In this week’s Around the Verse, Star Citizen’s Sandi Gardiner and Chris Roberts have a stack of gorgeous environmental pan shots for your to feast your eyes on – that’s because the design team has been working hard on the atmospheric moons. The devs are also focused on scramble races, the UI, props, and a pair of ships.
Meanwhile, if you’re curious about the development process behind the game, check out a new piece from Wccftech; the site’s got an interview with CIG’s Eric Kieron Davis. It’s pretty granular, but the writer hits on a few topics of note to the watchers of the game. For example, at one point they talk about the “technical debt” of a project, the legacy code that can trip up a project, but Davis says Star Citizen’s isn’t really that bad. Davis also addresses employee churn, suggesting it doesn’t affect the studio as much now that it’s grown so much larger.
“In the old days it was pretty dependent on who it was that was leaving,” he says. “If it was a concept artist who was got a job offer to work on the next Iron Man suit, maybe we had another guy who could pick things up pretty quickly, but if it’s an engineer who is deeply embedded in one specific code area, it was harder and we’d take a velocity hit. I think it was more of a problem when we were smaller and everyone was hyper-focused on one area but as we’ve scaled and grown, we have a much greater ability now to shift work around. As we’ve grown the company and are all making careers here and want this to be the place we work for the rest of our lives, we’re really sharing knowledge and the follow the sun development model also helps because we’re all working on multiple components.”
