It’s wonderful!
Imagine a launch screen that depicts a warm sunlit pastoral valley, in the distance a quaint village with welcoming tendrils of smoke rising from little chimneys and in the foreground tall stalks of wheat swaying in the wind.
Now attach all the menu items to that wheat: whack-a-mole new game, settings, multiplayer etc.
Ahahaha, the worlds most annoying UI innovation! Love it.
Of course it doesn’t work at all, the bartender has only been in development for three years.
So many novel gameplay loops!
You call it love, I call it disturbing.
This thread about the bartender is absolutely hilarious. Even the diehards are trolling CIG now.
This one is comedy Gold. I like how it’s always a “CTO” that makes these nonsensical posts on Reddit. This one is a 3yr old Reddit account claiming 20 yr dev experience. But yet, in 2015, he backed a project he saw was an on-going disaster.
Software development “experts” in the SC community of “believers” are dime a dozen. You can’t swing a dead Squadron 42 without hitting a thousand of those.
I’m a software developer with over 20 years of experience who’s currently a CTO (in reality, I’m the main developer in a team of two, but still). For real. When SC was announced, knowing quite a bit of the history of Chris Roberts, I chose to wait and watch. And not long after that I saw enough red flags to confirm that was the right decision, though I never anticipated the project would take this long and get this bad.
SC is right now a textbook example of MANY problems, that go beyond software development into the broader concept of a software project. Overscoping, misguided technical choices, mismanagement, lack of oversight and accountability, little concern for delivering value, nebulous definitions of key/core concepts, lack of proper abstractions, focus on (mostly) irrelevant details, “looks” over functionality, technical debt - it’s all there. Some of it comes from their business model and feeds back into it, I suppose.
I just hope that SC, when it inevitably blows up, doesn’t take the recent space sim genre renaissance with it. That would be a shame.
That post is terrible. Not because he’s wrong about there being a massive technical debt, but because he’s effectively blaming the programmers for Star Citizen’s current state.
The real problem, as pointed out many times in this thread, is Chris Roberts and his utter lack of project management competence.
Hmmm. I think I agree.
So, what could this become with proper project management?
Nothing. It was a pipe dream from the start and now it’s a stink bomb awaiting detonation. There are plenty of games that do some of what Roberts promised (elite, x3/4,everspace, eve etc.), and other future games will improve these proven concepts.
With proper management, it could become a good single-player space combat adventure. Just streamline it. Dump all the stupid unnecessary stuff, like empty planets. You can even have simple FPS combat mixed into the ship stuff. Then you can add a multiplayer mode for perhaps 20 people. Done.
To open with a contentious statement, possibly a meatier Elite: Dangerous. ;)
If we’re talking about project management as a whole - from the concept to implementation and delivery - SC could have been great. Mainly by limiting the scope, and building a solid foundation with core gameplay to build upon, and the right engine to do that. And then, after laying that foundation, you can deliver more and more features that scale the concept beyond that core. This is, in fact, the core of modern software development: you don’t build all at once, but you establish a good core, and you improve upon it in iterations, adjusting your scope according to the expectations and challenges you find in the way.
It’s funny to think that two recent other space games are great examples of project management: Elite: Dangerous and No Man’s Sky. You can accuse Elite: Dangerous of being “puddle deep”, but it has a very solid core and fantastic execution from the get-go. You can accuse No Man’s Sky of overambition and sketchy pre-launch marketing, but what they achieved in the last few years with a <50 people team is absolutely remarkable from a tech and process standpoint, and they keep building on it because they have a solid core both in tech and internal software development processes (and concepts). Not surprisingly, both of those projects created their own internal engine to support that core concept. In both cases, they also implemented a core that could be extended upon, building entire new feature sets “laterally” to the core, and even making them in parallel as needed. It’s solid management through and through.
SC, on the other hand, didn’t do that. They chose the engine based on how good it looked (since that helps to sell ships), and because it’s the wrong tool for the job, they are often wasting time fighting the engine instead of actually implementing meaningful features. And by this point it doesn’t look as good as it did when the project started, so they lost even that. And so on and so forth.
Thanks for your very detailed answer. It is very helpful for me in my understanding of the SC situation. I mean, I get that the gaming engine they chose was not totally (or not anywhere) suited to what they promised to create.
So could/should proper project management have started with choosing a better game engine or choosing to write their own?
Just wondering…
Yes. Proper management of a software project also means adjusting scope to the size of your team, and adjusting your technical choices to the requirements of the project. Hammers and screws and all that. ;)
They absolutely should not have chose Cryengine, but at the same time Crytek actually was involved from the start because they did the mockup game scenes for the kickstarter videos. This was important because it made it seem like there was actually already a team in place making progress on the project and that there was a coherent view of the game. In reality it was all throw away mock up stuff, but they chose Cryengine as a business decision not a technical one.
AGREED. 100%.
Still just wondering… Was there a better engine for the SC “vision” from the start (not the video hype stuff we all saw Crytek do for this), or would they have needed to code their own engine to realize the “vision” that CR appears to have for his “Oasis” vision?
Unreal would probably have been a lot better suited for it, at least the tools and support for it would’ve been miles ahead of whatever you’d get for CryEngine.
There’s a reason there’s a Cry in that Engine, and Unreal in the other one.
Heck, even the engine for Banished would probably have been better. Reading that guys updates was always a treat. (http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/)
Wonder if Cris Roberts would’ve picked the right engine and finished SQ42 if the game only got 1m in funding instead of 300 billions.
Whatever they chose, and I can’t speak much to that, they’d need something modular that they could adapt (because engines aren’t prepared for a solar system scale “world”, or other things that aren’t very common) without conflicting with the rest of the engine over and over, otherwise it’s better to start from scratch. What you shouldn’t do is be 6, 7 years in, or however many years it was at the time, and decide that now is the time to rewrite your network and (part of the) physics layer of the game, as everything else depends on that and is going to inevitably have hard edge case bugs.
And even then… I never paid much attention to the game before it start going pear-shapped because I don’t get MMOs and wouldn’t get this one either, but it always sounded like too much without focus on the gameplay loops. What even is supposed to be the economy or the progress of the players? Like, who’s going want to be the grunt in the boring tasks everyone seems to want to lord over, post-release buyers? Why would anyone want to?
There was really no engine that could support the game because the game is just DREAMS.
The original pitch was a single player Wing Commander game, an MMORPG, and a host-your-own-server version. No one engine is doing that.