Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

That's it, a lot of early access indie games are built using the lessons learned from agile methodology; Factorio recently released a video showcasing the ~6000 tests they have to verify all their complicated systems work as they should, and their velocity is incredible, fixing over 600 bugs in the span of a month (few of which were game-breaking btw, a lot of their bugfixes are fairly trivial).

But Star Citizen has all the hallmarks of too much ambitions, too many people, and poor management. They have over a thousand people working on it and have for a long time now. And that scale isn't the problem - Rockstar did the same with RDR 2 and will likely exceed it with GTA VI - but while the main guy has some games under his belt, they too had problems with development and actually finishing.

> too much ambitions, too many people, and poor management.

The main problem in this case was SC's game director. He was around for nine years and set the scope/goals/roadmap for the game before being abruptly fired 9 months ago and replaced. Through the grape vine I've heard he never provided a long-term vision for the project internally whilst constantly promising new things to the community (ie scope creep).

The new game director, Rich, is well liked within the development team and much of the recent CitizenCon event was spent cutting back scope and providing an actual goal for SC 1.0 to release as.

I think the problem is too much money.

Yes and no. The same problems can exist in any org. If there isn't much money, it does and we don't hear about it. But if you have a lot of money, you can stay on the runway for a long time befoure you run out.

The problem with too much money is that it allows for lazy project management practices.

And at some scale, it's difficult to determine if you are actually making slow progress or deluding yourself and rebuilding the same system for the third time.

Similarly, infinite runway means you can infinitely postpone worrying about stability. "We're still working on features" etc.

money (payment for goods and services) is a good signal that you are doing good. If you don't need to pay attention or the money comes in regardless of the quality of the product, it's easy to go off the rails.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com