Speaking of management miscues.
Mitch stated that the npc character creation program was separate from the main character creation program. Why did anybody think it was necessary to create two separate programs to do the exact same thing using the exact same resources? That is beyond me. Especially since the commander creation program has all the bells and whistles. The npc creation program to me would have been just a slimmed down version of the first one. Why was this not done at the same time using the same resources? This boggles the mind. Why would Mitch state it was going to take a month of man hours plus testing time to make this separate program cause they are not the same? Once again, boggles the mind.
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You do not need two completely different hammers designed from scratch and built separately to hit two barely different sized nails. Just saying. In other games, where you had a main character and then a party of npc's you used the exact same character creation system. Your main character usually had a back story and may have had better starting items. But your npc's used the same exact tools to be created. How did this get screwed up? How did this get made into a separate program? Why wasn't this figured out months ago?
I'm not a programmer (and if anybody here
is a programmer, please correct me if I'm mistaken), but I imagine a lot of it has to do with the fact that computer programs are Gordian knots, and building them is less like hammering new parts into a structure and more like trying to fit them into an ever-growing web of delicate components. You first have to figure out how to open a wide enough gap to fit them in, then do it while making sure their connections don't get tangled up with any others, and
then figure out where those tangles might have happened anyway, because they will no matter how good you are. They probably can reuse the custom commander code for NPC pilots, but the real work is figuring out how to fit it into the existing code without causing a host of other conflicts, especially since the commander character likely isn't just a regular pilot with some invulnerability flag. And even adding in the menu option to the existing game is certainly not the drag-and-drop or copy/paste kind of work many of us computer users (with our neat and tidy UIs) are used to.
This is also why, personally, I never hold programmers to the kinds of timetables they often create for themselves, and wouldn't call this "mismanagement" so much as the predictable unpredictability of creative work. Building anything from scratch for the first time is always full of uncertainly, no matter how much experience you have in the industry, and even moreso when there are
literally millions of things that can go wrong.
Plus, Mitch had said that it would take roughly one man-month of work - which honestly isn't that long, but it's long enough to delay the game past their committed release window. Considering that the major Unity update last year only set them back by a few months, I honestly think they've acquitted themselves pretty well.
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