Inside the Troubled Development of Star Citizen

rpmcmurphy

Quite an indepth look at Star Citizen http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2016/09/23/inside-the-troubled-development-of-star-citizen

MaxBacon

Just read it. It isn't any flattering article but isn't hostile or biased either, what is kinda refreshing. Also very well written with both interviews from Roberts and CIG Staff inputs on this insider look at the internal works of the development.

But at the end I don't think this is anything new, is it? It doesn't go towards the present yet what happened in the past, and information that to some extent it was already around.

Last year problems did transpire, and it was more confirmed when the company reacted by putting Erin on dev lead and did a company-wide restructuration. On a project of this scope and ambition, I don't think they would escape any problems, especially on a company that was grown on size and a project that grown on scope while the company was still being built.

cheyane

Given the very large scope and designs of this game it is quite inevitable they will suffer setbacks and problems. I think any game undertaking the type of tasks this game is doing will suffer but you have to cut them some slack however I suppose the money raising methods go a long way to how much criticism and scrutiny they are receiving. 

rpmcmurphy

MaxBacon said:

But at the end I don't think this is anything new, is it? It doesn't go towards the present yet what happened in the past, and information that to some extent it was already around.

No it's not really anything massively new but it condenses a whole load of stuff into one article with an actual timeline as opposed to selectively picking quotes from various people at various times to possibly build a narrative.

I just think these sort of articles are interesting to read, the pros and cons of various decisions and how they can have knock-on effects much further along in development etc. It certainly helps that the tone of the article is quite neutral as well.

MaxBacon

cheyane said:

Given the very large scope and designs of this game it is quite inevitable they will suffer setbacks and problems. I think any game undertaking the type of tasks this game is doing will suffer but you have to cut them some slack however I suppose the money raising methods go a long way to how much criticism and scrutiny they are receiving. 

Yes pretty much agreed.  You know... people keep telling that it is impossible and they can NOT do it. CIG have on my opinion shown us enough to prove that they are managing to achieve things people have been naysaying about since 2012.

I don't believe a SC to be 100% of what was ever promised it wanted to be is going to be achieved. But that they are very well able to deliver one amazing looking game fun to play, i'm sure they do and if I have that I have what i bought SC for.

rpmcmurphy said

No it's not really anything massively new but it condenses a whole load of stuff into one article with an actual timeline as opposed to selectively picking quotes from various people at various times to possibly build a narrative. 

I just think these sort of articles are interesting to read, the pros and cons of various decisions and how they can have knock-on effects much further along in development etc. It certainly helps that the tone of the article is quite neutral as well.

I'm more leaning on articles like this, very well written and learns towards attempting to give a depth to this matter. Because on my opinion what matters is not that they did mistakes and did suffer setbacks, what really matters is that they react and learn from them to ensure situations like SM do never happen again.

Elsabolts

Been waiting on hanger ready Reclaimer and Orion for quite awhile getting tried. More builds less concepts

rpmcmurphy

I like the bit about Star Marine and how things went wrong. I think it's really interesting to see how these things occur, why they occur, what gets done about them etc and hearing from people directly involved as opposed to those claiming Illfonic did this, Illfonic did that, Illfonic did a poor job blah blah blah. Great informative article in my opinion.

---

The Problem With Contractors

Outside of Cloud Imperium Games’ own studios, there were also significant problems with the contracted studios whose work CIG had relied upon, stemming largely from a lack of communication and direction. This would mean that mistakes would be left unchecked and development could progress in the wrong direction for months, necessitating further months of time-consuming course correction. This was a very frustrating experience for some of the developers working at those external studios, who shared their experiences with me.

In 2013 CIG contracted Illfonic, a third-party studio based in Denver, to build the Star Marine module and the first-person systems needed for Star Citizen. Star Marine was to be a vertical slice (ie, a demo) of Star Citizen’s first-person multiplayer. Much like Arena Commander, it was essentially a multiplayer mini-game – something the backers could play with to get a sense of what CIG was building for the final game. For CIG, the module would act as a test bed for its ideas for first-person.

The first release of Star Marine was to focus around a single map, Gold Horizon. It was a deep-space pirate base that two teams would battle over.

The plan was to build ship and station interiors from environment kits. For this to work, a source explained, “you need to have the same slottable pieces for all different types of art styles. All standard doors, for example, whether they be for a moon base or a mars base, have to share the same dimensions. If you’re building a new environment and new art assets to go with it then you create them as standard, modular pieces so other environments in the same style can be built quickly without needing bespoke assets.”

CIG wanted to use the environment assets Illfonic had created for its Gold Horizon space station level as an environment kit. But when CIG tried to fit the assets into their levels, they found that none of the assets worked with CIG’s kit system; they had all been built to the wrong scale. A source told me that after the studio had worked on the Gold Horizon map for more than a year, CIG asked Illfonic’s artists to remake the whole thing with new metrics to satisfy the Squadron 42 team. “It sucked for the artists,” my source told me.

“I'm always very perplexed by this,” Roberts responds, when I ask him how this deviation had happened. “We got everyone together and had a whole art summit in Austin in 2013. I thought we were all on the same page but I guess at some point we weren't, because I started to hear back from the environment guys that 'this thing doesn't fit with what we're doing.’ The communication wasn't good, but it was also a problem because there wasn't one person in charge of all of that.”

In short, no one person was in a position to spot deviation before it became too severe. This wasted months of work and necessitated months more to correct the problem. Illfonic worked on Star Marine for nearly two years, but production issues like the one above have meant that nothing it worked on has been released, and much of what it did create has been rewritten by CIG.

CrazKanuk

rpmcmurphy said:

I like the bit about Star Marine and how things went wrong. I think it's really interesting to see how these things occur, why they occur, what gets done about them etc and hearing from people directly involved as opposed to those claiming Illfonic did this, Illfonic did that, Illfonic did a poor job blah blah blah. Great informative article in my opinion.

---

The Problem With Contractors

.......

Don't even get me started. If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone in a meeting suggest outsourcing as the solution to resource problems, I'd have enough to buy a bullet for myself. 

What people generally don't understand is that the level of communication required in outsourcing scales at a non-linear rate according to the complexity of the project. Almost to the point where unless Illfonic was in the same office, I wouldn't have even bothered. It was definitely not the best decision, but it's not an uncommon mistake either. 

MaxBacon

CrazKanuk said:
It was definitely not the best decision, but it's not an uncommon mistake either. 

Yeah and unfortunately they had to learn that the hard way, a waste of development resources that could have put SC far ahead today if that wouldn't have happened.

The outsourcing they do with Behavior Interactive is perfectly fine, art assets, maps, etc... But Outsourcing a fundamental core mechanic of the game to another company... 

Phaserlight

Let's see what our anti-hero commander in chief has to say:

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/779302567079735296

Talonsin

MaxBacon said:

You know... people keep telling that it is impossible and they can NOT do it. CIG have on my opinion shown us enough to prove that they are managing to achieve things people have been naysaying about since 2012.

There is only a handful of people who say that.  Most of us are just disappointed in Chris Roberts leadership ability and sad that he is spending 125 million to make a 75 million dollar game.

Phaserlight

Talonsin said:

MaxBacon said:

You know... people keep telling that it is impossible and they can NOT do it. CIG have on my opinion shown us enough to prove that they are managing to achieve things people have been naysaying about since 2012.

There is only a handful of people who say that.  Most of us are just disappointed in Chris Roberts leadership ability and sad that he is spending 125 million to make a 75 million dollar game.

I've been following this project since November 2012.

I kind of understood they had some problems when they passed 10 million after their initial asking price was $500,000, continuing to ratchet up the 'money makers'.  Most conscientious crowdfunders will shut down after blowing past their initial goal.  I've seen this on a personal level.

Chris' goal right out of the gate was 'make as much as possible... worry about the how later'.

Signs were there since December 2012...

And that's enough judgement out of me.

SlyLoK

I raised my eyebrows when toning down the headbob was touted as an amazing groundbreaking feature. Yeah.

Talonsin

Phaserlight said:

Let's see what our anti-hero commander in chief has to say:

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/779302567079735296

Wow, we can not even get halfway through the first page a SC thread without mentioning Derek Smart.

Phaserlight

Talonsin said:

Phaserlight said:

Let's see what our anti-hero commander in chief has to say:

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/779302567079735296

Wow, we can not even get halfway through the first page a SC thread without mentioning Derek Smart.

Does that make me guilty by association? Did you try reading the 778 words?

Getting tired of the witch-hunt from the SC camp.  It's information.  Use it or ignore it.

Erillion

Good read, summarizing the pro's and con's. Not anything new in the article, but presented in a less biased, less-clickbait way than many other articles.

It confirms my own impression that the restructuring under Erin Roberts has greatly halped and improved CIG in the last 1.5 years.


Have fun

azarhal

The article claim the game has been in development for 5 years, except that none of the studios developing the game existed 5 years ago nor was there any crowdfunding money to make it until one year later... If they mean development as "since the moment Chris started to put his idea on paper" than most games spend over 5+ years in development too, if not more. For example, Obsidian Entertainment "soon" to release Tyranny game is based on a game concept that the company first pitched in 2006.

Also, everything that happened to Star Citizen development, I have seen monthly at my workplace for the last 9 years (I make software).

Feature creeps: that's a never ending trend, but we got better at pushing back dates now when stuff get added.

Delays: 50% because of having deadline before even knowing what to do,  50% because of setbacks (missing hardware for tests, delay elsewhere in the production chain, etc). We rarely do overtime (usually only for PR reasons with clients). 

Last minute design change: all the time (and more often then not a few days before the delivery date and sometimes after the delivery date). At some point we required client to sign the design doc so they couldn't come back on it, but it appears they don't care.

Conflicting doc: When we have docs, we usually have more than one version of it that don't say the same thing. This lead QA to open recursive bugs: you fix it to match one doc and QA open a bug to say it should be like the other doc and you fix it to match the other doc and QA open a bug saying it should be like the first one. But "no doc" is worst.

Dealing with the base tech choice: I resume this to the choice you make is always bad, because nothing will ever be customizable the way you want it to be.

Crap outsourcing: I think we rewrote everything they did by now (we stopped that 3 years ago) and only hire on-site contractors now (we still rewrite their stuff all the time).

Multi-office development issues: Somewhat better now that all software development is done in one office, but QA is in a different timezone and this impact productivity a lot.

Internal strife: Conflict of personality, design conflict and multi-office "them vs us" issues are all still very present.

SlyLoK

After reading the article I come to these conclusions.

1. CR has no clue how to oversee a project.
2. Too many cooks in the kitchen.
3. CryEngine. Spending to much rewriting the engine to try and make it fit their ideas.

CrazKanuk

Phaserlight said:

Talonsin said:

MaxBacon said:

You know... people keep telling that it is impossible and they can NOT do it. CIG have on my opinion shown us enough to prove that they are managing to achieve things people have been naysaying about since 2012.

There is only a handful of people who say that.  Most of us are just disappointed in Chris Roberts leadership ability and sad that he is spending 125 million to make a 75 million dollar game.

I've been following this project since November 2012.

I kind of understood they had some problems when they passed 10 million after their initial asking price was $500,000, continuing to ratchet up the 'money makers'.  Most conscientious crowdfunders will shut down after blowing past their initial goal.  I've seen this on a personal level.

Chris' goal right out of the gate was 'make as much as possible... worry about the how later'.

Signs were there since December 2012...

And that's enough judgement out of me.

Maybe it's just recognizing the funding required to do what he wants to do. 

To be completely clear, doing this game with $2 million isn't an impossibility, it just means doing different types of funding. As it stands, he's had enough backer support to fund it completely privately. Elite: Dangerous developer decided to fund by taking the company public. Many other developers take on publishers or investors who will fund the project. However, this type of funding can also kill a vision. The focus changes because investors are interested, exclusively, in their return on investment whereas backers want to do cool shit. So it's not really a surprise that some people believe that CR set unrealistic expectations. It's not the first time, see Freelancer. Also, Freelancer is a great example of how an investor can actually derail the vision.

I actually applaud CR's efforts to push the boundaries. However, there is actually an article linked by DS where he actually acknowledges some of his decisions and confirms them and then he actually goes on to say that he doesn't "get on" (get along) with people who are satisfied with mediocrity. There's something to be said about that in an industry where people continuously complain about the lack of innovation. 

In the same article he also mentions something about feeling much better about where they are now, meaning he was well aware of the challenges they were facing, meaning maybe he isn't as horrible a manager as some believe. I'll admit I actually thought he was a bad manager, but reading some of the stuff he quoted I think I might be swayed slightly. 

MaxBacon

SlyLoK said:

3. CryEngine. Spending to much rewriting the engine to try and make it fit their ideas.

It would far be a different story if they had +100M and hundreds of employees day-1, what is a far from the case, the history behind CIG wasn't particularly easy on them as the funding grown so did the scope, at the same time they were building the company... and adjust their development reality to that was likely where most mistakes were.

At the end of the day they can't do anything else but learn from their mistakes and move forward, as they did and are doing. They are delivering and that is what matters, it might not be as fast as we would want but I don't doubt they have the capacity to get there.

Vrika

Good article.


I think the problem with Star Citizen is the number of hard things they are trying to do: Creating a new dev studio and getting it to work together is hard, making an MMO with so good graphics is hard, making both space combat and 1st person shooter into same game is hard, creating multi-player ships with meaningful content for multiple people in them is hard, creating seamless landing on planets is hard, etc.

Doing something that is hard will always result in problems.

Not limiting your scope and doing everything the hard way means they're going to get extra problems with everything, on top of all the usual development problems. After that it's not about the skill of their managers or workers. It's so hard that the only possible result is major clusterfuck.

With infinite time and infinite money all those hard problems can be solved, one way or another. But it means Star Citizen is much slower and much more expensive to develop, and I for one don't believe Star Citizen will get enough money from their backers.

Erillion

Vrika said:

 and I for one don't believe Star Citizen will get enough money from their backers.

Hmm, if Chris Roberts stands up and says to his backers ... OK, we need another 30 million and then we are finished .... i personally think that the current backers would pitch in and donate the remaining money to ensure that it is finished.

That would be the current 500-600 k paying backers all grabbing another basic Aurora/Mustang account (54 $) and donating it to a friend as a gift.


Have fun

hfztt

Erillion said:

Vrika said:

 and I for one don't believe Star Citizen will get enough money from their backers.

Hmm, if Chris Roberts stands up and says to his backers ... OK, we need another 30 million and then we are finished .... i personally think that the current backers would pitch in and donate the remaining money to ensure that it is finished.

That would be the current 500-600 k paying backers all grabbing another basic Aurora/Mustang account (54 $) and donating it to a friend as a gift.

Sadly, I think you are right.

I do not think they will take kindly to continued nickle and diming after that though, but that is what it will take to keep development running and servers running for this monster.

Anyone who still belive this will be a B2P title are seriously deluding themselfs.

CrazKanuk

hfztt said:

Erillion said:

Vrika said:

 and I for one don't believe Star Citizen will get enough money from their backers.

Hmm, if Chris Roberts stands up and says to his backers ... OK, we need another 30 million and then we are finished .... i personally think that the current backers would pitch in and donate the remaining money to ensure that it is finished.

That would be the current 500-600 k paying backers all grabbing another basic Aurora/Mustang account (54 $) and donating it to a friend as a gift.

Sadly, I think you are right.

I do not think they will take kindly to continued nickle and diming after that though, but that is what it will take to keep development running and servers running for this monster.

Anyone who still belive this will be a B2P title are seriously deluding themselfs.

What makes you say that? The level of pain at the moment is exactly zero. The game has been completely funded by backers, so any box sales or ship sales after release are gravy. They're already in the black. So new box/ship sales following release can be immediately allocated towards creating new DLC which is much less expensive and crazy profitable. 

Vrika

Erillion said:

Vrika said:

 and I for one don't believe Star Citizen will get enough money from their backers.

Hmm, if Chris Roberts stands up and says to his backers ... OK, we need another 30 million and then we are finished .... i personally think that the current backers would pitch in and donate the remaining money to ensure that it is finished.

I think Star Citizen has a good chance of getting more than $200 million crowdfunding money.

I don't think that will be enough to complete the game to the point where enough people would be playing to support further development.

MaxBacon

Vrika said:

I think Star Citizen has a good chance of getting more than $200 million crowdfunding money.

I don't think that will be enough to complete the game to the point where enough people would be playing to support further development.

That's too hard to know currently. Depending on the revenue and popularity...

World of Tanks is generating far reports this year go 35-37M a month! That game alone made from January to April 2016 more money than the entirety of SC's crowdfund during all these years. Well it might just be F2P games able to generate more revenue than B2P.


Who knows how popularity and implementation going to work out for them as they move forward, because it only reached part of the total audience it can, just compare 500K paying backers (pretty much unique copies sold) to Elite Dangerous that had sold way over 1Million unique copies.