A question to the team of SE: In the last Dev Diary I noticed that you are only a team of less than 40 people so I asked myself about how long did the developement of the game take? I once developed a little game with some friends and I now know how much work there is to be done and that the programming only takes a moderate part in the whole process, so I find it pretty interesting to see how a so small group of people can develop such a big and challenging game in a rather short amount of time.
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Gonna take an educated guess before, and if, the devs answer themselves lol. If I had to guess Id say…little less than 2 years. The Systemic Reaction part of Avalanche Studios Group is still relatively new and so far theyve only released 1 game so far, Generation Zero, which came out early last year. But the game already has so much going for it that its insane to think they did all this within the span of a single year not including GDD work, drafting, and conceptualizing. They have veterans within the Avalanche group to pull from and many inspiration across all of Avalanches titles to use as a basis for inspiration, but even then putting in that much work, Id still say this game had to be in development for at least close to 2 years especially since the studio already has a beta ready build. Most AAA or even AA studios dont even have a beta ready build within 3 years of development. Im guessing they started work on this sometime as work on Generation Zero was winding down. But thats just my guess, and Im interested to see what they actually say lol.
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Side Note: I also have developed a couple of very small games with friends before and I too know that no simple thing is ever actually as simple as it seems lol. The smallest feature could take upwards of 2 weeks and a 6 man crew to actually refine and nail down. I think it was a dev log from the Astronauts, who are working on Witchfire, that I read, and this particular dev was talking about their past experience working on a game, and they mentioned how they came to one of their leads about adding in a very small feature at the tail end of development, and told them they could have it done and implemented in 2 days. The lead humored them and allowed them to do it, and it ended up taking more than 2 weeks and them having to add about 6 more people to help them do that small feature (ended up not being able to do it himself, and not within that 2 day timeframe he set for himself). And when the dev brought it up to the lead, the lead just smiled and knew they werent going to have it done within that time limit, but appreciated the dedication and work their coworker put in to try to add something to their game they thought would help improve it. At the end of the experience this dev ended up learning that nothing is ever as small as it seems, and game developed is a tricky and complicated beast. Still story reminds me of all those game development college projects I had to do, and hits home so hard.
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Hi @JM_Dinoslayer!
Good question, I’m actually not sure since I haven’t been on the project from the start. We didn’t start off as a 40-man team, so it’s impossible to say this many people have worked on it for this long. 
Hi Izzy!
It was fun reading your posts! Just wanted to clarify that Generation Zero has its own team of developers. We both work at the division Systemic Reaction, but Gen-Z’s team works from Stockholm and Second Extinctions developers work from Malmö, we’re not even in the same office. So the workload on Gen-Z has nothing to do with when we started working on Second Extinction.
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Ah lol. Thanks for the clarification (and the compliment lol). Honestly, that was my other guess but I took that 40-man team comment from the OP to heart and was thought if thats the case then theres no way they split up into groups and still managed these 2 big projects lol. But also yeah I figured that itd be impossible for you guys to all be working on the same thing because Generation Zero is still receiving big updates, with one just coming less than a month ago. But I couldnt resist the urge to put my Game Theory cap on lol.
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