Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Pillar Talk Pt. (4)2

Yeah, it's been quite a way in the making. I know that we said last year we would have a roadmap, but it's taken a lot. Well, essentially the team themselves did not feel comfortable sharing the roadmap earlier this year because they wanted to do enough work to validate all the remaining tasks, and not just at a high level. This is having the team themselves, so the various groups, down to the leads and the team members, look at the tasks, break them down, give estimates on the tasks. So it was a lot of bottom-up working to end up with the roadmap we have now. So it's taken a fair amount of time. It became more complex because we also have Star Citizen to consider. So some of the tasks are the same between Star Citizen and Squadron. Some of the tasks are not. Some of the tasks are subsets. Some of the tasks are supersets. So we had to get all that worked in our system because the roadmap is a full reflection of our internal JIRA task tracking system.

I think I said at CitizenCon that in terms of Squadron, we've been working on this for quite a long time. We're definitely on the downhill slope now. We're publishing this. We're showing a six-quarter schedule where by the end of '19, we'll have pretty much all our features done. And then in Q1 of '20, we're doing optimization and it's the alpha phase and polishing and hardening phase and finishing the levels, the chapters. And Q2 would be the beta phase where it's mostly just bug testing and continued polishing.

So I should keep my time free next summer?

Yeah, you should. But anyway, that's our time horizon that we've been working on. And it's a lot of work, but on a caveat basis, it's similar to what we do on the PU. So some of these tasks may take longer than we have estimated; there may be some unforeseen problems. I will say that the uncertainty, the R&D technology aspects are much less of an issue or risk now on Squadron because the biggest remaining one was really object container streaming. We've got mostly that sorted on the PU, Star Citizen side. We still have a little bit because some of the server-side technology for object container streaming is needed for Squadron 42, because Squadron 42 is basically a server and a client all together. But once that's online, we'll be able to stream this really high-detailed world and keep the frame rates up, which is really important.

Don't beat around the bush on the AI there. The AI is probably the biggest, I would say, remaining unknown or risk. Partly because we're going for a really high level of AI. We've been spending a lot of time building the building blocks and base stuff, so people aren't really appreciating the potential of what the AI can do. Some of the AI you see in the PU leaves a lot to be... Some of the flight AI, we've been developing that with the new IFCS, which isn't yet in the PU, but will be in the 3.5 release. If I was going to put my finger on one thing that would be a risk on the schedule, it would be us executing all the AI, mostly because at the moment we have, I think, about four AI programmers and we need probably another three to four AI programmers to really feel like we've got it covered.

If there's anyone on an AI front, we are looking for AI programmers or gameplay programmers that are interested in AI. And we're looking to repurpose some of our internal engineers into the AI side because that's what we see as the big risk on Squadron. So that would essentially be the risk, and then the other risk would just be the amount of time it takes to get all the content in and polish it up.

Our goal, and that's why we have a whole bunch of optimization tasks at the end, but our goal is to make the game itself run pretty buttery smooth, so the objective would be to try to have gameplay that is at least 30 but definitely closer to 60 frames a second. 60 is our goal. And I think we have a good shot at doing that because in a single-player game like Squadron you don't have all the issues of multiplayer that we have in the PU, and as people have been seeing, we've been getting really nice frame rates in the PU, and that's with 50 other players and the issues you have with networking and the processing that you have up on the server. So I think the performance of the game in Squadron will be a really nice, smooth, fluid experience, and that is definitely our goal.

It's always a delicate balance to share the stuff we're working on and then not share things that will give away the story. So for instance, on the chapters we don't have chapter descriptions because it would definitely give the story away. So sorry if they're a bit generic. The one thing I would say is the roadmap itself is set up slightly different than the one for Star Citizen slash the PU because we have two parts to it. One more traditional bit, which is the feature part, which is set up a lot more like you've seen on the PU one, where it's laid out per quarter: the various tasks, the engineering tasks, the asset tasks, like if we're making a character or a spaceship or a weapon or a prop or something like that. So you can see how those stack up like you do on the PU one. But then on top of that, because Squadron 42 is a narrative story game, it's got these different what we call chapters. And a chapter is really the equivalent of a collection of, say, missions that you would have had back in, say, Wing Commander's days. But you can start on a ship, you can fly, you can be given a mission, land on another ship or land on a location, get involved in FPS combat, get back in your ship, go somewhere else, get in a dogfight, then go and land on another area, get involved in FPS combat, get back in your ship, come back to your home ship, land, and then talk and catch up with everyone on the crew. And that's an example of, say, a chapter that would be within the whole. And some of them are bigger than other ones. Some are pretty epic, some are a little more contained and smaller. And those are tracked on the overview page that we have on the roadmap where you can go and see where they are at the various levels, whether we're still in the white box level.

It will track the level where you are, like white box, white box playable, grey box, full production, polish, which is when everything's in, but we're just polishing and hardening the level. And so you'll be able to track where those are, and the combination of getting to the end there where we're in the polish phase and getting the features done is when the game is basically in beta.

OK, so in finalizing everything we need to get done for Squadron, there's a lot of various, say, actor features or ship features that we need to say, OK, this is going to happen. So things like vaulting, mantling, sliding, swimming, they're all things that we say, OK, yes, we'll have an aspect that you could use some of this in Squadron, so it has to be working. So we had to make sure that, most of this stuff was already on the backlog, but we hadn't fully broken it down or scoped it fully, that people felt comfortable putting a stake in the ground and showing it in the PU roadmap. But we had to do that for Squadron, so now that we've done the work for Squadron, they'll reflect across into the PU roadmap. So a bunch of the features you'll see in the Squadron roadmap will also now reflect across into the PU roadmap, because obviously things that you do with your character or things you do with spaceships, a lot of it is consistent across both games. So the work that we did for Squadron really will help give even more detailed definitions of the PU roadmap.

Well, we sent out a letter to all you guys and it's on our corporate website, but we've taken on an investment that I think is going to really secure our independence. I think you guys have known, I've said from the beginning of the campaign, that all the money that we've been bringing in on crowdfunding is going towards Star Citizen, is going towards Squadron 42, is going towards development. And we've been upholding that side of the bargain, and that is something I feel really strongly about. But of course, as an ongoing business, we have some other needs, like, for instance...

Marketing.

Yeah. Well, Squadron 42, we're now on the downhill ramp. We're 18 months away, looking like, from when we have to be ready to release it. And as you tell me all the time, you have to start doing a lot, start the preparation and planning and booking and all the rest of the stuff for the marketing long before.

Yes, I have actually had this plan for a very long time and it has shifted and shifted and shifted. And finally, I feel like we might have an actual plan that I can execute.

The other aspect is being able to do that properly, being able to fund it without having to go to someone. There's a lot of other people in the crowdfunding world anyway that have raised their money, made the game, and then partnered with someone like a publisher to release the game in a wider format, but we don't want to do that. I value the independence. We've been able to have the independence because of all you guys. We really appreciate it. And so for us, it was really important to be able to control our own destiny. And this is really going to enable us to do that and also have all the money that comes in on the game front, the crowdfunding, go to the development. I never wanted to take any of that money and spend it on ads that we would buy in places. So this for me is the best of both worlds. It gets great independence. We have security, more chests. We can do various things as well as build the best damn space sim out there. So there you go. Happy about it.