"Unlike with a publisher, you can't pull the wool over their eyes because it's the real people who are going to be playing it," Roberts noted. This process has another important difference with the classic development process. ![]() That sort of thing is really useful early in the process if you make the wrong guess you could waste man-months." What happens with that is we focus more resources on exploration it's what 60, 70 percent of people want to do. I thought it would be mercenary, or fighting, or trading. We polled quite a few times what people wanted to be doing, and explorer was the number one choice, which I did not think would be the case. "Surveys where you get tens of thousands of people give you a much better idea of what people want. "We've gotten feedback from our community that's made it a better game, even at this early stage," Roberts noted. The engagement with the community has already improved the game. Part of the idea is to break down the overall project, and fortunately it has a lot of discrete aspects - dogfighting in space can be fairly discrete - so you break it up and then say we'll release this on this day and the team has to focus on that." Normally you're not that focused in the beginning until you get to the last year and then you're running around like a madman. "When you have shorter development times it focuses you. "The typical way, even on an MMO, was 'OK, we're going to work on this MMO for four years, now we're going to do a closed beta' and you've got all these systems that come online and all these problems that start to sprout up. Roberts believes this process will result in a better game on a shorter time frame. We don't even have a campaign going, we're not even selling new ships or anything, and we don't have a game" Chris Roberts "We generated $800,000 in February alone, which is crazy. We don't even have a campaign going, we're not even selling new ships or anything, and we don't have a game." We generated $800,000 in February alone, which is crazy. They've backed me way more than I thought they were going to back me, and we still get new people every month. "I have this community that's been incredible. "The thing I find really fascinating is that my mindset's completely changed," Roberts explained. This non-traditional schedule is based on looking at what the players would like to get, and that's something Roberts is passionate about. Even the current people will probably want to create a ship, create a weapon, and that will generate more revenue." By that point we've got opportunities to bring new people in, which generates more revenue. You'll be able to customize your ship, put weapons on it. We'll test the back-end server infrastructure for how many people we can get in one area, the tolerance on latency and all that stuff. "There won't be any persistent universe, there won't be any single-player story, but it's really for us to balance combat, the weapons, and the ships. "At the end of December we're going to have the Dogfighting module, which is taking the ship that you've backed into a deathmatch with other players or AI," said Roberts. ![]() The next release scheduled is much more active than the Hangar module. We'll probably have some of the customization options ready by then, so people can actually see all this stuff they've bought, which would be really cool." You walk into your hangar and look around the ships you've backed, get into the ship and walk inside it, and you'll even be able to invite some of your friends to your hangar. A good example is in August, for Gamescom and PAX Prime, we're going to release the Hangar module, which essentially is in-engine. "The way I'm thinking of doing it is the game's two years out, but we're planning to release parts of the ultimate game early. "The engine is primed, and in the next couple of months we're going to start sharing more gameplay videos," Roberts said. Instead, the team is working on what Roberts calls "an iterative release plan." The development plan for the game does not follow the classic structure, where the effort is bent towards creating an alpha with all the parts of the game working after a year or more of development. "We've got a really good core team together, and we're getting our pipelines up and running," Roberts said. Several months into the process, the game remains on schedule. GamesIndustry International sat down with Roberts at GDC for an exclusive interview to find out how the game is progressing, what Roberts has learned so far, and what lies ahead. ![]() Chris Roberts' Star Citizen game has raised over $8.6 million so far, and fans continue to jump in even though the game is more than a year away.
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