Annie Bouffard

The thing is, Ian is the art director, and me as assistant, actually, I'm just helping all the team to stay on track, because we have concepts to create our environment. So I'm not going to decide, okay, today we're going to do this or that, because all that has already been decided. So it's just giving support and just being sure that people stay focused on the mandate and where we're going.

And it's seeing the high level, right? Because you have your leads under you who can take care of your team. So Nick is there to do the very high level stuff with me where we can see things coming in advance.

Next mandate. And I'm still giving support. I'm still working in the editor. I'm not just high level and just talking in meetings.

I'm still assigning bugs to you.

Yeah, it's true. Fixing bugs and stuff.

You channel the information, and it trickles down from Ian to Nick, and then to us, the leads, and then to our teams.

That's true. It's super abstract, and it can change on a dime as well. But I think the way I see my job is to make these guys' lives easier by organizing the workload. If my leads and my assistant art director are focused on, oh my God, we need to make tasks. What are we doing this sprint? How much time is it gonna take? Do we have a problem? Who's gonna fix it? Who do we need to talk to? If they're busy doing that, they can't focus on their work. So basically my job is to make sure that they stay focused and I run along to find solutions and to find answers to their questions. Also keeping in mind that I need to be the contact point between all of those downstream teams we were just talking about and make sure the planning works and make sure that we deal with curveballs when they arrive.

QA is the starting point for so many people. We have lead producers who started as QA. We have directors who have started as QA. It's a wonderful entry point for almost any path.

It is, I would go as far as saying it is the best entry point. The best producers, it looks like I'm patting myself on the back here, but the best producers I've known in this industry came from QA. Just because it's so versatile, you have your hands everywhere, you have such a top vision of a project when you work in QA, it's pretty similar. When I made the transition to production, it wasn't that big of a jump. Just because I had visibility on the entirety of the project, how it was going, when the patches were coming out, how many bugs were there, what state the maps were in. And to answer the question of minimum requirements, I just hired a dev QA embedded on my team who has zero experience, but the guy has a good background and he looks hungry to learn. And sometimes it's even better to get people with no experience because...

You have to untrain them.

Exactly. It's a blank slate. They didn't catch any bad habit yet from other places. So sometimes it's a blessing in disguise.

And I guess the will to learn is a huge point. When we hire juniors, when we go through the filtering in the interviews, sometimes it's them showing the willingness to learn. That's a big factor, I find, for selection.

The most important.

I like an inexperienced person with potential a million times more than an old wolf who doesn't really want to prove himself.

Because there's less baggage and bad habits.

And is over it. Because there are a lot of those too.

People that show passion. There are still good old wolves who still want to work and have this fire inside.

Oh, there's a ton of that too. I'm not generalizing, but...

That's experience, man. It's really hard. The amount of time a task will take is just when you've been on a project for a while and you know your people and you know how fast they work.

Depends on how many you have on the team.

It's not one size fits all. Not at all. And granular, again, it depends on your team. My art team is very autonomous, and I don't need to go into too much detail to keep them focused. But other teams will function in a way where they'll hammer out 10 tasks a week. So you need to be more granular with them. But it really depends on the discipline you're managing. Not knowing which project you're managing, it's hard to answer, but it really depends on your team. Get to know your team and their strong points and their weaknesses, and that's really what helps.

I'm working on the derelict habs. So it'll be habitation pods or even maybe garages or little workshops built from ship pieces. So that's something that we'll be bringing into the following releases, something to dress up the crash sites. So we saw one of the early ones in the Ghost Hollow mission. That was one of the first habs that we made. And we're just adding more of...

Creating this library of...

Yeah, we're creating all the puzzle pieces to just be able to pick and choose then which one we want to spread around the 'verse.

There's all sorts of different functions to these habs, like workshops or maybe just sun barriers or shelters. Cover.

They look great. You guys are going to love it.

Yeah, we'll see those on, I think it's the first ISC back after the new year. We'll have a segment on the new derelict habs and the big asset library zoo that we're creating.

Right now, we're thinking about making more on Stanton because Pyro is not ready yet to create too much stuff on it. So, yeah, we'll say that, but eventually we're going to have a lot of them. It should go to Pyro. Not right now, but soon. For the next year, we'll be more Stanton, but eventually we'll be everywhere.

I mean, I can give you the scoop that we're starting to look at that in Q1.

Yeah, with the use of the Raastar tool and its development, Stanton is basically the testing bed for that tool. They're placing down the new upcoming outposts with it now. And then, yeah, it will, of course, be used for Pyro when that time comes.

And to go with one of your questions, while we were here, actually meeting the guys working with Raastar, that was one of the reasons why we came, to get some training on it and see how it works live. Sometimes training is a bit easier doing it in person rather than over Zoom or Teams.

For folks who maybe don't follow the entire breadth of Star Citizen's development, Pyro can't be added to the Persistent Universe until Server Meshing is in. Server Meshing needs prerequisites like Persistent Entity Streaming coming in 3.18, and these things all take months and months to do. Stanton's not finished. I saw somebody say Stanton is finished, and Stanton's not finished. We're still building Stanton. We're still building Pyro. We're still building Nyx, stuff like this. It goes akin to what John Crewe said, actually it wasn't John Crewe, it was Ben Curtis, in our IAE All Ships Supertalk Spectacular from a couple weeks ago, which was also taken out of context, where they talked about where's the best place to put your work and your effort right now. If you can work right now to put something in the game right now, that's a better use than if you can work to put something in the game six months from now, because you can work next month to put the thing in six months from now. So game development is a constant series of priority shifts and adjustments. The priorities change and shift dramatically during the course of development, but it always prioritizes what can be done now and what can be done next. So as we move closer to the time where, okay, now the underlying systems are in place and we can actually put Pyro into the Persistent Universe, that's where the ramp-up on that stuff goes. That's why, when we had presentations on Pyro during DCC, he talked about how Pyro is basically 80% complete. They bring the planets to that 80% and then they pause, because there's no need to finish it off now when the technology will continue to grow and continue to evolve. When it's ready to go in, that's when they will finish it off and polish it up with the technology and the tools and the procedures that are available to us then. So I don't think I'm telling anybody anything that isn't already out there. That's just how game development works.

The building interiors. So in the future, I'm going to develop the building interiors and I'm very much interested in developing the procedural level building basically.

And building interiors are not just to be able to walk inside a building and have more stuff to look at. You mean building interiors so that we can do mission content and gameplay content and stuff like that inside.

And mine would be the opposite, doing exteriors, since I've been doing a lot of interiors since I started, well, besides Ghost Hollow. I don't know if I can say what I'll be working on...

Yes, you can. Nothing you guys are working on is secret.

So I'll be jumping onto the UGFs, the underground facilities. And the Montreal team is going to start with the first zone, the surface parts. So working directly on the planet and making a big compound.

That's another thing that we came here for. We wanted to meet with John Griffith and company so that we could get a solid kickoff and hit the ground running in Q1.

Yeah, since they'll be working on the UGF as well, but in different zones. So we'll be working as a team, but Montreal will be working on the surface and Manchester will be working on one of the floors, and then we'll switch and dig.

And that's the thing you want to be working on that you're not already working on.

Actually, our next mandates are so awesome that... We always pick what we want to work on.

Exactly. I try to make sure that everyone goes on to something that they're passionate about. So, yeah, we've hammered this out in the past couple months and we've distributed our teams on mandates that would motivate them.

The buildings there are going to be crazy. All those buildings over there, maybe not all, but a lot of them will have content in them. We'll have some industrial, residential, commercial, rooftops, maybe sewer. We'll be able to connect each other, so we're going to add so much gameplay.

And holding cells, I think, like prisons.

Eventually, we're all looking at that. We're seeing what works, what doesn't, and yeah, we'll hammer out the proof of concept for this, and then we'll be doing a bunch of those.

Making a world more world.

And how about you? You get to have a vote.

Well, I'm really, really excited about the mandates that they just talked about. And yeah, we're going to have a lot more in the next year. I think you guys are aware that Montreal is ramping up the team. So we're going to take on more and more super exciting mandates. But sadly, I can't talk about all of them. So it'll be for next time I'm over. I can tell you guys about it.

I was going to add something. With the UGF, I think one thing that's going to be different, because all the other mandates we had were very local, everything was made in Montreal. So for the UGF, that's going to be one mandate where we're really going to work with the Manchester team.

More collaboration.

Yeah, a lot more collaboration. So it feels like we're becoming more and more part of the family, which is cool.

It's one of the initiatives of coming over here to meet those teams.

Yes.

That's all UGF is, right?

Well, not only UGF, but building interiors would have some procedural elements. Those additional derelict locations that we were talking about, with Raastar, we're going to take those pieces that we built in the past few quarters and we're going to spread them somewhat procedurally. So yeah, pretty much everything we'll be working on in the next year follows that pattern.

And the early tests that we did with the space clinics, we made them in modules and the level designers used those modules to build. So we built one initial space clinic as a target, and then the tech level designers used that to create a recipe to populate all the other space clinics in the space stations.

And some rules basically, right? So that every piece would actually fit together and that we never procedurally put two things together that don't quite fit.

I think we bring in the narrative team, we show them where we're at. For Lorville skyline in particular, we just show them where we're at in terms of placeholder, and then there's a branding, and telling them that this is the size of the city, these are the different areas that we have, and we need a little bit of variation in that. Then they go to work with that and they bring their ideas, too. And it's just a synergy.

Yeah, it's a healthy mix of both. I think we get the concept from the concept artist and then we work something out, and then we try to involve narrative as early as possible in the process so that they can have a first look and wrap their head around what we're trying to do. And then they always come up with the most wonderful ideas. So yeah, we try to meld everything together.

But sometimes the ideas come from us. We have ideas about crashes, why those crashes happen, and we can just send our ideas to narrative and they can just accept it and say, oh, yeah, we can do that.

Yeah. They've been discussed.

We're talking about it. I don't remember the name. What's the name of the big, big, big station? Port Olisar. Thank you. We were talking about maybe we're going to crash Port Olisar on the planet somewhere eventually.

But for now, I don't think this is a mandate that's going to be on us. And if it is, it won't be for now.

But that could make a nice silhouette.

This is where I have to remind people that talking is talking. We discuss a lot of things. It's just concepts and whatnot. We will explore many ideas. I already see the one running to Reddit right now: Nicholas said they're going to crash Port Olisar on a planet.

No, I said we thought about maybe we could crash Port Olisar on the planet.

We've had lots of discussions over the years about what we can do with Port Olisar. We've even talked about it here on this show and on other things. I think there's a definitive intention to end Port Olisar's life at some point. How we're going to do it and in what manner is still being discussed. It could still be years away.

Oh, it requires some planning, guys.

Because if that's on the surface of the planet, it's a huge undertaking.

Well, no matter what we do end up doing with Port Olisar, it's going to need careful planning.

Yeah, because it's going to be unique, so it takes a lot of time, a lot of people.

We'll see. I don't even know necessarily what we have against it, other than it's really old and really resource intensive because it was made with the procedures and knowledge that we had in 2015. And we desperately want to replace it and improve it, put something better that's more performant, that serves more needs and stuff like that.

It'd be a poetic way to end it, turning the page on an old relic and kind of giving a story to Star Citizen.

A proper send-off.

I mean, a project of that magnitude is... it's hard not to be flabbergasted by whatever you're seeing. And the fact that it's already playable and out there in the world is something that most of us really haven't experienced. It's all hush-hush for years, usually. And now we're building it, and we can see people reacting to it as we're building it. We can see how it resonates with people. And I think that's something that not a lot of us have experienced in the past, developing those super long productions that we have to keep secret for three, four, five years sometimes. So I think it's an interesting way of developing games.

And sometimes forever. There are some games that we've worked on that got scrapped. So it's kind of sad to work on something that looks amazing, and then, sorry, can't show it. It's gone. So to work on something that has frequent patches, playable in alpha, it's very encouraging, motivating as well.

It feels like we're working for the players and not investors. It's a team effort. We're not the big money pocket guys. We're just working for everybody that loves the game and the whole community. So it's a very different feel; that's what attracted me the most.

And as artists, it's also just a really good looking game. It's a passionate thing for us too. It's kind of funny that we'll be able to update our ArtStations before our previous games get to ship. So that's how quick it moves.

But also, when we work on different projects, you're always asking yourself as a developer, imagine if this game was actually coming out on the next gen or on the next CPUs and GPUs. And currently, that's pretty much what we're doing here. It's hard to run this game even on high-end PCs. Being able to work on a game that's built for the future but that currently is in a little bit of a shaky state is very exciting as a developer, because you get to just constantly try to push those limits as much as you can, because you're expecting that eventually hardware is going to catch up. So it's exciting to not have those limitations already put in place on day one, and then you work on a game for four years, and when you release it, it's been four years of new releases of hardware. As opposed to right now, we're just constantly trying to push the limits, even if the hardware can't necessarily always keep up.

I liked also, to your point, Rainer, just before that, the hospitals were the first full levels that the team has put out in the patch, which is very nice, really cool. But it's the fact that you can actually read the feedback from players when they see them. Even though they're not completely available right now in 3.14, even just having the lobbies, I know you went in and you guys were taking selfies in game, like, look, we're in the game. And that's really invigorating, to be able to ship often.

And see positive comments, too. And just to see praise on your work so quickly, because I joined last December and already I get to see what I've worked on in the past six months is already getting better. It's nice to see comments already.

I think we're doing really good. Essentially, what we want to create is a team that's somewhat autonomous but not working as a lone wolf inside the company. So we are connected with other teams. We have reviews with other teams. And just this morning, we had a biweekly art review in which all the teams were showing absolutely amazing content. But when we work on the day-to-day, that's when we want to have more proximity with the team so that, for example, when the people in the UK are leaving work, if we have questions, it's much more simple if we have someone here to answer them. So I think so far, the combination between level design and environment art was absolutely successful. Then adding the tools team, who not only are helping us sometimes to understand things better, but also doing quality of life improvements for the artists and the designers, was also super helpful. And it's essentially our base of growth, where we want to grow the entire studio by adding teams that are relevant to each other so that we support each other even more in that area. And to be honest, when we first joined one year ago, we thought it would be quicker to ramp up and, let's say, do a star system. And that was probably very naive of us. Now we see the absolutely gigantic amount of work a star system takes to develop. So that's in terms of the scope, but in terms of the team we have assembled, the luck we had of having so many talented people... the 37 people that we signed and are working with us are top, top, top in their craft. So in terms of creating an autonomous team that can work together, we're so, so lucky.

We're autonomous, but it's important to know that we still ask for a lot of help from other teams in CIG, in Europe and everywhere. In no way could we have ever shipped hospitals or even anything without the help of the level design team in Europe, and everybody from VFX artists to environment teams to lighting artists everywhere. I think on a daily basis we chat with the level design team in Europe, and all the time we're asking, what's this bug? How do I fix this? Because they have years and years of experience under their belt. So for them, the problem resolution is five times quicker than it is for us, because they've seen all these bugs 100 times and we're seeing them for the first time and we're a little bit clueless. So we try to be autonomous, but at the same time, the support we're getting from every other team in CIG is what's helping us ship these things.

The people were so welcoming. It was pretty amazing to see that. And to echo on your question, Jared, I think we're doing great environment-wise. It's been super nice. I think that the ramp-up's been great. On the gameplay side, we're still looking for more hires to be able to totally dive into complete gameplay loops. Though on the design side, like Neno was talking about, we're moving forward with puzzles and what we're able to action today. I feel like we still have ways to go to dive fully into new gameplay features, but we know which ones we're looking at. I can't talk about that. And as Guillaume was saying, the strategy is going to be to have a team that can complement the group here to basically iterate together gameplay, level design, design tools, art, concept, everything into one giant loop.

[These] are all things that are in the works, but again, as we discussed earlier, the game development side of Turbulent has been on for a year. Anyone who has worked in this industry knows that a year is nothing; it's a very short amount of time. So just to have been able to give to the community what we have so far, like the hospitals, and put all these processes in place, that takes time. It's insane the amount of stuff we have achieved in such a short time. And Guillaume can correct me, but about half of that year was just ramping up and finding the right people for the job. So all in all, it's six months of development. So it's very inspiring what we're able to achieve with these amazing talents across the board.

And going back to the gameplay side that Ben mentioned, can we do a shameless plug? If one of you is a lead gameplay programmer, drop us a line. We're looking for one. We've got some really great topics for you. Contact us and we'll talk.

Do we really need it? We need a meeting to talk. Are you sure?

For an artist, what is it going to look like?

And then we need an Excel sheet to define all of the departments that are going to need to work on that door, and then ETAs, and then add a two-week buffer for that ETA because something is going to go wrong. Something is going to go wrong, for sure.

Tech art, what's your question when somebody says door?

Either you want it closed, either you want it open all the time. That's what you want. Do you want it to open and close? No, you never want it to open or close. You want it to stay open or stay closed. You don't want the animation part of it.

You don't want to have the detection part of it. It's so complicated, because how do you deal with the collisions? Do they move at the same time as the door? What happens if you attach a gadget to the door and the door opens or closes? Does the gadget fall on the ground? Does it explode? Do you lose your gadget? How do bullets react with the collision? How does the enemy react with the doors when a door opens or closes in front of the enemy? Does it cut the nav mesh or doesn't it cut the nav mesh? Do we have that check in the game? This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Now, the best one is: this door normally auto-opens when you get close to it, except during mission stage three, if the dude said the door is now locked. And then we start with a door, and then one month later there's a co-op door, and then a month after there's a double door, and then another month there's going to be a security door.

Then there's a breakable one and a metal one that's unbreakable, one that locks with a key.

And once you think that it's rock solid and that you've seen every possible thing that could go wrong, you give it to QA, and within five minutes, they break it.

He looks at it and it's broken. And then, what does concept do with a door, really?

It can't be a simple rectangular door. You've got to see how much detail you can fit onto this door, how many decals you can put on it, maybe a warning sign on your door, how many panel lines you can put on the door. It can't be a simple metal door. No such thing.

Warning, this is a door. It opens.

Brittany, what do you think Pierre-Luc would say in the concept door review?

He would say it's not door enough, it just needs to be more door.