The Star Citizen and Squadron 42 Public Roadmap is designed to give you an unprecedented look into the game development process by following every feature being worked on by our 50+ development teams, from their initial implementation to their release.
Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are massive projects with lots to track, and this companion guide will help you read and navigate the Roadmap for both projects, as well as provide additional insight into the processes behind it.
Throughout our development communications, you have likely seen us reference a team as being designated "Upstream" or "Downstream", which carries an important meaning. Upstream teams begin work on any given feature at the beginning of its process. They typically handle things like art, vehicles, locations, and gameplay features. These teams set the major tentpole deliverables for the rest of Star Citizen and Squadron 42, and as such, they're able to plan up to four quarters in advance, which is displayed in the Progress Tracker.
Downstream teams are reactive and support the upstream teams, so they depend on the upstream teams scheduling and progress to determine their own work and priorities. Because of this, they're only able to plan for the upcoming quarter, rather than a full year.
Example: The Vehicle Teams (Upstream) begin work planning a newly concepted ship, the Aurora. The Vehicle Content Teams then schedule out production of the Aurora, from a design, art, and animation standpoint. Once the ship is nearly built and the design is close to final, the downstream teams jump in and begin adding details like VFX, Audio, and UI. The important takeaway is that the downstream team relies on information from the upstream team in order to produce a schedule/plan.
Feature Cards are added to the Release View near the start of the quarter, once they've been completed for release and the QA process begins. These new cards will always show up on the Roadmap marked as Tentative, meaning the goal is to release in the next quarterly patch, but the feature has yet to pass its Final Review.
Every quarter, development Directors come together to review features approaching completion in an effort to evaluate if said feature is ready to be released to the live game. If a feature passes its Final Review, then it is integrated into the live release candidate and marked as Committed on the Roadmap. At this point, it is nearly certain that the feature will arrive with its corresponding update. Once the feature has been released to the Live servers, its status is then updated to Released.
Upstream Teams
- Actor Feature Team
- EU Landing Zone 1
- EU Landing Zone 2
- EU PU Gameplay Feature Team
- EU Sandbox 1
- EU Sandbox 2
- Game Services Team
- Live Tools Team
- Mission Feature Team
- MTL Sandbox 1
- Systemic Services and Tools Team
- US PU Gameplay Feature Team
- Vehicle Feature Team
- Vehicle Content Team - EU
- Vehicle Content Team - US
- Vehicle Content Team - MTL
- Weapon Feature Team
Downstream Teams
- AI Content Team
- AI Tech and Feature Team
- Arena Commander Feature Team
- Audio
- Character Tech Art
- Cinematics Team
- Editor Team
- Engine Team
- Facial Animation
- Gameplay Story
- Graphics Team
- Interactables Team
- Location Concept Art
- Lighting Team
- Motion Capture Team
- Narrative
- Network Team
- Persistent Tech Team
- Physics Team
- Planet Tech Team
- Star Citizen Character Art
- Squadron 42 Character Art
- Squadron 42 Art
- Squadron 42 Feature Team
- Squadron 42 Level Design 1 - FPS
- Squadron 42 Level Design 2 - Flight
- Squadron 42 Level Design 3 - Social
- Squadron 42 UI Feature Team
- Tech Animation Team
- Tools Team
- UI Tech Team
- Vehicle Concept Art
- VFX Team
- Weapon Content Team