Star Citizen - Chris Roberts, lots of spaceship porn, lots of promises

[scharmers]

And a call-out to the mighty Qt3!

[Gendal]

For that to happen, “it needs to have a solid foundation that’s scaleable and can be constantly maintained and built upon easily. If we don’t do a lot of this stuff upfront then we’re going to repay that technical debt later on.”

As much as you can conclusively prove an idea is bad in managing software development, I think the above concept certainly got there with games. It can work, but trying to predict what you will actually need before you need it, especially 10+ years, isn’t going to work.

Iterate, and iterate fast instead.

[rhamorim]

I guess it’s less about trying to predict what you will need, and more about building everything over a solid fundation that won’t get in your way when you start shuffling things around. Which is really hard to do.

[Ryan_Kelly]

What is this epic space adventure? Is there an overall story with some kind of big bad threat to the galaxy that you will need to deal with?

My concern is that SC will just be a space combat simulator with some trading. I want a game with a hell of a lot more than that.

The Vanduul are intended to be a major threat in the Persistent Universe. The goal of the developers is to allow hostile NPC groups such as pirates and aliens to have more of an impact than just serving as trash mobs, mostly by disrupting the economy of the system they’re located in. I’m guessing there will be scripted events where the Vanduul conquer a human system, but it’s currently unclear if non-player groups will be able to acquire territory as part of the simulation.

There will be a mixture of hand-crafted story missions and missions that are procedurally generated based on (and effecting) the economic simulation. The mission you saw in the Gamescom demo was an example of a story mission.

They decided to have the in-game universe be comprised of around 100 star systems (as opposed to trillions) so that the setting is more intimate story-wise.

[Telefrog]

Kotaku UK takes a look at the big-money backers of Star Citizen.

Who Are the Star Citizen Superbackers?

“I started [backing] about three years ago,” says John, a US Navy serviceman, who has spent in the region of $13,000 on Star Citizen so far. “I was on deployment at the time. The first thing I bought was the Rear Admiral package. I remember, because it was like $250, I was like, ‘that’s insane! That’s an insane amount of money for a game! Hell no!’.

“I don’t know why I caved. It looked cool. So I bought the Rear Admiral package and then it went all downhill from there. I was on deployment for two years in Bahrain. So I was getting a little bit of extra money for being out there, so obviously I was just blowing my money like it was my job. So I bought the Rear Admiral package, and then new ships would come out and I’d pick them up slowly. It wasn’t like one big burst of money. But I was buying every ship that came out.”

Tom, who works selling audio/video software and home theatre setups, found himself in the same boat, with an investment of, by his estimate, a whopping $20,000 to date. But even he is hesitant to put himself in the very top tier of Star Citizen backers.

“I don’t consider myself in the ‘1%’, because there’s guys who plopped down $10K that first week back in November 2012, whereas I grew to the number that I’m at with every sale, every purchase, every subscription down the road,” he says. “So I don’t see myself as a one-per-center… [I’m] not wealthy, by any means, but I’m comfortable enough that I can spend money, monthly or weekly, on things that don’t matter to normal living, like games, travelling, etc. So, that’s where I’ll put my ‘fun money’. Whereas some guys will spend five or six grand a year on their favourite sports team, I prefer to give it to my passion, which is gaming.”

My wife would divorce me in a hot second if I ever dropped $10k on an early access game.

[divedivedive]

Hell, my wife would have me committed and then lobotomized and then smothered with a pillow if I spent $10K on a game. Or pretty much anything.

[ArmandoPenblade]

[I’m] not wealthy, by any means, but I’m comfortable enough that I can spend money, monthly or weekly, on things that don’t matter to normal living, like games, travelling, etc. So, that’s where I’ll put my ‘fun money’. Whereas some guys will spend five or six grand a year on their favourite sports team, I prefer to give it to my passion, which is gaming.”

Shit, that’s more or less my precise definition of “wealthy.”

Hell, my wife would have me committed and then lobotomized and then smothered with a pillow if I spent $10K on a game. Or pretty much anything.

I got hardcore side-eye for paying full-price for ME3 and SC2013 back in the day…

[Lantz]

Shit, that’s more or less my precise definition of “wealthy.”

Wealthy is the person making twice as much as you do.

[RichVR]

To me anyone taking home six figures is well off. Seven figures is wealthy.

[SlapBone]

From the article:

Relatively early in its development, the game had so many players who had invested more than $10,000 that they were rewarded with access to their own superbacker collective: the Million Mile High Club.

Taken for a ride and getting screwed?

[olaf]

Man. I spent $250 on the Pillars of Eternity Kickstarter. At the time I thought it was a sound investment just given the history of the people involved and my love of BG2. But it was still a tough choice at the time…and in the end I wish I had just waited until it was released and spent like $60 or whatever on it.

I can’t imagine how much money I would need to have where $1000, let alone $10000+ on a game made sense to me.

[Paul_cze]

If I had millions of dollars I would easily spent tens of thousands on things I want to see get made.
But since I don’t, the most I spent on kickstarter so far has been a hundred bucks.

[rhamorim]

Kotaku UK continues the series on Star Citizen by looking at what happened to Star Marine:

What Happened to Star Marine, Star Citizen's Missing Module

[rhamorim]

As a software developer, reading those Kotaku UK articles made me cringe so very freaking much. There’s so much wrong stuff in the development process of Star Citizen that’s it hard to even begin to describe. It seems they did take some steps towards fixing that lately (and I suppose Erin Roberts played a major part in that), but man, it was tough to read, and it makes it hard to believe that something good will eventually come out of all this. Even if something good comes out of this, it’s undeniable that it could have been done with a lot less money and less time if the process was adequate from the get-go.

[Wendelius]

As a software developer (I’ve been in the industry for 22 years), you should know that it’s nigh impossible to staff up as quickly as they needed to for very specialised jobs.

What we see here are hardly uncommon growing pains of a huge project forced to span several geographically diverse studios / teams and use contractors ramping up very quickly.

You could argue they should have known better, but nobody had a clue how big the project would get when the Kickstarter launched.

It certainly was messy and inefficient. But you would have had to have a big developer already in place with clear reporting structures before the Kickstarter was even run to avoid all this.

Given the astounding amount of money pouring in, I guess they found themselves hanging for dear life rather than paying pause for 3-6 months simply to start an organisation.

And even then, the Crytek and TT staff, a critical part of the now saner in house development force according the articles, wasn’t around to be hired at the start.

Hindsight is 20/20 though.

Wendelius

[rhamorim]

I don’t disagree, Wendelius. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years now, and I worked for companies big and small. I’ve seen similar things happen a lot of times. And nearly all of them are workable if you have the right mindset and care from the start. I know because I experienced at least one project in which that was the case.

So, when I see something as big as Star Citizen wasting backer’s money because people didn’t communicate as they should, didn’t follow back as much as needed, and didn’t have proper project management, it causes me pain, because that’s backer money being thrown away on something that could be avoided or at the very least minimized.

[Fifth_Fret]

It reads to me like they scaled up development far, far too fast. Far beyond the management available, and far beyond available qualified hires. Fascinating to read; I hope they really have fixed these things. And I hope they don’t blunder into every issue a rapidly expanding business is going to encounter so ill-prepared.

[JeffL]

As someone who has been involved in huge projects over the last 3 decades, but none in the game development world: Are real live trained Project Managers not used in the game development field? Someone who is trained and experienced as a true Project Manager, with the appropriate skills, tools, and authority? My perception is this was completely lacking in this project, looking from the outside.

[rhamorim]

Project management is a bit different in game development, because you’re dealing with creative people a lot more. The pipelines tend to be highly specialized and interlinked, and critical paths are very different (tooling is one of them, which is mostly absent in most “normal” software projects).

Even so, project managers can help a lot in making sure communication works between different areas, and in managing deadlines and resources. It’s not easy to do, of course, and you need really good managers to make that work fine, which is a challenge in and of itself.

[cicobuff]

This morning as I look at the HUGE amount of Space Game releases in Steam, I am suddenly VERY THANKFUL for Star Citizen.

Whatever the motivation of Chris Roberts, the success of the kickstarter and the subsequent fund raising showed the world that there is a HUGE market for space games.

And I think this is ONE of the reasons we are have so many choices regarding space games. And I am very thankful for Star Citizen for what it did to other developers.Showing them that it may be profitable to do this genre after all.