I got a chance to sit in briefly with Khal and the developers for a few weeks at their company while I was a naive and hapless high-school student going into po

I got a chance to sit in briefly with Khal and the developers for a few weeks at their company while I was a naive and hapless high-school student going into post-secondary, during the development of this game. Their dev studio was tiny, like 4 or 5 people at the time. It was interesting to get some exposure to professional game development at that time in my life, because I was maybe 17, playing WoW and various RTS titles, which gave them a chance to ask me what I thought of it and what makes good games in general. I recall probably not seeming so enthusiastic for many of the same reasons I don't understand why people play Star Citizen now, there just didn't seem to be any compelling gameplay loop or reason that it would be more intrinsically interesting than any other game or any other source of media on Space. If you were already a Space enthusiast and looking for Space games, I imagined it might be another thing to play with, but they and Nasa seemed at the time to hope that it was going to spur that interest, almost like if bureaucrats wanted to make a rollerblading game to get people interested in being active, even though it would have taken a miracle to resurrect what had already become unpopular. As in, if you don't have an interest in space, it would take a miracle to make a sufficiently compelling game, especially setting out to build an MMO, especially with a small budget, and relatively dated sdk, to capture the attention of kids who already had endless options. It was a grand vision that seemed unlikely to be captured, and I guess I was hoping I was wrong. Aside from all that, it looked like a challenging and compelling project from the development perspective, probably a good learning opportunity for the team, it must have pushed them pretty hard. I appreciated being welcomed into their Space despite certainly impairing their productivity, and I hope they've continued on to other ambitious projects since.