Actually, I think I will bring Standoff into the discussion, Dund
. It's kind of an elephant in the middle of the room that nobody really wants to talk about - the race between Standoff and Saga. I think it's hugely important in explaining why Saga's still being worked on - and also, it's very important to explain that this wasn't a one-sided race. It wasn't Saga being obnoxious or arrogant - both sides really wanted to win, and I daresay that between me and Eder, the Standoff team definitely out-egoed the Saga guys.
It all started back in 2004, when winning the CIC's Fan Project of the Year award seemed like a matter of honor to us. UE had won it three years in a row, then Standoff co-won it in 2003... with Saga! The idea of Saga winning the 2004 award horrified us. And things weren't looking good. We were a couple of months away from completing our Prologue, and Saga had been making all kinds of news with their own Prologue campaign. More than us.
Admittedly, I always got the impression that Saga blatantly stole the idea of a separate Prologue release from us. We can see now, looking back, that episodic releases are not Saga's modus operandi, so releasing the Prologue seems inexplicable otherwise. But hey, maybe that's my arrogance talking.
Still, the point is - we really, really wanted to win that award, and we were worried that any day, Saga would announce a release date and win the award on the strength of that alone. It really, really felt like Saga would release either before the end of the year, or at the start of 2005. Eder and I talked about it for a bit, then we looked at our Prologue, what still needed to be done... and decided to risk everything. We decided to announce a release date that we
thought we could make, but were really, really uncertain about. It was a desperate decision, and I can't see how it can be attributed to anything other than our crazy egos... but amazingly enough, it worked, and amazingly enough, it was actually a good thing for the community because we did release something.
Standoff didn't just win Fan Project of the Year - Standoff managed to make a release, on schedule. It wasn't easy, and we had problems right until the end, but we made it. Unfortunately, I get the impression that we also blew Saga out of the race at that point - with first place no longer being an option, it seems the Saga guys decided to concentrate on quality (either that, or they were still having lots of teething problems and were really good at not letting it show), and were no longer in a hurry.
We, meanwhile, were burning ahead with Episode Two. Because it was relatively the smallest episode, and also because we already had a lot of work done for it while working on the Prologue, we were able to comfortably release it in September 2005. Again, this was partially driven by the urge to keep winning that darned award - if we didn't have a 2005 release and Saga did (which seemed absolutely certain - I mean, not knowing what the Saga guys were up to, we were convinced they were right behind us), who knows how things would go?
So, we released Episode Two, and amazingly, managed to follow on with Episode Three in early 2006 (it goes without saying, this had been supposed to be a Christmas release, just like the Prologue). And Saga's Prologue still wasn't showing. It was obvious the Saga guys were no longer competing with us, and even after they did finally release their Prologue, we just didn't worry about them at all (this, by the way, was bad for us: that's one of the reasons why there was such a long gap between the last couple of episodes).
Now, I suspect that with every release of ours, the Saga guys saw less point in trying to release quickly, and more point in focussing on scope and quality. I think that's why they're still developing in 2012, with Standoff long-finished. And I very, very strongly praise them for it. Had Saga released their Prologue first, we'd probably still have tried to catch up, releasing our Prologue and trying to release the next episode before their main release - but had Saga released their Prologue and then followed up with a second episode before we could release anything, I would stop trying to catch up, and I would concentrate on trying to out-do them, to show that in the end, the wait was worth it. Of course, it didn't help that when they did finally release their Prologue, the reception was not that positive. They saw that there was still a lot they needed to do to make Saga feel more like a Wing Commander rather than a Freespace title.
And I think that with Saga, the wait for their final release really will be worth it. The impression I get is that they really took to heart the criticism from the Prologue. I also get the impression that they went overboard with expanding the scope and quality of their project, and that's what cost them so much time - Saga guys, just don't let me be wrong on this one
.
One final note - which can help explain both Saga's and Standoff's long development times. Time is your enemy when you're making a fan project. Time means new ideas and new possibilities. When PopsiclePete came up with the online scoreboard, towards the end of Episode Three (it was Three, right? I don't remember)... I was furious. The idea is fantastic, of course - I hated having it in Standoff. I was convinced the game would take longer because of it, and hey - I was right (in case somebody forgot: Standoff is not finished. We still have a patch to do that adds online scoreboard support to two final sim missions!). But we also could not just throw Pete's idea away - he'd spent a lot of time tinkering with it, and had we decided not to use it, he probably would have lost any kind of energy to work on the project. This happens time and again during development - somebody comes up with a new idea, everybody loves it, and you - being in charge - just wish you could have released the darn thing a week before this new idea came up. But in the end, Standoff is so much better for this, and Saga will be as well - and who cares if it's a couple of months or years later than planned?
To summarise: I don't think there was anything particularly obnoxious about what Saga was doing. I think they were just eager to show what they could do and win praise from the community - like us. It's only now, when I look back at this race being older by almost a decade that I am amazed both by how juvenile this kind of competition feels, and... by how incredibly useful it is as a motivator, and how much slower things go when that motivator is removed.
Squealer's role in Standoff is incomplete because he was voicing him - it's one of the few cases where we actually had to make cuts to the game). Heck, is Lynx and Starman around still? And there surely must have been others, just as we had a few losses on the Standoff team over the years. But this goes back to Chris' point - nobody ever heard about how this was affecting Saga.
