How to Ship Games on Time and on Budget with Galaxy Grove

Every year, indie studios announce ambitious projects. Sprawling RPGs. Innovative mechanics. Years of dev time. Then… silence. Or worse, a delayed launch, a scaled-back scope, and a team running on fumes.

Galaxy Grove took a different bet. In two years, they shipped two games, Station to Station and Town to City, scaled to 16+ people (and growing), stayed within budget, met their deadlines, and avoided team crunch. While some are still polishing their first trailer, Galaxy Grove is already working on projects three and four.

To understand how, I sat down with Joost, the studio’s founder. He shared how they define milestones, set scope, what their approach is to delegation and how they decide what are the important things to focus on and what to scrape. 

We discuss key production strategies and analyse how Galaxy Grove builds games that ship on time and within budget. 

Why Multiple Teams Instead of One Big Game?

Lot’s of traditional studios bet everything on one game every 3-5 years. Galaxy Grove rolls the dice annually with multiple teams in parallel.

At his previous studio, Ronimo Games, Joost experienced the chaos of “what do we do next?” moments. Game wraps, you have 15 people standing around, and everyone wants input on the next project. It’s expensive. It’s stressful. And it’s a process that works better with two people, not fifteen.

Joost’s solution at Galaxy Grove:

“I wanted multiple teams so one team can start on a game while another finishes a different game. Big production team, small preproduction team.”

But there’s a deeper reason: market reality.

The games industry is brutally competitive. Success requires luck you can’t control. If you ship one game every three years, you need to be incredibly lucky. That one game has to hit. But if you ship annually? You get three times as many rolls of the dice.

More chances to find product-market fit before you run out of runway.

What Actually Makes On-Time Delivery Possible?

Galaxy Grove hit three goals with Station to Station: great game, on time, within budget. How?

Strong focus and sharp scope.

Here’s what that means in practice:

Stop Prototyping Everything

In the past, Joost would prototype multiple ideas to see which was better. “Let’s try both and then choose.” 

Now? Pick the one that feels best and commit. If it sucks, try the other one then.

Does this mean you occasionally pick wrong? Sure. But building everything twice costs way more time than picking wrong once.

Timebox Your Features

When Galaxy Grove moves from preproduction to production, they create a milestone schedule with the publisher. But instead of promising specific features, they timebox them.

Example: “We have one month to make growing cities. That’s it.”

When that month arrives, they ask: “What can we achieve in a month?” If they realize halfway through it’s too complex, they cut scope mid-feature and finish what they can.

At the end of every milestone, Joost looks at the remaining schedule and asks: “Do I need to kill something?”

The publishers? They’re fine with it. As long as the game is great, they’d rather have a smaller game on time than another delayed project.

How Do You Build a Milestone Schedule That Actually Works?

Joost works backwards, but he starts with market reality first.

Step 1: Guess the Budget 

“I feel like this many people for this long should make a great game.” That’s intuition from experience. Multiply people by months, and you have your budget.

Step 2: Validate Against Market Data

Look at similar games in your genre. Throw out the complete failures. Throw out the biggest hits (you can’t plan for that much luck). What’s left? The “does okay” tier.

That revenue needs to be twice your budget. Why? Publishers have additional costs. If your game does okay, they need a profit.

If the numbers don’t match, either don’t make the game or adjust the budget.

Step 3: Work Backwards From Release

Now you know your release date. Work backwards:

• Need 3 months of bug fixing before release
• Need a demo for Steam Next Fest
• Need a feature-complete demo 3 months before that
• Need an announcement trailer 3-5 months before the demo
• Need capturable footage 2 months before the trailer

The schedule starts filling itself in.

Step 4: Accept You’ll Be Wrong

Joost is “really terrible” at estimating features. He accepts this from the start.

Both Station to Station and Town to City were way bigger on paper than what shipped. 

Town to City was supposed to have five cities but they launched with two. It was supposed to have multiple unique mechanics per city and they shipped one (farming).

The game still fit the original pitch. It was still fun. That’s what matters.

How Do You Decide What to Cut?

Joost has a conversation with the team and publisher: “What are the most important things? What sells the game most?”

He looks at two factors:

1. Does it make the game fun enough? (Gameplay priority)
2. Can you show it in a trailer? (Marketing priority)

Some features are great for gameplay but invisible in marketing. They lose priority. Other features are required for a fun game regardless of whether you can show them, they stay.

The milestone schedule is already ordered from important to less important. So the default answer is: “What’s the last major feature in the list?”

The team never likes cutting features. But Joost doesn’t try to please everyone.

He’s clear: “We can keep this feature and crunch, go over budget, and risk the studio going bankrupt. Or we cut it and make a smaller game that’s still great.”

When you frame it like that? People understand.

What’s Different When You Scale to Multiple Teams?

Galaxy Grove now runs multiple teams in parallel. Designers and programmers stick to one project permanently. Artists move between projects.

As the studio grows, Joost is getting more detached from individual games. On Station to Station, he was one of two programmers for the entire dev cycle. On Town to City, the team made most decisions without him.

That’s intentional. As they spin up their third and fourth projects, other team members become game directors. Joost’s job is to interfere as little as possible (which he admits is a challenge).

The structure is simple: one boss per project. Not democratic. Not consensus-driven. Clear decision-making authority with transparent reasoning.

How Do You Track Progress Without Metrics?

Here’s the surprising part: Galaxy Grove doesn’t measure anything.

No velocity tracking. No burn-down charts. Their only metric: “Are we meeting the milestone schedule?”

For tooling and workflow improvements, Joost’s signal is even simpler: “If people are complaining a lot about something, we need to fix it.”

They switched from Jira to Codecks because artists hated Jira. Codecks felt less like a slow spreadsheet and more like a playful, fun card game. The card format forces short summaries, making workload instantly scannable without being overwhelming.

What’s the Biggest Project Management Mistake Indies Make?

Not being able to say “I know something could be better, but we’re not doing it.”

On a past project, Joost’s team realized halfway through they could make a cooler visual style. They threw away assets and remade them.

Looking back? Huge mistake.

“You don’t even know whether the cooler style will resonate better with audiences. Just accept that you had a better idea. Put it in the fridge. Use it for your next game.”

This applies to everything. That feature you thought of mid-production? That better UI you could build? That more polished animation?

Accept your choices. Finish the game. Fix it in your next game.

Closing Thought: What No Longer Works

What struck me most in this conversation wasn’t the clever production tricks—it was the philosophical shift.

• Five-year dev cycles don’t work for indies anymore.
• Perfectionism doesn’t ship games.
• Democracy in creative decisions leads to slow death.

The market is too competitive to bet everything on one perfect game. You need more rolls of the dice. You need to ship faster. You need to accept that “good enough and finished” beats “perfect and never done.”

As Joost put it:

“Unless you’re making The Witcher 4 or GTA 17, don’t spend five years building one game. If you’re an indie without a giant fanbase, you don’t know if your game will sell. Be more impatient. Make something smaller that you actually finish. Accept your choices and ship it in two years, not five.”

Because in an industry where luck plays a massive role, the studios that win aren’t the ones with the best ideas, they’re the ones who ship enough times to find what works.

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