At this point in the spring of 2012, how many people were on the project that you can remember?
TL;DROnly about five or six people worked on the 2012 vertical-slice demo, not a large team, with outside help from people experienced with the engine tools.
I want to say that there was probably, gosh, I was working with David Haddock a lot. There's probably five or six, honestly. But we also had, because we were working with CryEngine, access to people like Sean Tracy.
He wasn't actually an employee yet. He was moonlighting.
Yeah, exactly. So I had a lot of interactions with these really talented, experienced people with these tools. And so while internally we had a very limited staff, we did have some resources to help get the trailer out the door, obviously.
There's this belief out there, when people talk about how long Star Citizen's been in development, I see it often cited that, oh, they were working on it for a whole year before, or it was 1,100 people back then. No. Five people were working on it for the time period before it got out, and some of them were only hired in that same year. And it wasn't making the game. It was making this demo, this video demo.
Yeah, it was a vertical slice is what we were calling it. We were like, what is the game? And can we create a small section of what that game could potentially be? And we knew that we didn't want it to be an offline render. We knew that we wanted to build everything in-engine, and we wanted the thrusters physically firing, which Chris was working on and coding. And so we just wanted to see, can we really make this thing? And one thing that was very clear after the demo of the trailer is we knew we could. And luckily the fans believed in us too.