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 his friend and office-mate Paul Reiche III, the designer of "Archon", during a period where Reiche was "supposed to be working on "Mail Order Monsters"". Reiche advised Johnson 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. The game was one of the earliest to use procedurally generated content for planets and everything on them. The techniques used created a type of "roguelike" environment on each planet, with the contents randomly distributed. The story network was also one of the earliest examples of a sandbox game design. 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.