Brian Chambers

As Jared said, I'm Brian Chambers. When I first started with CIG, my title was Development Director. So it was me and a handful of guys starting up the office here in Germany. And so I spent a few years really focusing on getting that team solid, and working with Erin on global development and looking at teams and seeing what we can help and push. Mid last year, roughly, we restructured a few things within the company with our growth. It just made sense to look at that and see if the current structure we have still works for everybody. Part of that structure was to pull in studio managers for each office so they could work on the day-to-day stuff that it takes to keep the lights on, and general admin stuff and everything, right? That allowed me to then come and focus more on dev. So at that point, I became VP of Development, and I now work really, really close with Erin on a daily basis to drive the development team globally. Come November, December, me and Chris and Erin were talking and looking across the projects and seeing how things were structured, and we said, okay, with Squadron, the size it is, and what we want it to be as far as expectations, it absolutely needed some more dedicated focus. So I am now primarily focusing on Squadron 42. Erin's now primarily focused on the PU. We both have visibility and say on either side. A lot of stuff crosses the boundaries per se, right? So one call actually works for both. So my primary focus now is Squadron, working with the team every day, seeing what's going on with schedules and with progress, and it's going to be good.

And this kind of reorganization is a normal part of video game development. It happens in projects all over the place. It's not necessarily because of issues or problems. We usually do it at the end of one year, the beginning of another year, to take a step back, to reevaluate how things are going and to find ways to improve, to make things more efficient.

No, it wasn't due to any deficiency. It was just that now we have a studio manager there and they can handle all this other stuff that I needed to take care of, and that now frees up my time to go back to my roots, which is game development. And if I'm free and Erin's free, let's split that focus so we can get some more of that dedicated attention. It's definitely a positive thing. And I'm excited about it. Working with the team, you see progress every day. It's good stuff.

No, the roadmap, honestly, it's one thing that I've looked at more and more recently, and other people on the team, and we were scratching our heads too, going, wait, hold on, what's going on here? The roadmap as it currently exists, starting chapters at the top, going to the bottom, and just spreading out horizontally, it doesn't make sense. There's so many things that we do; a majority of what we do crosses all chapters, right? When you talk about mechanics, when you talk about technical work and so on, when we're working on characters, whatever it might be across most disciplines, it touches all chapters. So in theory, if you were to leave it as it is, all chapters would basically be done all at the same time, right? We've got every little thing, excluding a couple little bits that are going to be very specific and very unique. So due to the nature of the development and what you push on, if we call it AAA or quadruple A or whatever it might be, it really doesn't work. I think when we first started it, it was just logical. It was like, oh, let's put all the chapters down and we're cool.

Follow a linear progression. It's easy to understand. It's not like we had an example to look at. There aren't other AAA games out there with a publicly facing development roadmap during their development. So we had to figure this out as we went. We tried for a linear presentation, but as you're saying, development runs parallel.

Yeah, and I actually scrubbed through stuff, maybe a couple of months ago, looking, okay, what other AAA games are giving the level of detail that we do? And I think some had some roadmaps, but they're just very chunky. Like, hey, we're a quarter of the way done or halfway done and so on, right? A big key thing for us, though, is we don't want to give away spoilers. It's incredibly important to me and it's incredibly important to Chris that we hold that stuff tight, because we want that experience when we get it into people's hands, that they play it and they experience it new. I'd rather not give away, although we may have already most of them, I'd rather not give away any more characters, locations. And it's actually hard when we do monthly updates and so on. A lot of stuff we get from the team that I'd prefer to publish, that is awesome progress, has so many spoilers in it. I'm like, no, can't do that. Can't do that. Nope, nope, nope. So it's a chore. However, the current format doesn't work to show the progress the way that we think is the best, or in a format that makes sense for what we're doing. With that said, we're currently in the process of investigating new ways that we can provide information. Progress is being done every single day. Awesome stuff. We have global reviews with the directors and leads and Chris Roberts every single week where we go over and see people's progress. So progress, really cool stuff, is being done. So it's up to us to find a way that we can present that to everybody publicly. And that's something that we're actively looking into. Absolutely.

Right, so it's not all doom and gloom. We recognize that the roadmap for Squadron 42 isn't as effective a tool as we were hoping in conveying the information without spoilers, mostly due to its linear nature and our parallel development, not just between all the chapters, but our parallel development between Squadron and Star Citizen. It's very hard to present that to backers in graph form and lines without the context that we can't give, because the context is all spoiler-related. But we do have a couple ideas, and we're still looking for more, about how we can be more open about Squadron 42's development, how we can convey more information on its progress.

So we've been thinking a lot about the roadmaps lately, and ultimately we want to improve how we communicate in a variety of ways so we can basically provide a better idea of what's being worked on, why something may have changed, et cetera. So more specifically, we're looking at some creative ways that we think we can better illustrate our progress that ties closer into how we're blocking out our time internally. We're already well underway with exploring some creative options for how we can visualize that and how we can share that with everybody. But of course, it's going to take a little bit of time. But I think we're heading in the right direction. We think we're working on some stuff that you guys are going to like.

As far as blocking out time, some of that stuff we already do on the dev side as well. We block out sprints that guys are working on, and you can see their completion progress. So we even talked about, could that be existing information we have that pulls in, again, as long as it doesn't give away spoilers and so on.

Yeah, absolutely. We also recognize that as we're developing Squadron 42, much of that content ends up making its way into the PU, which is something that we feel we can track and also illustrate better. And so that's another thing that we're working on. But in the short term, obviously you can still look forward to the monthly reports. You may have seen recently we did an AMA on prisons. So we would like to continue doing those AMAs more regularly and actually talk Squadron 42 when we can. Like Brian mentioned, we don't want to spoil the game, but as often as we can, when it makes sense, if we can do some AMAs surrounding different aspects of Squadron 42, we'll take those opportunities. One of the favorite parts of Inside Star Citizen is the Sprint Report. We're going to start leveraging the Sprint Report for Squadron 42 content again as often as we can. You probably see the pattern here: we just want to start injecting more Squadron 42 content into our regular communications, but also getting creative and seeing if we can introduce some new stuff. For example, we might do some fun regular video check-ins with Brian, with you, and the Squadron 42 team. We've been talking about some fun ideas. I think that you guys are going to like the direction we're going to go with that.

No, we're exploring everything. We're looking at it from all angles. We've even had some discussion, as we've said, and everybody knows that a lot of the things that we do from Squadron make it to PU, or PU to Squadron. So could we even have some type of shared map that calls out which ones are shared, which are unique and so on? Because a lot of stuff you see in PU, although we're not loud about it, absolutely makes itself into Squadron, right? So by nature, it already starts showing some of that progress there. It would just be us calling it out.

And then of course on the video side, opening up shows like Calling All Devs to host Squadron questions when appropriate. Maybe even an Inside Star Citizen segment here and there related to Squadron. Again, where we can find stories to tell that don't spoil the story being told. Basically, what it sounds like is we're going to pull back the curtain, we're going to push open the closed door as much as possible. It's going to be slow at first. We've got to be careful not to spoil anything.

Yeah, I'd say the key takeaway is that we recognize that we haven't been able to share progress as effectively as we would have liked to with the way that we've been set up. And so we're in an area now where we're willing to experiment, we're willing to tweak things and see what we can do to ultimately give more information. And I think one of the big parts that I'd like to note is that we're going to be looking at Spectrum for y'all's feedback. We'll start a few feedback threads. And we want to hear what you think of the direction that we're taking it. We want to hear your suggestions, and we want to keep that conversation open so that ultimately we can give you guys as much information as we can.

I'm confident that we'll find a way that's informative and gives people a good idea of what we're doing on a regular basis.

Well, it does. But I think one of the things that we've always strived for is making it look as good from far away as it does up close and personal. And so that was a comment that Chris called out when we showed off the Lorville stuff. We showed it off from the player perspective, but what does it look like from a ship flying above? And how does that hold up? And those are all things that we're working on and working towards.

Absolutely. And even on top of the new stuff that we're working on, which is chunky in assets and flora and populating with more and even new planets, we're also constantly working on updating and maturing what we actually have. We recently did a pass on the textures to get seams to blend even smoother. We're looking at the LODs and how things fall off and how the LODs are blending together. Even though there's some things that may not be as substantial as, 'hey, here's a whole new moon with a whole new look,' we constantly have a group of guys that are pushing the existing tech we have to get it as mature as we want it to be.

No, it is. It's also introducing the new fog into it, and that basically wreaked havoc, I think, with the old lighting. So now it's doing a pass on it now that we have all the new fog in place.

But once we give it more attention to detail and we've defined even more the art style we want and the tools mature, we start pumping in, as Todd was saying, more atmospherics, and the guys are getting even more used to the tools and so on. And I'm absolutely with you. You'll see something that I looked at a month, two, three months ago, and I'll see it now, like on Chris Campbell's desk, our lead lighting artist, and you'll just go, wow. You'll just look at it and go, okay. It's a clear indication that lighting and the atmospherics absolutely breed a feel for the environment and can push it drastically one way or another.

Well, I think there's times that we can say that. And then there's other times, at least for me, as a game player, I want very clear signage. I want to understand where I'm going. I want to not look at a mini map all the time to work out the 3D layout of an area to understand where I need to go. So if it's selling a mood or selling an emotion, then I think it's good there. But if it's too much fog, or if it's actually obscuring the way that the players can find things, then that to me is an issue.

I read a few of those comments as well. Some people are saying it was too much. Some people said, no, it's perfect. But as Todd said, each planet, each area is going to have a certain amount of density within the atmosphere for certain reasons. And what you see today doesn't necessarily mean that's it. We may come back and look and go, you know what, we need to dial that down 10% for one reason or another. So you'll see a whole mix of atmospheres, and some will be pretty dense that will be hard to see through, but maybe that's for a reason.

Yeah, but for me, I want to make sure that there's gameplay associated with that.

Absolutely. That's when the bad dudes jump out.

We haven't built it yet, but I know Chris wants to be able to swim, and maybe in the future we talk about doing an underwater vehicle if there's a lot of water prevalent in all of our areas. But I'm sure that in order to add life to that location, that's going to be one of the things that we look into, adding flora and fauna.

I like the way you just casually dropped 'we've been talking about underwater vehicles' there.

Well, we haven't. Well, we've kind of discussed it, but it really depends on how much water we have in the universe. And I think on Reddit I saw, was it a Javelin or a Bengal, sitting on the water? Somebody did concept art.

If you think about the level of detail, though, that we're putting into everything, bodies of water, you would assume further down the line they would absolutely need to have something in order to match the quality of immersion that we've put into everything else.

I believe those are general plant explorations. The idea, I think, in particular for the Hurston family, is that they have these compounds that are very lush and have these areas that don't look like the rest of the world. But it's more about: this is the family compound, and since they run the planet, they can water the area. Think of like Las Vegas and golf resorts. Basically they water the grass there, and if they didn't, it would just be dead and be just sand and die. And I think that's kind of the concept for these compounds with Hurston.

So you could argue that some of them stay within that family, but I think they could definitely be used as assets elsewhere if needed as well.

By the time all is said and done, I'd be amazed if there's a biome we haven't explored in some way, shape, or form.

Well, in the future, if you ever get Ian on, you need to have him show you the power triangle where he's worked out the different biomes, and where it goes from dirt to snow to overrun by jungle, as well as other things. So it's pretty interesting.

So the service beacon is a way to create a contract. And that contract could be 'help me, I'm being attacked,' so like a distress call, a 'mayday, mayday' kind of thing. Then there's something like refueling, or 'I want to be taken from point A to point B,' so like a taxi or Uber. Then there's like a mercenary hire, or like a bodyguard: 'hire me and protect me while I'm traveling from point A to point B,' or if I'm mining or doing something. It's a way for players to create contracts as well as transfer funds. That for me is one of the main goals. Right now, let's say you, Brian, and I went out on a mission and we did something, and I was the owner of the ship, and then I go in and I basically turn in the cargo that we got. There's no way for me to pay off the two of you guys. So from a usability standpoint, from a player standpoint, this is one of my main goals. And I think Tony and I would need to talk a little bit more about how we're going to actually do it, just because right now we're focusing on distress as the first one, but one of my main goals after we finish off the distress would be a way to actually transfer funds between players.

If you're trying to track down your ship somebody stole, you could use the service beacon as well then, right?

No, that should be... well, I guess if you want to put a bounty on somebody, then that could be.

I mean, we've talked about stun grenades. We've talked about basically taser aspects, to knock players out. So it's something that we've talked about. And right now we're working on Weapons 2.0. So basically refactoring all of the weapon system and switching over to Item 2.0, and getting everything to work the way that we feel we need it to work and get it so it's scalable. So once that's done, then we have a list of projectiles that we want to be able to create, so that we just don't have laser and distortion and ballistic. If we can get the dread hotshots or armor piercing or those types of things, those are the ways that we're pushing towards. And then non-lethal would be another venture into that. And then it's also making sure that the players actually have a stun or some sort of reaction to that. And then the other thing that we'd have to tackle is basically, as a player, if you were ever knocked out, what do you do? Because as a player, me watching somebody drag my body to their ship, that's not going to be very fun. And so is it basically, do I sit there and kind of wait? And are there ways that I can alert my friends to come and help me and save me? Or is it that at that point I give up that life and then I respawn, and then they take their bounty and get paid out?

On that topic too, an interesting thing to just point out and to highlight. Let's say we have assets done and the base design of how a non-lethal weapon X should function and look and so on. Let's say you have the asset built, the effects, the audio and all that. Well, you also need the animations associated with that. You also need then the feedback, the player feedback, and the design or the UI elements, so on and so on. There's a tremendous amount of stuff that we work on, but it doesn't get out there until it has all the parts and pieces, right? It's not enough just for us to put out one little thing and you can kind of see it and go, 'oh, look, this kind of would stun people if the animations were there.' So a lot of our work, we have to wait till those other parts and pieces come together globally, to where we can then really stand back and look at it all and play it and go, okay, cool, this is working. And that's when things get closer to release for us.

From a bounty hunter perspective, we do want to do it. It's just we haven't started yet.

When I started at Foundry 42 it was about a year ago, last September. Back then we weren't really working on the procedural stuff. It was just an idea and a long-term goal. So I did some space station stuff. I supported the guys in the UK because there weren't a lot of environment artists here at the time.

You were telling me the other day, what was the very first asset?

Ian, the art director from the UK, came to me and gave me this white box mesh, it was really rough. He said, okay, dude, you have to make it look nice, that's your job. See how you do with the art style, everything is new. So I did that and I went through it, I finished it, I gave it to Ian, he's like, yeah, this is cool. And normally when you make a game, you wait for a long time till it's in the game. But in this case, a couple of weeks later it's in the game, and it's this console where every player goes to select his ship.

The blending of different height maps in general, if you have mountains and then you have sand next to it, works. Technology-wise, it can be done really well, but in some cases, it just doesn't make sense. For example, if you have a pitch black mountain and next to it you have white sand, it's obviously going to look a bit strange. But this comes from the art direction. They tell you, okay, this doesn't look good, we just have to change something. But basically, in general, we get concept art from the UK. Our concept artist sets up all these biomes, these ecosystems, what they're going to look like. He kind of takes them apart and also shows you how it's going to look on a global scale, also on a detailed scale, what kind of vegetation there is and rocks.

So when you guys are jumping into it, you have a really good idea at least what your target is. And then it's you working with tech to go, cool, how do we achieve that?

Because sometimes we hit a certain limit. What we did so far was very organic. Earth-like planets, we can get them looking pretty good. But now we're thinking of stuff like ArcCorp that's very mechanical. It's a huge cityscape basically. So we had to figure out certain ways on how we achieve that. So before we go into production, we always make sure that we have the tech there, that it can be used by the artists. Because in the end, we always need more than one dude.

Looks nice. Looks good.

We're excited. We had Hannes working on that, primarily, right?

Yeah, he started a couple of months back and that was his first, his baby, basically. He's taking care of the ocean. So at the moment, visually, it's in a good place. We have all these tessellated three-dimensional waves. Interaction-wise, there's not much going on at the moment. Because we also have to take care of what's going on when you go underneath the water. And you need stuff like buoyancy, what happens if you want to land with your ship, and this type of stuff. As an artist, I don't really know if there's any plans for that yet.

I do know on the design side, we're not going to block people. It's not like you're going to get to the water's edge and hit an invisible wall. We know we're not going to do that, but honestly, I don't know what the design team has come up with or what that roadmap is, but I know there's been discussions of, okay, what would we do underwater and how would it happen? So we'll see.

We actually just started this week to prototype ArcCorp, figure out ideas. Can we do it with the planet terrain? Because if you do something like architecture, it's very different. If it's organic, you have these random shapes and stuff, and in architecture, everything is very straight and angular. And with the tessellation of the terrain, you can get away with certain looks, but you will never get this convincing city of ArcCorp with massive towers and skylines and this type of stuff. So what I would like to do in the future is prototype something that uses the object scattering, because all the objects on the planet will be scattered procedurally as well. So we will do something similar, just with really, really big objects, kind of scatter them over the planet. I don't know how happy Marco is with that. We'll have to figure out, does it work performance-wise?

But then on top of that, that's when level design comes in. They know where the player path is and where they want the gameplay to exist.

Well, so far we've gone with Earth-like stuff. We've been looking at the latest pictures from NASA, from Mars, and they have a lot of cool, inspiring stuff. But of course, I'm looking forward mostly to really alien planets where you just land and you're like... You can go really nuts with things like vegetation. A different atmosphere, there's more oxygen, things grow really big.

In a sense, it gives you guys more creativity. It's also a bit more of a challenge because of the unknown: you still need to create all those elements that still feel like they fit within an environment. Although that environment is make-believe, you still want those things to all seem like they're going to come from that same place.

That's a good thing, because it's still artist-driven. It's not completely procedural. So you still have the control: you can say, okay, this is how a tree looks in our world and I'm just going to modify it, but it still keeps that essence of a tree. You can say, okay, it grows like this, and it still has this believability to it.