One person · one game · pre-alpha
Stubborn Machine Games
The robots need coaxing. So does the game.
I’m Evan Daley, and Stubborn Machine Games is me. I’m building Stones to Starships, a survival and base-building game about harvesting a world, building the machines that do the work for you, and getting to the space age. It is pre-alpha, and I would rather show you what is true than what is finished.
What I am making
Stones to Starships
A first-person survival and base-building game about harvesting a world, building the machines that do the work for you, and advancing into the space age. Early on you charge machines off your own personal shield generator, because you are the power supply. You end up running a colony that does not need you standing next to it.
Every resource you collect syncs to the Matter Lattice, a shared pool any linked builder or fabricator can spend from. The progression is deliberately incremental — every rung exists because the one before it ran out — and it runs all the way from the first rock you break to the starship the game is named after.
Built in Unity. Currently a pre-alpha demo — no release date, and some of the art is still standing in for itself.
Practice
How I work
These are not values on a wall. Each one is written down because getting it wrong cost me something specific.
Verify before asserting
A green check is not a result until I know what it actually checked. One of my own translation checks reported PASS while silently skipping every table it was supposed to compare — an encoding bug had eaten the data. I keep a written list of what remains genuinely unverified, and I do not round it up.
The preview and the runtime call the same function
The map you open in-game is baked by the same generator that builds the island under your feet, not a second implementation that agrees most of the time. My offline tools re-run that same code outside Unity, so the numbers they print are measurements of the real thing rather than a model of it.
Seven languages, at pre-alpha
English, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese and Simplified Chinese — 598 text keys, all present in all seven, before the game is anywhere near finished. Fonts are checked glyph by glyph, because the UI draws an empty box rather than substituting. The translations still need a native-speaker pass, and I will say so until they have had one.
I checked the name before I said it
Stones to Starships was picked by putting sixteen candidate titles through eleven typographic treatments on the actual title screen — 176 combinations, judged where a logotype has to survive. Availability was confirmed against the authoritative domain registry rather than a reseller page, and every name I ruled out is written down so nobody re-pitches it.
About
Small, and early, and saying so
Stubborn Machine Games is one person: me, Evan Daley. There is one project, Stones to Starships, and it is in pre-alpha — no release date, and a fabricator still standing on screen as primitive cubes while the art catches up. I would rather you heard that from me than found it in a screenshot.
The way I work came out of being wrong in expensive ways. A threshold written in one unit and compared against a value in another sat quietly unreachable for months, and nothing failed — it just never fired. So the rules are written down now: check units, do not let a preview and the running game compute the same thing twice, and never let a passing check stand in for having looked. Localization gets the same treatment, which is why seven languages exist at pre-alpha instead of being retrofitted into a shipped UI later.
The studio name is new. Early is early, and I would rather build the habits now than apologize for the absence of them later.
Contact
Get in touch
Press, business, and anything else: daley.evan@gmail.com
If you are writing about the game, ask me what is verified and what is not. I will tell you.