Development information are listed in this page.
General Information
Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are produced in a distributed development process by Cloud Imperium Games and Foundry 42 with studios in Austin, Frankfurt, Santa Monica and Wilmslow, in cooperation with Behaviour Interactive and Illfonic. The game's release date has never been officially advertised. The games utilize the artificial intelligence system Kythera, developed by Moon Collider. Additional partners that are or have been working on the project include CGBot, Rmory, The Imaginarium Studios, Turbulent, Virtuos, voidALPHA and Wyrmbyte. The developers also exchange knowledge and technology with Warhorse Studios, the creators of Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
The development of the game started in 2011 with building a demo on a modified version of the CryEngine 3 game engine, later updated to the 4th generation. Star Citizen will support AMD's Mantle graphics API. Star Citizen is being developed using a modular approach, with the first module (dubbed the "Hangar Module") released August 29, 2013 in order to coincide with the game's appearance at the 2013 Gamescom trade fair.
The initial alpha release of the Hangar Module allows backers of the project to explore their virtual ships from a 1st person perspective. Subsequent updates to the Hangar Module will include the ability to add upgrades and modifications to players' ships and allow players to invite friends to their hangar. The module system is intended to be iterative in nature, with updated version of modules being released as and when additional functionality and content are finalized.
The second module was released on June 4, 2014. It was officially named Arena Commander and allows backers to playtest the ship combat and racing portion of the game against other players or AI opponents. Future updates to Arena Commander will add multi-crew ships and additional maps.
The first-person shooter component of the game was unveiled at PAX Australia 2014. illFonic was officially revealed as the developer of the module. The presented gameplay demo showcased 4-player cooperative combat on board a space station in both artificial gravity and weightlessness. Notable features include the synchronization of first-person and third-person animations and the separation of head and arm movement. In August 2015 Cloud Imperium Games confirmed in a statement to GamesIndustry.biz that development of the Star Marine module is nearing completion and a 'transitioning' has been in progress as IllFonic's part in the Star Marine FPS module is coming to a close. After the backers kept asking what happened to Star Marine and multiple online publications reported it being cancelled, Chris Roberts addressed the issue in 10 for the Chairman: Episode 75 on January 25, 2016 saying that it is not cancelled and now part of the in house development.
In December 2015, a small scale version of the "Persistent Universe" module was released in the form of Alpha 2.0.
Other confirmed modules include a "Planetside" module and a singleplayer/co-op campaign dubbed Squadron 42.
Star Citizen will feature distinctive fictional languages for the three most prominent alien races, the Banu, the Vanduul and the Xi'An. In accordance with the 50 million dollar stretch goal of the game's crowdfunding campaign, the languages are individually created by the developers in partnership with linguistic specialists. Other alien races in Star Citizen are the Tevarin and Kr'Thak.
