Dan McCabe

Just a cathartic moment, I guess.

Whose catharsis, Alberto? And what are you trying to get out?

No, just to describe a moment of power.

I remember when I first saw that picture in a meeting, I went straight to Alberto's desk and I was like, can I have that right now? And it's now my desktop background, because it's just so sick. I remember when you first showed it to me, I came over to your desk, and I think you talked about how it was kind of hiding in the asteroid belt and then it would pop out. And we talked a little bit about how in the Arctic you see these really large ships that are icebreaker ships. And it's just insane. That's a great picture for it.

And I think that's one of the core things with the concept art as a whole. There's obviously things that we want to show to really show the details of the ship and what that ship's functionality and loadout and everything else is. But then there's also pieces that we want to do that just set the scene and set the atmosphere, and give an idea of the dream of what we're trying to achieve. So, yes, some of these pieces might be more art pieces than... I remember me and you had a big conversation about this. I'm not going to say it was a heated conversation, because it wasn't, but there's things that we wanted to show that really put this in our universe, and then there's things that we wanted to show that were kind of like a little love letter to concept vehicles as a whole, because this being almost the end of an era with concept vehicles, a lot of work went into it. And from a concept artist point of view, delivering those really cinematic shots at the end of a long period of working on it is kind of part of the payoff.

Yeah, this is Levski. It was the best way to communicate the scale of the thing, as the diameter of the hole, I think, is five kilometers, and the length of this ship is 150 meters, so it gives a better idea of what you could see and where, when this will come out.

We thought that was such a big hole when we built it. And then we put an Odin in there and it's like, oh.

It is still a big hole. Odin's just a very big ship. I think, to build on what you said about the key art and how it's almost a love letter in some ways to all the insane work that we've seen: from an artist's perspective, the team's grown so much over the last few years, and it's these pieces of concept key art that appear on Google Images, on the YouTube videos where the backers are talking about how excited they are, and even internally, when you're about to start the project and you get presented with 'this is the ship you're going to be making', and you know that's going to be your world for five months, or whatever. It could be months, and in the large ships' cases, even longer. Those moments are what motivates you as a game developer. When you go into that first call with Ben and John and they're like, okay, here's the kickoff for this, this is what it's all about, and you see the pictures and you're like, yeah, we're going to make that. It's so exciting.

It's about setting the vision. So obviously the concept doesn't cover every single area, but it gives everyone an idea of what the vision is for this vehicle. So when you're making that decision about what do we do with this space, what do we do with this bulkhead, we know what the intention was. So sure, they may not be realistic about everything that will happen in our engine, but it gets across the vision and the narrative of what we want the vehicle's identity to be.

Plus 2,000 just for the elevator.

All right, so there's 6,000 in the hold, and then the elevator, if you want to leave cargo on the elevator, that's another 2,000.

Yeah, and that's an elevator that goes down and up between the medium hangar, at the back of the medium hangar.

Do we have an image of that? Because right now you're telling me there's an elevator that holds as much cargo as the Ironclad.

The elevator is this part with the straps.

So see the chevrons at the back? That's the elevator that goes up and down at the very back of the hangar.

Is that red light at the top the ATC thing you were talking about?

Yes.

See, that's the scale, right? We showed that side shot and it looked like it was an entire room. It's not an entire room. It's literally the catwalk that you're seeing on the left and right.

And when we went into this and got the initial brief, it came out that we were doing an Anvil ship, and it's like, yeah, cool. And then we got the brief and it's like, okay, this we can work with. And then through each point of decision we made, we were always looking at it like, this is our ultimate ship for this purpose. This is what I would class as our end game. Obviously, we need to make it. Obviously, we need to deliver it. So there's got to be compromises somewhere. But we did our best to always look at it and think, right, how do we make the best we can? And this is what we tried to do. And when we get into production, we get to see whether or not we can achieve it. But we put a lot of discussions and decisions into trying to get this thing to be something that we can be proud of.

33. That's bare bones.

How many operator turrets were there? We're talking bare bones, not even working at full efficiency. That's not even saying there's anyone feeding the torpedoes. That's just to man the operator seats. That's the sort of numbers you're talking about.

I feel like when it comes time to balance a ship like this, that's probably the biggest thing. If you can coordinate 33 people together, it's like you deserve to just be, you know, the Norse god of everything.

It's like whenever you have a large group of people playing games together, there needs to be someone who is doing a little bit less of the interaction, but managing everyone and actually getting them all to coordinate. It's like anyone that's ever done raid leading in any sort of MMO. That person absolutely isn't putting out the highest DPS in the group, but they're taking a step back and watching everyone while doing it.

They've literally made the 40-man raid.

Pretty much, yeah.

Yeah, and that's exactly what I was about to reference. It's the 40-man raid experience, but it's you with your org, your friends, going out and having that gameplay for an evening.

And having your capship to run. And the best part is also, you have different specialities, right? Because you need fighter pilots, then you need turret gunners, then you need engineering, then you need the guys that actually coordinate the entire crew, and probably more than one guy at that point, because it's going to be very difficult.

Raid leading is a really unique skill. Whenever you play MMOs, there's only ever a handful of people that are even willing to do it. And they choose to do it because they enjoy doing it. But it's a very unique set of subskills. Anyone who is a raid leader or has ever been in a raid will understand just how different it is as a way to play the game.

It's like the epitome of sandbox emergent gameplay, really. It's a role that doesn't necessarily get put in by the game design teams, but it has to exist.

It's like Raid Leader is your class.

To be blunt, it's for someone who wants to do a lot of cargo. They want a ship that's relatively durable, and they like Drakes that have lots of guns. Because Drake ostensibly market this as a cargo manufacturer, but we all know what Drake tends to get up to, so sometimes the cargo's not as legit as it should be, or maybe the cargo is cargo you've got to deliver pain to other people. But yeah, it sort of caters to that. And externally, at least, I think it's pretty true to the concept. We did make some changes to it. Dan begged for an extra entrance into the top of it.

Yeah, traversal was such a massive thing for this ship versus the concept, I remember. And with the signage as well, I remember when we worked on the Polaris, one of the key pieces of feedback was that the signage wasn't as good as it could be. And obviously we went back and edited that a bit, but with this ship...

We had the stairs around the other way as well, didn't we?

Yeah, the stairs have flipped. I believe the elevator was added as well. When we actually got it in and started running around it, once we actually started putting the blockout together, we made a few changes just so it felt a bit more natural, because there was a lot of back and forth and hard 90 and hard 180 degrees that people were having to do as they were walking around. So we softened a lot of the corners, put 45s in. Like here, the wall got knocked in so this became an open area, which I think really helped differentiate the different decks, which is obviously something that we tried really hard to do. You should always know roughly where you are, and when you're in a modular kit, because this is one of the most modular ships we've ever made...

That's developer modularity. You always have to specify: there's player-facing modularity, and then there's the method in which we make our ships.

Yeah, so when we talk about developer modularity, what we mean is the asset pack that you use to author the vehicles. So let's say you have a wall that's two meters long. It doesn't make sense to model every single wall two times, in the same way that if you were to make a car, you wouldn't 3D model every single wheel again. You'd want to duplicate it. So we have this base layer of modularity of our assets underneath, and then we sit on top of that these extra assets that make each of the spaces feel different. And it was really important for us to make it so no matter where you were stood in the ship, you didn't feel lost and you were able to quickly orient yourself. I get the first time you're in it, it's a big ship, you're not going to know exactly where you're going, but it shouldn't take long to establish that.

A sense of exploration though, isn't it? The first time you enter a ship, you want to explore it. You don't necessarily just want to be like, I go in it and I know exactly what's going on. So I think that's part of the charm of these bigger ships, that you do need to explore them a little bit. Obviously, like you say, having navigation is an important user experience thing that we need to try and improve. Obviously, we've got the minimap as well, which helps a lot with that sort of stuff.

You shouldn't have to rely on that.

You shouldn't have to rely on that. As you're heading towards engineering, even though you're in a corridor, you want to start seeing those engineering-y elements bleeding out into the room, so it doesn't feel too stale. And then when you get up to habitation and stuff, you want things to be a little bit more clad, a little bit more refined.

We've got a bed, it's got weapon racks, got access to all your components. We wanted it to keep its Origin DNA, but be a heavy fighter. And so one of the things that is helpful is having easy access to all your components. So we prioritised that functionality as the main thing that we really wanted on the interior of the ship. And then obviously being able to stow your weapons and personal storage and that sort of stuff.

It wasn't meant to be like an explorer or anything like that. It was supposed to be combat focused. It's got a little bit of space so you can keep general boxes from utility missions, like the small ones that you gather, and obviously for loadouts, standard weapon racks, a little bit of personal storage. The core components to keep the ship actually running are all inside, so you don't have to go outside if they get damaged; you can repair them from the inside. But obviously there's not enough space for all the components on the inside, so the less critical ones for being able to actually operate the ship are outside the ship.

I think it really depends on the role and depends on what we want to do with it. Obviously we want an Origin ship to feel like an Origin ship, and I think that's key to it. You see this vehicle lined up against the others, you can see the DNA from it, and that's what we want to keep. It really depends on the role of the ship. If we do more fighters, we might take similar inspirations. If we do more commercial ships, we might not. In the more commercial stuff, we've looked at a lot of yachts, that side of things, whereas, personally, a yacht doesn't feel very combat. So I think there's a lot of range within our manufacturers to experiment with visuals, and I think that's one of the nice things of the game that we work on, that we are able to try new ideas and experiment with new visual ideas.

It's combined two different DNAs. You've got the Origin DNA, and Origin has its own identity, but you wouldn't expect an industrial Origin ship or a combat Origin ship to look the same. You'd expect them to be completely different. This is one of our first times doing a very dedicated, completely only combat-focused Origin ship, and it has a little bit of difference, but it's the same way that a combat Drake ship is a bit different from a combat...

I mean, the 325 is a combat ship, but it's a variant of an existing line, so there's only so much you can do with a variant.

Exactly. The 125 and the M50 have that split of interceptor and racer. But this is a true, dedicated fighter as is.

You see it in real-life automotive manufacturing and aeronautic manufacturing as well, that even though Boeing makes planes, they also make helicopters, and Rolls-Royce makes engines, not just cars.

Mitsubishi makes everything. You're touching on one of my biggest pet peeves here. When people are like, that doesn't look like X manufacturer, or Y manufacturer wouldn't do that, I always go to Mitsubishi. This is the same company that makes tanks, refrigerators, elevators.

I do think it's important to keep some kind of core DNA. When there's a BMW right behind you, you know it's a BMW. There's always these core parts of the DNA of the manufacturer. I think Alberto touched on it perfectly when he was doing the first fly-around, about how Origin always reconnects the lines back around, and that core art direction can be applied to other contexts. There's core rules, and then there's areas to flex those rules.

But even brands evolve over time. In the fiction of our universe, some of these ships, like the Idris and the Javelin, are hundreds of years old. So why would an Aegis ship today look anything like an Idris that was designed 200 years ago? They've got new people. They come in with new ideas, new technologies.

The Zeus Mk I versus the Zeus Mk II is probably the most clear example.

Technically, the Connie folks are flying right now is the Mark IV. You saw that change from the Mark III back in the day. RSI is a great one. You look at the new Aurora. It's not that the old ones never happened. It's that these things evolve.

Within RSI as well, if you look at the Polaris, it's the more military-centered, whereas if you look at things like the Apollo, it's a little bit cleaner and not military. Look at the Connie as well, like the Phoenix. They're very different DNA, but at the same time, they're both very obviously RSI.

I think one thing that excited me about the Starlight was, because we obviously heard about it being in development while we were doing the Ironclad, and we can rearm and refuel inside of the Ironclad Assault, someone made a good point like, oh, you can just stay out in space in the Ironclad and just come and refuel it and then have all your smaller Pitbulls come out of that, and you can stay out in space. And that was when it first started to click for me. When you talk about how it's not necessarily about being this path to riches, but if you're the refueling guy for a bigger org, and that bigger org has got these bigger initiatives and they're making money doing these other things, you might not get rich doing it, but you might get paid really well if you're really good at it. I'm sure there's orgs out there that heard what we were talking about, and it's like, well, we could have a fleet of refueling ships, and their only job is to just make sure that all of our fighters and all of our big ships have got fuel. And at that point, maybe you could get rich, because you're part of that bigger ecosystem and that bigger progression.

And as you know, Tactical Strike Groups, which just came out in 4.8 here, is this next big step towards more coordinated ship-based gameplay. There are, of course, players and organizations out there that have been doing fleet ops for years. Those technologies continue to develop as armor continues to come on, as Maelstrom comes online, as time-to-kill starts to expand, and there's more time out in the fight. There's more capital ships coming online: the Javelin after the Idris, the Odin, and stuff like this. There will be more opportunities to, oh, this fight isn't done. And these larger ships can't fit in the bay of an Idris and can't fit in the bay of an 890 Jump. They're going to need refueling ships in order to stay in the fight. So there's even a role within fleet ops for refueling ships, which is why, to answer the question that we started at the beginning of this, a refueling ship is at DefenseCon.

Well, the original brief was, let's add a beam weapon to the Hammerhead. And like you say, every time we showed this in concept, it was, it needs to be more shark. And I hope that we nailed it in the end.

So I'll be honest, I was a little bit skeptical about how far to push it.

And I think that's fair. And then I got an image of Bruce from Finding Nemo. And it was like, this.

I remember going to Alberto and being like... how? Okay. But I think this was Sam as well, wasn't it? I think it was one of those where we pushed and pushed and pushed it, and then we all sort of went, yeah, he nailed it. He's got it. It definitely has that shark DNA. There's no hiding from that. But it feels like a ship that could exist. It feels very brutal. It feels very aggressive. And it's got that absolutely exquisite line that just runs all the way down from the side to the very, very tip. And it still sits in that sort of age of Aegis next to the Hammerhead, and that's something we were really, really conscious of. Because it was being built around the Hammerhead as its core, it would have been so easy to push its, let's call it its manufacturing date, far into the future, and we didn't want that. We wanted it to feel like it still sat alongside the Hammerhead nicely. And then the other, I guess not happy accident, but the result of us having to put more time into it than we were expecting, was we took a look at the turrets, and one of the things we looked at was, actually, this would be a really good opportunity to put remote turrets onto it. And I think that was absolutely the right decision. Functionality-wise, that's super good.

And don't bury the lede here. These are remote turrets. So your crew is not spread all...

Not to the extent, yeah. They are much better protected within their little cubbyholes. Gives them much better visibility as well. The visibility, the range, just how we can package it, I think is super cool. Every time we showed Mark the concept, we had the weapons on the outside and he's like, no, put them on the inside, and then we'd flip them. And I think little decisions like that that really improve the gameplay are super cool. And then, just visually, obviously the front looks like a shark. And then we tried to build on that with the little armor pockets on the side that feel like the gills, and the big fin in the middle, which is actually a big cooling mechanism for the main laser. We didn't want it to be just a fin down the middle. We wanted to give these things purpose. And obviously you've got a massive beam on the front of it, so we needed to build in those cooling elements. It was one of those things where the more time we spent with it, the more things fell into place.

I remember every time we were going through the concept meeting, every time Ben was coming back and being like, oh, well, it needs to be more shark. And I just kept thinking to myself, this still has the same delivery date. This is starting to look like a lot more modifications.

It really depends on the brief. If I'm doing a capital ship, our approach will be completely different. But considering how a motorbike works and how much of a human appears on a motorbike, which is a good 30%, the first things I will make sure I have in the right position are the steering wheel? What's it called on a bike? The handlebars. As my accent can tell you, I'm not British, and English is not my first language. So I make sure that I have them in the right position. I have the character fully rigged so I can move it. Generally, I also reference other animations from the game, so sometimes we can recycle things.

That's a consideration. If you can reuse an existing animation for the enter and exit, that cuts down development time, development cost tremendously.

And it's all a matter of balance. Can we afford it? Is it something particularly important that we have to do?

And when you say can you afford it, I continuously have to clarify that we're talking about performance metrics. It's a relative development term. We use the term cost to mean performance and not money or whatnot.

No, no, no. Eventually time.

Time. I think one thing as well is when you have this library of mo-capped entry-exit anims we've got for different styles of vehicles, if you have something that's a little bit more unique in its stance, like take for example the Fury, we had to make it so the seat would come out and lower down, because it didn't really make sense for the player to kind of scramble up and spin around in there. So it ended up adding some more interest into the entry-exit anim because of that limitation. Just kind of welcome, really.

How does the LOD work? Where do the LODs come in? They're at the very end, really, aren't they?

Yeah. LODs are just before we put it into game, really. So we have our white box, gray box, LOD 0, and final; LOD is the stage where LODing would happen.

So how do you make the LODs?

So LODs typically would start with... I'm assuming if you're asking about LODs, you've looked at our production art workflow a little bit. If not, there's some resources, because it's a little bit unique. But we basically start by removing our chamfers, our bevels, which are our small edges which give the nice little polished effect to our edges, and our small POM, so our POM lines and our main decals that are quite subtle. And then that kind of gets you to LOD1, and then the rest is kind of a more traditional LODing pipeline.

We actually did an episode, gosh, years ago. It's still on our YouTube. I believe the Friday show was called Happy Hour when we did it. So if you look on our YouTube channel, we actually did a whole hour with Eric Kieron Davis and, oh, I can't remember who else, where we went through how producers make schedules and plan for the development work. And it's the same process for just about everything. So you're asking specifically for ships, but it's the same information. It's changed a little bit. There's Agile and there's Waterfall and stuff like that. But for the most part, I think it's still fairly accurate, and it's a decent primer if you were curious. That's up on the YouTube channel. I got in a lot of trouble for doing a show with producers and how to make a schedule. I think there were only like 17 citizens that enjoyed it. They're like, why are you doing a show with producers? And I'm like, because they're essential to the development of any video game.

When you're in a meeting, producers are the comedians that keep it all together. They know how to run the meeting in a way that keeps everyone... There's nothing more boring than looking at schedules and stuff like that for artists, so they do a really good job of making it fun for us.

Yeah, I don't see why not. A lot of our stuff is based off cars. It's going to be a very British reference, but you have Vauxhall cars, which is Opel in Europe, and I forget what the actual name of this particular brand was, but basically the Saab 9-3 is a Vauxhall underneath, and at the time they owned the same companies, and they're like, take the car, you can change the bodywork slightly, make it a Saab. And Saab just ignored that.

Was it Porsche? Porsche always made racing cars or sports cars and everything. And then they brought out the SUV and it did all right. And then now we've got Lamborghini SUVs. And they're like, that's selling all right, we'll have a cut of that pie.

And you've got companies like Mitsubishi who are making sports cars. They're making giant 18-wheel trucks. They're making TVs. And it's like, what's that brand identity?

They're making air conditioners. That's one of the things I like about the racing stuff, like the Razor and that. A lot of times car manufacturers will take something from their racing pedigree and then implement it into the normal, like Quattro with Audi and stuff like that, and like Porsche with the flat six and things like that. They kind of get informed by their adventures. I think the Ford GT was a massive push as well, where they tend to use the racetrack as a place to experiment what works.

They can take the technology away from that and put it into the mainstream.

So MISC ships will probably steal a bit from Mirai, if it worked, and what didn't work, and less experimental stuff, but some of the new direction.

Yeah, I think when it comes to MISC and Mirai specifically, there's a hard distinction for me. MISC are very utilitarian, they've got a purpose, they've got a role, they've got a job, whereas Mirai is definitely the performance division. Anything that doesn't necessarily fit into that industrial feel. MISC is a very, very strong art style and I'm very happy with where that's at. But yeah, that doesn't mean they can't try new things. And even if you take things like RSI, you take some of our old RSI ships versus our new RSI ships, they progress over the generations of their vehicle releases. They span hundreds of years or so. Many hundreds of years.

Mule. Mule's an easy one. Kind of split the vote a little bit, didn't it? I think the functionality of the Mule leads more to Drake than necessarily... it is quite a high-end vehicle for Drake. It feels a little bit more refined, but a lot of the inspiration for the Mule came from what we see now in tractors and combine harvesters and that sort of thing. And they are very purpose-built, so they kind of tick that brief, but they are just a little bit nicer.

Melkor the Wise is like, the Mule is high-end?

Well, compared to Drake.

Yeah, compared to some of the other Drake ships. It feels more kind of Argo-y, in the sense it's, like you say, like plant machinery.

Yeah, if you look at the interior, the interior is all sort of moulded plastics, whereas if you look at the interior of some of our Drake spaceships, they're...

Very stripped back. Screens very basic.

Screens on the floor, helicopter seats, that sort of style.

The Vulcan concept was Anvil for probably 80% of its concept development, and then it got towards the end and we're like, it's sort of not particularly Anvil-y anymore. It's getting towards Aegis, and then the whole cockpit bit of it changed to be more like the front of the Reclaimer.

I think the Vulture looks more Argo.

Well, the big dirty secret is that there aren't 15 different manufacturers making all these. It's the people at this table who are making them. And so you've got to put your brain in, okay, I've got to put my brain in Drake mode, I've got to put my brain in Crusader mode. And sometimes the brain just doesn't want to do what you want it to do, and it will push you towards whatever these other manufacturers are. And occasionally that leads you to invent new manufacturers, when your brain just wants to do something completely different.

I remember just before I moved on to the Fury, I'd spent a little bit of time on the Corsair helping Lodit, and my entire visual library was just Drake. And then it's like, now you're doing a MISC racing ship that's kind of Mirai performance kind of thing. We weren't really sure which direction it was going to go then. And every time I modelled anything, I went square. I went big bolt, and Ben was like, no, rivets, metal, like chrome. I was like, okay. And every mechanism was more Drake-y until I remembered the direction of it.

You just referred to the Fury as a racing ship. Obviously, the two variants that we just released are not dedicated [racers].

No, no, I meant nippy, like they're fast and stuff like that.