System Era Softworks is the Seattle-based independent studio behind ASTRONEER, one of the most acclaimed exploration games of the past decade. With their follow-up title, STARSEEKER: Astroneer Expeditions (early access launching June 11, 2026), System Era set out to deliver a deeper, more connected player experience — and knew that reliable, insightful data would be central to making that happen.

To get there, they turned to InterWorks.

The Challenge: Inheriting a Legacy Platform in a Fast-Moving Development Cycle

As development on STARSEEKER accelerated, System Era needed to quickly pivot from a legacy platform designed for ASTRONEER to a new solution that would scale with STARSEEKER’s goals. Their Snowflake and Tableau environments supported both the live ASTRONEER game and the in-development STARSEEKER title, meaning any instability had real consequences for their ability to tune gameplay and make production decisions.

They needed a partner who could step in quickly, stabilize what existed and then evolve the platform to meet the demands of an active game launch. Their Tableau account manager pointed them to InterWorks as the premier shop for managed analytics services around Tableau and Snowflake.

“InterWorks was very intentional — they focused on the exact questions we needed answered.”

—David Cordis, Senior Product Manager, System Era Softworks

Above: Players exploring alien terrain in STARSEEKER: Astroneer Expeditions.

The Approach: Stabilize, Modernize, Then Scale

InterWorks began by reverse-engineering the existing Snowflake environment — understanding what had been built, identifying gaps, and mapping a path to something reliable and maintainable. Rather than a disruptive rebuild, the team prioritized continuity while steadily improving the foundation. InterWorks was able to deliver coherent architecture, automated monitoring, security best practices and meaningful documentation to the project.

Key steps in the engagement included:

• Implementing a Medallion architecture (bronze, silver, gold layers) using dbt core within Snowflake Workspaces, with JSON event flattening templates tailored to game telemetry data
• Building automated task failure detection and alerting using Snowflake account logs, persistent logging tables and email notification triggers
• Designing and delivering question-first Tableau dashboards built around the specific analytical questions the team needed to answer — player funnels, onboarding experience, economy tuning, progression pacing and expedition outcomes
• Maintaining a shared data dictionary for game-specific events and metrics to create a common language across analytics and development teams
• Operating through a flexible bucket-of-hours model that accommodated variable demand across development cycles while preserving internal resource predictability

The team was structured deliberately: Senior consultants led data engineering and analytics respectively, establishing architecture and client trust alongside data engineers to scale execution. Communication ran through a shared Slack channel and bi-weekly planning calls, keeping both teams tightly aligned as STARSEEKER’s telemetry needs evolved week to week.

Rising to the Moments That Mattered

Game development doesn’t pause for clean handoffs. When System Era ran a major external playtest with a tight deadline, event schemas changed rapidly and new reporting requirements emerged overnight. The InterWorks team distributed the work across multiple engineers and delivered a complete refactor of key models within a single day.

That kind of responsiveness defined the engagement. System Era came to trust InterWorks enough to invite the consulting team into their limited family-and-friends game testing program — a signal of just how embedded the partnership had become.

“Keep doing what you’re doing.”

—System Era Softworks team, end-of-project retrospective

Above: Players emoting together.

The Results

By the time STARSEEKER launched, InterWorks had delivered a stable, observable and analytically rich data platform — built to support both the launch window and the live-ops that follow.

• 25+ data models built across flattening, transformation and gold-layer analytics layers
• 6 net-new Tableau dashboards designed and delivered for player experience, economy and progression analysis
• 6 existing dashboards revised and significantly enhanced
• 6 additional dashboard templates built ahead of data availability, ready to activate at launch
• One-day turnaround on a full model refactor during a live external playtest
• Snowflake environment transformed from an undocumented legacy platform into a secure, monitored and maintainable architecture

Beyond the metrics, the engagement established InterWorks as a trusted analytics partner embedded in System Era’s development process — one whose work directly influenced decisions about game tuning, player onboarding design and economy balance before a single player installed STARSEEKER.

Looking Ahead

With STARSEEKER now live in Early Access (as of June 11) across PC, Xbox, PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2, the focus shifts to live-ops analytics: Understanding player behavior at scale, reporting outcomes to platform partners and continuing to tune the game based on real data.