Blythe Renay

Well, it's a lot of naps. Each of those games have vastly different requirements as far as what we do on them. With Squadron, the storyline is a lot more locked down just as far as what the missions are going to be doing. It's basically helping the teams as they're building on them and iterating on them. We'll do reviews as levels are coming along and go, does this need additional content? How's it feel with the existing dialogue? Has the mission changed where we have to showcase a new thing that the player needs to do that maybe wasn't captured in the original line set, stuff like that. So it can be a bit more support stuff for that. It's basically to be on hand to help with whatever's needed, whatever team is working on whatever facet of the game they are at that particular time. Star Citizen, the Persistent Universe, is a bit more of an open thing. We'll work with the mission team when they're developing new mission types, sit extensively with them as they're figuring out what are the line triggers of the events in the mission, the mission flow, basically, to figure out when we need to have a line, when we don't. Writing mission text. I mean, we've alluded to it earlier, the item names, descriptions, all that stuff. And then we're even working with the AI team as they're working on behaviors, kind of similar to what we're doing with the mission team. We're like, if we need to have dialogue, what dialogue requirements do these characters have? What makes sense? What feels like too much or too little? And then that's just the active development stuff. There's also developing the universe. So we're still working with Britton on languages, iterating on those. Anyone else jump in? You could start throwing in tasks. We've got a bunch.

I love that you're even involved with things like graffiti. You don't really think about that as being narrative-driven. But yeah, even things as small as graffiti on the walls kind of gets run by narrative. Like, hey, does this make sense? Would this be in this area? What would it say? What would it look like? It's really interesting to me.

Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned before, too, we obviously interface with teams that narrative teams don't traditionally interface with a lot, like marketing and sales, right? Because of the unique nature of the way Star Citizen started, a lot of our marketing initiatives are sort of baked into this in-lore, sort of semi-diegetic thing; they walk a fun line there, which we've been able to have some fun with over the years. And because of that, there is a heavy narrative element to a lot of the marketing stuff. So even the big things that cross the line, like the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo or Invictus Launch Week, where it's technically a marketing thing, but that has this big in-game element that you can go and interact with and stuff, right? Which is pretty neat and pretty different than a lot of other live service games or whatever you want to call them out there. And because it is very narratively focused, it's not just the marketing...

Yeah, and as a narrative team, we're somehow both an upstream and a downstream team, so we can be involved on either side or both sides of a task. And when it comes to managing all that, having Blythe be around and be able to track everything and run down people and be able to say no at certain points is so vital to the process because, again, it's such a wide world and we are looped into so many things. So all her hard work and being able to track everything internally is just a job in and of itself on a whole other level, which blows my mind.

Very carefully. Yeah, it is a lot of work. Dave is in meetings like 12 hours a day, so I don't know how he writes anything outside of that, but he still does. It's fascinating. But there are a lot of meetings that we're involved in, which is really cool. And so we kind of track in those meetings what's needed from us, when it's needed. And then of course we have a system, this is all very boring I'm sure, but we have a ticketing system where we track all of our work in there and we figure out when is it due, when is it needed in the game, all these things. And then we create our priorities based on all of that. And that's just a matter of going through all those tickets and figuring out who can do this, when are they going to have time to do it, all those things. And then just planning appropriately. And that's pretty much a producer's job, just figuring out what you can do and when. And just trying to wrangle as much as you can, because there's just so much all the time. And we do our best to get as much done as possible. I hope the community loves it.

And Dave won't bring it up, but Dave also is out there directing things like PCAP shoots and stuff from time to time. Like when we were just out there in Europe last week or the week before, you were out there working on pickups with the female player character for Squadron 42.