I’m getting us over a needed benchmark this week, doing a handoff meeting to somebody, and then coming back in December to jointly work on it with them. At that point all the work should be done and it should be more of giving them a tour of the thing. Everyone knows this is a terrible situation. A lot of things went wrong to get us here.

Edit: Having a coffee right now after fixing an automation thing from another company which attaches to our robot. The guy that company sent was “I dunno what’s wrong with it.” I just want to sit next to my cat, paint minis, and watch Stargate.

Oh you see, this is a project that’s been going on for years, and I started into it six months ago to get it done by 2025. It’s not just a computer thing, but a robot with a lot of both hardware and software work. Naturally last month suddenly a lot of overhauls were made to the design, and since I’ve single handedly installed all of them, no one person except for me is familiar with exactly how everything fits together. The project plan and timeline is “get it done fasterer.” At this point they will throw whatever material resources are needed to me, but we just don’t have the personnel aside from me.

The project management is also not from the same continent as me, so meetings are a painful thing to schedule. The manager has finally come to the US to oversee the last round of acceptance work.

Right now the mechanicals are 99.9% done and I’m interacting remotely with software people to be their onsite hands.

The project manager is flittering around the room.

Literally dealing with that right now. The project manager is on site, and I thought that I’d finally have some backup on putting together this monster project. He’s so far been asking a lot of questions legitimately trying to wrap his head around what he’s seeing.

I’m the most (only) experienced person on the project and I don’t like it.

I suppose I should have elaborated.

Chris Roberts begin developing Freelancer with a similar aspiration of total simulation that Star Citizen now promises.

Freelancer repeatedly overshot development timelines and Roberts was running out of money. He had to go to Microsoft for cash. Microsoft gave money to develop Freelancer in exchange for Roberts being essentially demoted to a consultant, and Microsoft taking charge. Microsoft immediately began cutting features and mechanics to turn Freelancer from an amorphous project into a shippable game.

If you know that, then seeing Roberts in charge of a new game, with no oversight and essentially infinite development time, the resulting quantum superposition state of Star Citizen’s release should not be surprising.

No, there’s really no excusing this game’s development. If anything, Robert’s should have learned from Freelancer to have a tight core product that’s actually shippable.

At this point Internet nerds are locked into throwing money at Star Citizen’s development, making it the closest thing humanity has achieved to a perpetual motion machine.

I’ve been part of some amateur game dev projects and SC has the vibe of an amateur project where the devs are constantly focusing on whatever catches their fancy at the moment, going back and tinkering with things they’ve already made, and sort of aimlessly scope creeping. There’s nobody to strongarm them into writing, much less following a game design document.

All of that is intuitive to me to understand.

Then there is “the dream” that is being sold to people who want this type of game. That level of very specific fandom is also easy to understand, at least from a distance. People get super into all kinds of games and spend outsized amounts of money and time.

Star Citizen is like the perfect storm of these elements.