Game Design (but really, how Agile software development works)

[Dojo]

This video is for the curious. Just today (like every day) we were discussing "why can't ED just..." or "Why does this take so long..."

This video is about Star Citizen, quite possibly the most ambitious game development ever attempted. The video describes the complexity of the development process, and how seemingly small tasks have big implications.

To anyone not versed in technical 'mumbo jumbo', you don't really need to speak it to follow. You'll still gain an appreciation, I think, for the complexity in solving problems and predicting features development time. The video is for anyone who's interested in why game development, even with the best intentions, is difficult to predict.

To anyone who works in software development within Agile, many of the concepts (sprints, epics, JIRA) will be very familiar to you.

The video was produced as Star Citizen moves into its most ambitious phase, the planetary landing tech, to be released in June.

[Ragtop]

Its remarkable how much work goes into something we all use to avoid doing work :P

Really though, I have enormous respect for those development teams.

[Gliptal]

This still does not excuse ED's lack of focus and terrible PR.

Star Citizen devs have a weekly updated and in-depth blog, take constant direct feedback from their users, and provide with a clear sense of direction and purpose in their work. Whether ED does that internally we do not know, but what they let their userbase know instead is that they lack focus, are working on an old buggy framework, and have little interest in listening to their users.

I'm not expecting a working FLIR to roll-in in a year time, but damn it after years of the same easily solvable bugs being in the sim they could very well fix some of them. And I say "easily solvable" because there are mods that involve few line changes that do so.

Not to mention how they're constantly breaking stuff on every update, feautures that are essential for their paid content to work. And if this is acceptable in OA or OB, it is not in stable. The fact that they can break basic triggers like "PUSH AI TASK" from one update to the next means they have little to no automated testing in place.

The difficulties of developing a large product aren't excuses for some of their practices, their slowness, and the way they handle their userbase.

[Dojo]

The video wasn't meant to provide an excuse for ED, but insight for people curious about the development process. It's worth noting, I made my first kickstarter contribution to Star Citizen in November 2012. There's still no game released. There are scores of jaded Star Citizen supporters who make the complaints you've seen on the ED boards look like praise by comparison. In fact, there have been law suits filed against the developer, and the public charges of sexism, racism, nepotism make ED's problems look like a hang nail.

There's even a rival developer, who has dedicated money and the last 2 years of his Twitter account to fighting this game. In simple terms: it's butt fuck insane. But that's what happens when massive initiatives ($150MM initiative so far) challenge the status quo.

Another point worth noting, is that the video you watched, and the weekly videos you allude to, are paid for. That logo you see "brought to you by subscribers" is a nod to that. "Subscribers" pay $10 or $20 per month, depending on their tier, for those videos to be produced. "Subscriptions" do not go into the money pool to pay for or fund the game. Yeah. I have contributed a lot to this game because I wholeheartedly believe in it, but I'm not a subscriber. I'm pretty sure if ANY game developer, let alone ED, thought they could get an additional $$120/$240 per year per subscriber for content updates, you'd have ALL game developers producing weekly videos.

ED is horrible at communication in both directions, giving and receiving. But here is a developer in Cloud Imperium Games who is head and shoulders above anything we've ever seen in terms of taking in feedback and updating its player base (like I LITERALLY know what all of their developers are working on THIS week, they're insanely communicative! They publicize their production schedule!), and they still have to deal with more PR challenges than anything I've ever seen.