In 2013 CIG contracted Illfonic, a third-party studio based in Denver, to build the Star Marine module and the first-person systems needed for Star Citizen. Star Marine was to be a vertical slice (ie, a demo) of Star Citizen’s first-person multiplayer. Much like Arena Commander, it was essentially a multiplayer mini-game – something the backers could play with to get a sense of what CIG was building for the final game. For CIG, the module would act as a test bed for its ideas for first-person.
The first release of Star Marine was to focus around a single map, Gold Horizon. It was a deep-space pirate base that two teams would battle over.
The plan was to build ship and station interiors from environment kits. For this to work, a source explained, “you need to have the same slottable pieces for all different types of art styles. All standard doors, for example, whether they be for a moon base or a mars base, have to share the same dimensions. If you’re building a new environment and new art assets to go with it then you create them as standard, modular pieces so other environments in the same style can be built quickly without needing bespoke assets.”
CIG wanted to use the environment assets Illfonic had created for its Gold Horizon space station level as an environment kit. But when CIG tried to fit the assets into their levels, they found that none of the assets worked with CIG’s kit system; they had all been built to the wrong scale. A source told me that after the studio had worked on the Gold Horizon map for more than a year, CIG asked Illfonic’s artists to remake the whole thing with new metrics to satisfy the Squadron 42 team. “It sucked for the artists,” my source told me.
“I'm always very perplexed by this,” Roberts responds, when I ask him how this deviation had happened. “We got everyone together and had a whole art summit in Austin in 2013. I thought we were all on the same page but I guess at some point we weren't, because I started to hear back from the environment guys that 'this thing doesn't fit with what we're doing.’ The communication wasn't good, but it was also a problem because there wasn't one person in charge of all of that.”
In short, no one person was in a position to spot deviation before it became too severe. This wasted months of work and necessitated months more to correct the problem. Illfonic worked on Star Marine for nearly two years, but production issues like the one above have meant that nothing it worked on has been released, and much of what it did create has been rewritten by CIG.
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