Cloud Imperium Games hosted an AMA on its official forums to celebrate the anniversary of the beginning of the Star Citizen project.
Founder and CEO Chris Roberts, live director Todd Papy, and persistent universe game director Tony Zurovec answered a variety of questions about the present and future of the growing game and its single-player campaign Squadron 42, which just received an update to alpha 3.11.
Below you can check out what they shared.
Chris Roberts
About he way and pace of new information reveals on Squadron 42’s development.
“Tomorrow we’ll be launching the inaugural episode of the “The Briefing Room” a show focused just on Squadron 42, which we are planning to do every quarter (3 months) until Squadron 42 releases, where we will address some of this.
We haven’t been happy with how effectively we’ve been showing progress on Squadron 42, as we felt the previous format didn’t do a good job of all in communicating just how much work is going on. The new roadmap format which we’ve been working towards and on since we announced we would be changing it up will do a much better job in show what people are working on at any given time as opposed to just focusing on deliverable features. I briefly discussed our thinking here.
Squadron 42 is a tricky project to communicate on as we really don’t want to give the experience and story away which can make updating on certain content or features challenging.
We DO give regular updates on Squadron 42, even though we haven’t updated the Squadron 42 Roadmap since the beginning of this year with the monthly reports. The most recent one was earlier this week. We also occasionally have content or feature updates on things that will be in Squadron, as we did with the new Vanduul ships in the Inside Star Citizen Episode: Enemy Mine
We also communicate way more than any other developer or publisher than I am aware of in terms of work and progress on Star Citizen, which is the game “The Pledge” was referring to; We have multiple video shows per week, lore updates, developers regularly engage in the forums, have a weekly newsletter and well as regular monthly reports.
I don’t think the issue is whether we treat our community with respect, as that is core tenet of the entire company, or lack of communication; it’s different people want communication in different forms; some want in depth long talky videos, some want just the sizzle videos with pretty graphics. Some people want huge technical treatises on server meshing and others just want the ELI5 version and finally a lot of people just want to know when a feature or the game will be done.
And I think that’s the crux of the issue; it’s impossible to please all the people all the time, and with a project as complicated as Star Citizen or even Squadron 42 it’s impossible to have iron clad dates due to the huge amount of ongoing R&D.
So yes, I do feel like we have been meeting “The Pledge”.
Does that mean we can’t improve?
No, we can always improve, and if you follow CIG and Star Citizen close enough you will notice that we are always trying new things and tweaking existing processes both in our development approach and structure in how we communicate and share information with all of you. The new Roadmap will be part of this, as will the Briefing Room.”
About death in-game and what has changed since the publishing of “Death of a Spaceman.”
“Later this month there is going to be a Calling All Devs episode on “Death of a Spaceman” with myself and Richard Tyer, Core Gameplay Director (which includes the Actor teams), where we’ll go into the current plans, which you’ start to see the results of mid next year as we begin to bring in Medical gameplay. So watch for that as we’ll go into the current design which is ready for implementation.”
About base building.
“We have some pretty exciting plans on the base building / player settlement front. One of the fall outs of iCache, which we’ve been working on for full persistence of state and location of all dynamic objects in the universe of Star Citizen, is that recording and restoring a building you’ve just constructed is really no different to remembering where you dropped your coffee cup on some distant planet, or which shelf you placed it on in your hab.
Basically, iCache will enable us to allow all of you to settle the stars!
When we first came up with the concept of player built outposts and land claims iCache hadn’t been technically designed, but now we have a system that will have a much higher degree of fidelity in remembering where each building or component is and what state it is in. So rather than just dropping down a singular Outpost, you’ll be able to place down various structures and connect them to things like power generators, turrets, resource collectors, hydroponic domes and so on.
In parallel with this we’ve been working on tools to build settlements or homestead both for our artists / designers (more of a RTS god like view) and players (a first person view).
With this we’ve been rethinking how the Pioneer will work to make her more flexible rather than just spitting out a pre-fabricated outpost we want her to me more of a mobile fabrication facility that would be near your building site. With a Pioneer you’ll be able build these structures without having to ship in the component parts as long as you have a supply of raw materials. You don’t need a Pioneer to build a homestead but if you want to build a decent settlement, or you want to build something relatively quickly as opposed to having to fly in prefabricated components from major landing zones you will want to have a Pioneer, or have a friend or someone that is willing to lend their services to you.
We’re very excited about the gameplay that all of this will provide and can’t wait to see what kind of player settlements sprout up over the huge amount of land area the game has. We will need iCache in and working well before we will see this in the game, so expect to see some updates on this later next year.”
Todd Papy
“First steps are building out the player functionality to those roles (Captain, Engineer, etc) similar to pilots and turret gunners. We currently have some of those AI functions, like flying the ship, but we would still need to build the “glue” for AI, like what they do off duty. The capt/owner of the ship will need a way to set what roles he wants the NPCs to do. The Capt will also need a way to interface with the AI to tell them what they want them to do, like fly to a set location or attack a certain target.
We are still planning to allow players to take remote control of the NPCs.”
About the evolution of the process to create new star systems in the game.
“We are not ready to go full bore on all of the systems. We are building up the tools, knowledge, and people power to be able to deliver the systems quicker.
Can’t talk about tools? That is what allows us to build faster and faster as they get refined! That is how we have adjusted building a moon in year to building one in 2 weeks. We have the same goals for Space stations.
A lot of time and work goes into building up the asset packs. Once we have the assets built we can put locations and planets together fairly quick. Putting gameplay hooks into the locations will take time to place and make locations feel special. Obviously the quality and detail level of the solar systems that were initially planned in the very beginning of crowd funding has drastically changed over production of SC. Once we realized the detail level that we could go into with the planets and the landing zones, we wanted to push the limit of fidelity. Comparing SC to the Privateer/Freelancer systems, you are getting exponential amount of gameplay and detail on each planet and moon.
We are trying to build up the team to deliver solar systems in one drop vs the iterative approach that we are currently doing in Stanton.”