– Facepunch Studios founder Garry Newman describes why the Early Access game Rust is getting an overhaul. “There were a lot of stupid decisions made in the old codebase,” said Rust developer Garry Newman in a recent interview with PCGamesN. “That’s probably unfair. There were a lot of decisions made when we didn’t know what game we were making.” Newman and his team at Facepunch Studios have ceased updating the current version of Rust — which was remarkably successful after its release on Steam’s Early Access service last year — to focus their efforts on rebuilding the game from scratch with a new codebase. According to Newman, the brutal post-apocalyptic survival game has its origins in an unreleased prototype for an open-world assassination game tentatively titled Cash4kills. The team wound up building Rust on top of that game’s codebase, leading to a lot of troublesome development issues — issues that it is now sorting out in front of the thousands of people who paid for alpha access. “There’s a lot of systems that are integral to Rust, that are 3,000 lines long, that could be 100 lines long,” said Newman. “So every time you go to change something you have to chase around finding how these five different systems that it doesn’t really need work, then you change it and it breaks 4 different systems that you thought had nothing to do with it.” Now the development team is focusing its efforts on building the new, “experimental” version of Rust, which has been integrated into the main game so that players launching Rust on Steam can choose to play either the established (and stable) version or the new, experimental build. Going forward, the studio plans to keep the current version of Rust available for play as a legacy branch when it feels comfortable rebranding the experimental branch as the main game. The studio will still keep an experimental branch open after that as a means of letting players test new features before they’re added to the main game For more details about the studio’s design goals and plan for redeveloping Rust from scratch, check out the full story on PCGamesN.