Friday update - Dec. 15, 2012, 5:04 p.m.
"Star Citizen has been nominated for most anticipated game in MMORPG.com’s annual Player’s Choice awards! We’d be very happy if you’d take a moment to vote for us. Let’s win our first award!"
The new forums
"Better late than never: the new forums are online and you can access them here or through the forums tab at the top of the page! The one issue is that you’re going to have to re-add your signatures and avatars… but we finally have the robust, customizable forum system you demanded which allows for proper moderation and community management!"
"We’ve created a simple “prime directive” for forum users that tells you how you should behave, how we’ll punish you when you don’t and what we’re going to do for you in return. We think it’s a fair system that should create a good, positive community. As with all aspects, we’d love your comments. We do believe that most of this is common sense and will become unnecessary as the forums become available only to pledgers and backers(after all, no one wants to pay for a game just to troll a message board) but that it is always good to know where you stand. We reserve the right to amend these rules in the future as the community evolves."
Montreal Update – Behaviour Interactive Partnership
I mentioned in an earlier Comm-Link that we are planning on having the core development of Star Citizen happen in three locations – Los Angeles, Californa, Austin, Texas and Montreal, Canada. There are quite a few reasons why Montreal is interesting – there is a lot of game development talent: Ubisoft, Warner Bros, EA and THQ all have large development studios and games such as the Assassin’s Creed series, Far Cry 2 & 3 and Deus Ex Revolutions have all come out of Montreal. There are a fair amount of developers with CryEngine experience (the Far Cry series is built on a modified version of the original CryEngine and THQ has been working on a couple of unannounced CryEngine projects.) Finally, all your dollars go much further in Montreal than they do in Austin and Los Angeles due to the strong government support for game development and the lower cost of living. This allows us to pack more ships, locations and features in than we could if we just built the game in Los Angeles and Austin.
As part of the year of preparation, research and development I did in building the prototype I was testing out workflow concepts and personnel. Montreal was an area that I knew from making films (which the Canadian and Quebec governments also support strongly), so it was an area I considered right from the start. I weighed several options, from building a studio from scratch to partnering with an established studio to help build out a team. Considering everything else that we need to accomplish with Star Citizen I decided that it was smarter to partner with someone that all ready has an infrastructure and is up and running, much the same way I would contract with a local production service company if I was making a film.
Behaviour Interactive are the biggest independent developer in Montreal, with a great infrastructure and work process. They have worked on over 130 games with some of the biggest publishers in the industry, have a reputation for being on time and budget and have many people that worked on big AAA titles like Assassins Creed or Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft contracted them to help out the recently shipped Far Cry 3.)
Over the last year they contributed some resources on spec to flesh out some of the technical design on the server back end (Behaviour designed, built and maintains Nickelodeon’s kid’s MMO, Monkey Quest, which has over 10 million users) and help build the prototype as a test to see if we could work well together and they could meet the quality standards I want to hit for Star Citizen. If you liked the prototype you’ve already seen some of their work and approved. Because of this I’m happy to announce formally that Behaviour Interactive will be our partner in Montreal, Canada. You can read the complete press release here.
The team in Montreal will be fully integrated with the Star Citizen teams in Los Angeles and Austin, and will be managed and directed by myself and other Star Citizen team leaders. The Montreal team will be made up of a combination of Behaviour employees that will transfer into this new group and new people we hire from the Montreal game scene (so if that are any developers in Montreal that would like to join Star Citizen, please send your resumes to Behaviour!)
This allows us to flesh out the full Star Citizen team sooner and waste less time on building out studio infrastructure so I feel it is a win for everyone. I would like everyone to welcome the Behaviour folks to the team. Over the next year you’ll get to meet them and see what they’re working on in the same manner as the Los Angeles and Austin teams. One of the core tenants of the team DNA that I’m trying to build is a commitment to interaction with the community and we are setting up the ability to film in all three locations. In fact one of our key interview questions is if a potential hire is comfortable interacting with the community occasionally and being on camera!
-Chris
Source: Roberts Space Industries
