Some time back, in this thread, @draw posted a YouTube video about a fascinating game called Star Citizen.
Reviving the subject because their development process and challenges parallel ours in ways that could be useful.
In common:
- Crowd-funded by passionate community
- Feverish anticipation for delivering an unprecedented product
- Product composed of many pieces that must be mostly developed to completion to work together
- Community frustration and disappointment over missed milestones and delays
Take a look at some of these for a taste of the pressure, anticipation, and frustration:
- Star Citizen Delays as a Content Creator
- Star Citizen single-player delayed indefinitely
- 8 months delay is disingenuous
- The fight over Star Citizen’s production delay is getting dirty
- Delayed Again: ‘Star Citizen’ Alpha 3 Now Won’t Hit Until September
- Inside the Troubled Development of Star Citizen
- estimate ~400 days to complete all JIRA tasks
The amount of testing that required for the smallest of tasks is overwhelming.
When milestones are missed, some of the louder voices in the community claim malice or neglect on behalf of CGI, the company behind Star Citizen. CGI has replied by addressing the great divide between community and developers over development process.
Star Citizen has responded by creating several series of weekly shows on YouTube:
-
Bugsmashers- recap of particularly interesting solved bugs for the week and summary of JIRA -
Around the verse- highlights how a particular aspect of the game is developed -
The Loremaker's Guide to the Galaxy- each episode goes deeper into the culture, lore, and history of a particular system in the galaxy -
The Next Great Starship- series competition where amateur developers compete to develop a ship or weapon that will be included in the game -
Calling All Devs- Live Q&A with various developers to learn about how components are developed and how they work
There’s a lot more than that but, in general, each of these pieces of content educate the community about the something that’s very hard to convey: the development process.
One major difference between our projects is that Star Citizen has much greater and on-going funding, which allows them to pay for all the overhead of content creation and community development.
With all that said, CGI has a roadmap, milestones, and regular informative content, but I’m unsure of how to measure the effectiveness.
Misses and delays are inevitable but would people feel better about them with greater detail of development process?