Kotaku.com tries to figure out what happened with the poorly-reviewed video game first-person shooter that is Aliens: Colonial Marines.

The first major problem was the game’s story: even four years after Colonial Marines was announced, nobody had locked down a final script. Narrative designers at both Gearbox and TimeGate were writing and rewriting constantly, and TimeGate had to discard entire scenes and levels because of story changes during development, according to three sources.

“For a couple months, we were just kind of guessing,” said one of those sources. “It’s really weird to work on a game when you don’t have a basic idea of how things will work.”

(Also? I had no idea there were such things as ‘narrative designers.’ Neat!)