Two more milestones reached in the past two weeks for Star Citizen, hitting both $25 million in crowd funding and then $26 million. And the press continues to add their thoughts. Here are some of the highlights…

• GameFront – “At this rate, Chris Roberts and the Star Citizen team will have the funds to create real-life starships in a few months.”
• Warcry – “Star Citizen may not be a finished game just yet, but it’s certainly a useful measurement of how badly space sim fans want something new to play.”
• Escapist – “Can anything stop Chris Roberts’ Star Citizen?”
• Games.on.net – “Star Citizen seems to be the gift that people keep on giving to, with space-sim-hungry gamers now pushing another million dollars down Chris Roberts very excited throat.”

This week Chris spoke at GDC Next about crowd funding and offered up a few tips for those looking to try out funding their own projects through the crowd. Chris offered all sorts of advice including how to work more directly with your community, building your own website to raise funds and offereing upgrades and perks to your fans. Gamasutra covered Chris’ speech delivered on Tuesday this week and you can read their story here.

“It’s not just about raising money…. this is the mistake I see a lot of other campaigns make. The best thing about crowdfunding is that you get to build your community early.”

Nathan Grayson with Rock, Paper, Shotgun spent some time with Chris after his talk at GDC Next and discussed the latest on Squadron 42, the single player game that is being developed as part of Star Citizen. It’s a good read as Chris goes into quite a bit of detail on Squadron 42 including the scope of the project and where it’s being developed. You can read Nathan’s full story here.

“When there’s an article about us, there’s always one person who’s like, ‘IT’S A SCAM,’” he confessed. “[Gradually releasing each part of the game and then combining them into one] is a conscious plan. I mean, I’m building a really big game. If you ask people what they want, they’ll tell you they want the best game possible. But if you take a look at Blizzard or Valve or Irrational or Rockstar, those guys all make games people love. But then, people are still asking where Half-Life 3 is. These companies are like, ‘It’s done when it’s done.’ When some of the best in the business can’t run to some preordained schedule, [it says a lot about how this stuff ends up working out].”