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Scenes from a visit to the offices of the parent company of RSI Cloud Imperium around 2014. Like any good game development office, Star Wars loot was all over the place.
Lee Hutchinson
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Interrupting and annoying artists who work with my flash.
Lee Hutchinson
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Michael Holcomb, working hard making more spaceships on the Internet. Concentration is evident on all the faces of the artists.
Lee Hutchinson
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Audio director Martin Galway in hiding.
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This stark office is where Chris Roberts camps when he is in town.
Lee Hutchinson
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The Cloud Imperium conference room is fully equipped with all kinds of elegant electronic entertainment …
Lee Hutchinson
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… and here, in case you’re wondering, are the games that Cloud Imperium people are playing while making Star Citizen.
Lee Hutchinson
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Joysticks, joysticks, so many joysticks! Being a suitable space combat simulator, Star Citizen It is being designed to work well with advanced peripherals like sticks and throttles rather than just mice and gamepads.
Lee Hutchinson
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Beautifully rendered concept art posters adorn the hallways. Each of the ships in the game has its own fictional manufacturer and its own in-game tradition. On the left are Musashi’s industrial freelancers; On the right is one of the 300 series fighters.
Lee Hutchinson
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I’m not sure which ships are on the left, but on the right is another 300 series.
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Banu’s friends: allies of humanity, interstellar merchants and “bloodhounds of the culture of the universe”.
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The Cloud Imperium offices have a sizeable balcony that faces central Texas, west of Austin. Not in the photo: the giant pool table.
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No office in Texas would be complete without a kegerator.
Lee Hutchinson
Almost eight years have passed since Star Citizen launched its first Kickstarter. At this point, its sponsors, who have given more than $ 306 million to the game’s development, should be used to the endless series of delays for its final release (while holding on to an updated but highly incomplete alpha version). Sponsors must also summon deep reserves of patience to Squad 42, the story derived from a player who was first promised for a release in 2015.
Now, however, Star Citizen faces apparent delays in planned updates to the system you use to publicly track development updates.
This latest saga began in March, when developer Roberts Space Industries admitted in a forum post that their current public roadmap for Squad 42 development “did not reflect [the] progress “that was being made in the game.
“We have discovered that the format in which we have tried to visualize our progress linearly does not coincide with the approach we are taking in developing Squad 42“RSI wrote.” Over time, we have found that the roadmap as presented does not and cannot accurately depict development in a chapter-based game based on AAA stories like SQ42“
In summary, RSI said the current roadmap was too ugly and uninformative for its standards. So RSI promised that “I would go back to the proverbial drawing board to explore different [roadmap] approaches to Squad 42“That included potential options that” would use our internal speed tracking process to visualize our progress, “linking directly to RSI’s internal project scheduling software.
Now that we are approaching five months from that announcement, some Star Citizen Community members have been justifiably asking what happened to the promised revision of the roadmap. RSI responded to those concerns Tuesday with a post promising that the roadmap revision “is still in progress … Although not entirely ready, it is currently the top priority on the web team’s current projects.”
That kind of language may sound strangely familiar to anyone who has followed RSI’s high and slow development promises. However, don’t worry; RSI now offers a roadmap for the launch of its revolutionary new roadmap:
In the immediate future, we plan to deliver the following communications:
1. Give an explanation of the objectives of our new Roadmap and what to expect from it
2. Shows a rough model of the new proposed Roadmap
3. Share a version of the Work in Progress Roadmap for at least one of our core teams
4. And finally, the transition to this new RoadmapWe will address them in the order above, and we will probably need a few weeks between steps, so I don’t want to create the impression that this is happening overnight. But we should announce step 1 very soon if my Thursday meeting on this is as good as I think it will be.
And much like Squad 42 In itself, RSI promises that the new roadmap will be worth the wait. “Believe me when I say that I am personally eager to let you know,” writes Community Manager Tyler Witkin. “We take the time to explore options on how we could better represent our progress, and I think we are getting closer to landing in a pretty good place … This new roadmap will dramatically change the way you track development progress for both Squad 42 and Star Citizen [emphasis added]”
The original Star Citizen Reveal a video that captivated the Internet in 2012.
After waiting almost eight years and counting Star Citizen, here at Ars we can’t wait for this exciting new development to “drastically change how [we] follow development progress. “However, failing that, we look forward to an update providing more details on the development of the new development roadmap, which we hope will arrive in a few months.
