What signs do you look for indicating feature creep has begun to infiltrate into the production of a game? What specifically have you done to ensure that doesn't happen in Star Citizen? Finally, have you developed a place for interesting concepts/ideas that would be considered feature creep now, but could be exciting additions after SC is officially released? Have any of these ideas already been given a green light for post release creation?asked by AragornBH

It's what we have a backlog for.

Yes. So can I backwards forwards on your questions. Yes, absolutely, right? We have a backlog of everything. Everything that's come up in any meeting we try to capture. We have this massive, as much as we possibly could...

Sky's the limit ideas.

Sky's the limit. Those blue sky ideas, scope. Just go to town. You always want to encourage folks to get that out of their head. It gets excited, "Well what if it could do this, and this, and this." We've all done this, growing up as kids with our... we make things up when we play. You know we all do this, we have imagination. So we do encourage that, we want that to happen. And then we capture that in the backlog and then we take that backlog and that's when we would filter out future sprints or future milestones or future deliverables, whatever word you want to use. For us it's future releases. When we come up with a patch, we've got a few patch plans coming up and what we'd like to come out in that patch. So we definitely do this, frequently, all the time. What have we done to ensure on Star Citizen? That's a good question. Because we're doing something new. We've got a lot of great backers and subscribers that are helping us make this. And we want to do something really cool and we want to do something really big. And something unique.

No shortage of ideas.

And no shortage of ideas. So we are constantly as producers working with this blue sky idea and then trying to put it in reality. So we can actually get something out for us all to play and have fun with. This is a challenge. This is a real challenge for us. And we're every day, I mean today, we had meetings about things that we're like, "Oh that's a great idea, but it's out of scope." How can we still get this out and then maybe make version two or three or four of it. I think I saw this on one of the questions I don't think we're answering today was, "How do you say okay we're done we got a thing out we want to play it and now we'll iterate on it." And you'll see this with people that sell their games for consoles and then you go to play it and there's a 500mb patch immediately. That was the same thing, they had to get it out, they went gold master, they got out the product. And they're like, "But we got all this other stuff we wanted to fix or get out there." And I think that's kind of just the way now with this constant downloading, streamable world we live in. It's actually a reality without impeding our player base or our wonderful fans or our wonderful folks that are playing our game. So we're balancing that. We're always trying to balance that. So how are we ensuring it? By just looking at the schedules, the realisticness of our schedules and nature of our dates. How to get things out quickly and make sure people are having fun with this. And then we try to be realistic in every meeting we go to. Every time we bring it up we always are the reminder like, "Hey guys we're still trying to shoot to get this done Friday. What do we need to do to do that?"

A lot of times producers have to be the bad guy that just says, "No. We can't do this for now. Maybe later, but right now. No."

Yeah and a lot of times people understand, they'll work with us on that. We'll raise it up as a red flag again like I said before and usually people are like, "Okay, okay you're right. We can't, that's not realistic without working 24/7." Which as much as we all want to do this because we love this project. It's not physically or humanly possible.

And you hate curbing... brilliant suggestions. Especially when you have a lot of visionaries like Chris, Ben, Dan, everybody who contributes to the design of this game. You have such a collection of brilliant designers and ideas that it's really hard to say, "No we can't do this one right now. Let's do it later." Because you want to incorporate them all because like the designers, we want to see this thing happen.

Yeah, that's right. And to answer your question about do we already have a green light for post. Yeah, we have an idea of.. you know we want to release this stuff at this time frame. But we still want to put this other stuff in. Based on what we did in our initial kickstarter versus what we're still fundraising. We're looking at okay how can we continue to release those past our original schedule or roadmap.

Yeah we've got some long term stuff roadmapped out.

There you go.

And those roadmaps will change, probably each patch. But we still try to keep it a long term vision.

That's right, the best we can.

Yep.

Yeah.