.