Jacob Taylor

Well, I think anyone who plays games enough kind of knows what to expect from loot, and we're not going to reinvent the wheel there. But for a long time, loot was owned by individual content designers, so it got a little bit inconsistent. And in an initiative at the start of this year, I've taken it over as a systems designer to try and get things back to consistent again. And hopefully you'll notice that in Align and Mine and the most recent Stormbreaker locations. So basically we just take a few things into account: category of the item, rarity, and size, because it all has to fit in a box. So we have four main categories, which are weapons and ammo, armor, medical, and then miscellaneous. And those are distinguished visually by different boxes. Miscellaneous can then be broken down into more specifics like food, mining, repair, so that if the level designers have a cafeteria or a garage, they can place things that make more sense in there. And then we have five rarities: common, uncommon, rare, epic, and legendary. You'll find the first four of those in loot boxes. We have three different rarities of loot boxes: common, uncommon, rare. Epic, we don't have a box for that, but it appears in all those boxes in a very small amount, with more likelihood of getting it if you are looking at a rare box. We don't have those distinguished visually yet, but that is the plan. We will be getting new models for those, so you'll be able to just glance at a box and see that, oh, that's a rare box. It'll be a lot shinier than the common one, I assume. And then we also have size of the item. We have three different sizes of boxes, and it obviously makes sense that you can't find a railgun in a small weapons box. And it tends to be that as things get more powerful, they get larger. So you'll only get the full suit armors inside the largest armor box. So it's kind of turned out that as far as gameplay goes, the size of a box is actually, I think, more important than the rarity of a box, because what is rare is kind of like a tint on an item or something like that. And then we have legendary items, and those don't appear in loot boxes. Those are saved for the location. So in Orbageddon, in Align and Mine or whatever it's called, we had the camo rifle, the Vault Rifle, and we had the camo hunter outfit, the hunter armor. And then in Stormageddon, Stormbreaker, we had the bright yellow radiation suits. And those will never be found anywhere else. They'll be found in those locations. Whereas all the other stuff that's kind of unique to those locations, it's only unique right now. As they get older, they'll kind of spill out into other locations as well. And how we decide where they go, those individual boxes or the loot: we draw a map of the location and then we decide how difficult it is to get into all those rooms and then assign them a loot value, and that determines whether they can have uncommon or common loot inside them.

Maybe good to mention, we are also making an active effort to go back through some of our old locations and update them to snuff. Obviously, there's no date on when that is or when that's going to finish, but it's something we are trying to do to make sure we're consistent.

Yeah, and that will be done using the new extension to the system that Jacob's currently working on, which makes it easier for us just generally to set up loot, to place loot, but also to define locations. So you'll start seeing differences between Stanton and Pyro through loot.

Yeah, so a lot of what Luke has said is things that we're already doing. We're trying to make each location have its own themed loot in some way, but it currently takes quite a lot of manual intervention to make that happen. A lot of inefficiencies in the workflow. So I've been working on some extensions to the system to improve our tools around that and make it easier for designers to set things up in such a way that it can scale to all of our different locations, all our different systems, and grow for the future as well.

Yeah, when I first started on this, I remember you saying this system was made to place rocks and trees.

Yeah, one part of the system was made to place rocks and trees. And now it's grown, and it's even placing Atlas Geosuits, I think, in certain places.

You didn't say I couldn't, Jacob. If you don't tell me I can't do something, I'm going to do it, all right? I'm a designer. My goal is to get stuff done by any means necessary.

Yeah, no, I understand that, I respect that. What I do is I try to adapt to the changing needs that the designers have as we're making new content. And what might not have been supported at one particular time will be supported later. So we keep growing our technology as the needs of our content and gameplay grow as well.

Yes, it makes it a lot harder for sure. There are different layers to the physicalization as well. Just saying it takes up space, that means even within an inventory, we are measuring the dimensions of the item and the volume that it will take up, so that you can't fit a super long thing in a really small box even if its volume would technically fit. So that gives more work for me to do in terms of the maths internally. But then there are more level design and system design perspectives on this as well, which Luke might be able to say more about, of how we choose between when we're going to present the item to you physically in the world or when we're going to present you with a loot box that you have to look inside.

You asked, does it make it harder? I think it makes it harder for everyone, even the players, but especially the devs. Because we have been physicalizing certain items. It's always the items that are particularly rare or useful. If we want to draw your attention to something, we'll put it in the world. We do that in an eye-catching way within the level. So in Align and Mine we placed vault weapons in gun racks. Recently those got lit consistently to really show off what's inside there. And again, the radiation suit is now available on a mannequin. And we'll be using that quite often, I think, from now on, and going back through and placing it. But the other reason, other than technical reasons, we don't want physicalized loot everywhere is because loot boxes solve all the downsides of that. You can group items together, and they're in an easily recognizable package, a big red box, whatever. Physicalized items, you can easily mistake those for static props on tables and maybe miss them. It massively speeds up the jobs of level designers and artists to place these things around. Imagine placing individual pieces all over tables, making sure you've got room for them. And then it makes my job easier, because if anything changes in loot, we don't have to go back through every level and delete individual bits and pieces. I just change what's going to spawn in the box that's there. And then finally, it just hides the respawning of bits and pieces. Nothing pops in on tables. We refresh in the box.

It's a difficult thing to balance because, as Luke says, it does make our life harder and it can sometimes make the players' life harder, but it can also make the experience better. When we're designing things like Stormbreaker and Align and Mine, you think back to playing games when I was a kid. A loot room should feel like a loot room, right? Instead of me just seeing a bunch of red boxes and knowing it's a chance of rare loot, I want to see the gold stacked up on a table. I want to walk in and I want to see a vault shotgun or a vault sniper rifle in a case in front of me, because it gives two things. It gives affordance to players, because when they look through the window, they see the reward that they want and they know the door's locked. Aside from you all clipping through environments, the normal flow would be that you then have to go and figure out how to get through that door, usually without breaking physics. So it's kind of a toss-up between the two. So what we try to do is choose what we think could be something that we'd want the player to latch onto visually and think, I want to achieve that, I want to get that. And that's why in some places we have the vault weaponry visible, so people can see it and get into it. And we have a few armor mannequins that are the same. I can see it, I want it, how do I get to it?

It's big. With crafting, God knows how many things we're going to inject as rewards: thousands of blueprints, hundreds of materials. So we really need all of this available to us so we can dish it out into all various parts of the game. Some places where it's more difficult, some places where it's easier, unique resources, different systems. So it's big, because the whole gathering aspect of crafting is the foundation layer. It's the biggest layer of the pyramid, then refining, and then crafting at the very top. So it's big, big.

All of the pieces that we've talked about so far, all of the work that Luke, Nick, Andrei and Elliot are doing, all of that content is things that we'll be able to add blueprints to, add crafting materials to, and in loot boxes you might potentially even find some pre-crafted loot, but we'll see about that.

So this is a big one because we really believe that base building will enable us to really change the universe. The way that players will interact with one another or not want to interact with one another. And it will become hopefully more of the backbone of the game where even if you want to interact with it or not, one way or another, you are always influenced by the gameplay loops of base building. So for example, maybe you're just a small miner and you want to just mine your resources and kind of ship that out and make a nice living out of that. Then for you, it might actually be good to have a small little base close by the mining resources to more efficiently do your gathering of your resources and so on. And the cool thing with base building is that we're trying to keep the possibilities as open as possible so that you can actually choose what you want to do with your bases yourself. So maybe you have these weird bases just tucked away in the universe where it's just like there's no electricity and you just use it to store away some of the stuff you found in the universe. Or maybe it is more of a sprawling trading hub for you and your organization. Or a base just built for the most efficient refining processes or search. Again, the guys know a little bit more about the specific processes. But from a visual perspective, what we're really trying to do is to just give you a beautiful base template that you then can let your imagination all lose. And kind of use it the way you want to use it as a player, even though it might be very different than other players.

Yeah, I think you really hit on it. It's very much a base can be used for whatever you want to use it for. That will provide options for you to do all kinds of stuff with it. And there should be or is likely to be relevant links into pretty much any kind of gameplay that you can think of.

Actually adding to that, it's a growing feature in addition to what we have already, right? So every gameplay loop that we have will also have its representation in the... Not every, but most of the gameplay features that we have will probably have representation in the base building aspect. And the bigger our game grows, the more features I introduce, they will also find a slot in your base.

Even if you don't have your own base, it's still impactful because you'll be visiting the other people who have made their bases and using their facilities. So even if you're not doing the work, it's still an interesting thing for you to use.

Short answer, yes. So they will respawn. But it is very unlikely that they will respawn on the land plot that you already have. So if you already have a base, you already extracted it. Every mineral that was below your extractor. It's very unlikely that the deposit will respawn. So what we want to see there is players more moving around in their bases and basically going through to new locations and actually grabbing new resources. And to answer the economy part of this question, yes, that is a huge undertaking that we have to go through here. And that is like we really have to get certain resources out of the system and the system being our game. And that means that we as the system design team and everyone working on that, we really have to work closely with the economy team and make sure that like even everything that we pull out of the system is meaningful. And then we create certain values for certain resources because we really want to have like a player driven economy and we want to have a healthy in-game economy that is driven by our game. And it's a challenge, but we are definitely motivated to resolve that and get that like in a really good state.

So what you're talking about there is like the concept of resource sources and sinks, because having your extractor on your base is a source of resources until it's depleted. But then we need to make sure that there's also sinks in for that resource in various gameplay loops so that you don't just well, just have inflation essentially of just a buildup of resources you can't do anything with. So yeah, that'll be a very careful balancing act.

Yeah, interesting answer. You mentioned something that I think maybe not a lot of folks have considered this idea of having multiple or mobile bases. Obviously, you know, folks with the land claims and we'll talk about the land claims in a bit, you know, you build your home, you might stake out your home. This is where I store my stuff and I decorate and all that stuff. But for industrial purposes, while you could certainly build that location up, then go out, gather stuff, bring it back. There is a gameplay style where you then instead create smaller mobile bases and move and move them around as you need to stuff like this.

So you can still have your static home base with your first extractor, but at some point your deposit just runs empty and that you can still leave the extractor there if you like the look of it. But then if you still like the area and you don't want to move away, you can just disassemble the extractor and then decide to, okay, let's buy a new plot or let's move to a new plot and actually find another resource there.

That is a bigger topic because, yeah, so the TLDR or the short version is the mining that we have right now will change more drastically again. And we will revisit like other gathering methods that we have. Like we have mining, we have salvage and salvage will also get like a nice little treat. But let's start with mining. So on the mining side, we basically have to because of the quality that we add to the mineables that you will now find. We talked about that and we considered that, OK, with the mining system right now where we have multiple resources per rock, that doesn't make any sense because you might want to look for quality instead of finding like a specific resource. So we want to make it easier for the player to actually look for the specific resources they need for the crafting processes. So we will basically split up or we break out the randomness in the mineables that we currently have, but have bespoke mineable. So we will find the copper rock, the iron rock, the titanium. So the titanium rock and because what you're looking for is a better quality there. So you will still look for like the titanium rock that basically fits, like has the perfect quality, but you don't have to look for a rock that contains titanium anymore. And here we also want to emphasize or we want to utilize the new plan attack that was also talked about at CitizenCon where we want to make use of the biomes that we get through those. And then have like more meaningfully placed minerals on the planet. So you will find certain materials more likely at a riverside or in a certain biome versus in other biomes. So we are really looking forward to get more control over that. So, yeah, we are internally quite excited about that. And yeah, and additionally on the mining. So we now talked about like the minerals themselves. We will also be more concrete on the mineables that you find based on the profession that you picked. So if you are a ship miner, you will find ship mining deposits. If you are an FPS miner, you will only find FPS mineables. And if you are ground vehicle miner, you will find ground vehicle resources. And if you if you want to use your ground extraction tool in your base, you will find specific materials there. So what I'm saying here is that we don't have the shared minerals anymore that we currently have between FPS and ground vehicle mining. We will have the hard cuts. So everything you will find FPS in FPS mining, you will only find an FPS mining. Everything ground vehicle mining, only there, only ship mining, only there. So this, we will have a clearer separation so that we can actually encourage the different gameplay loops a bit more effectively.

I'm really looking forward to that. It'll mean that whichever kind of mining profession you choose to do, you'll have some valuable unique materials that you can only get with that profession.

It's going to be a lot more different materials as well.

The amount of materials that we will have is crazy.

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There's the thing that I mentioned at the beginning that Salvage will get also a little revisit. And something that I'm really happy and excited to tell you is that we will have some time to revisit it. And what we will do there is I think something that a lot of people already expected for the initial release. And that is in regards to the construction material that you actually get from structural salvage. That is that basically the ships are made out of certain components. And once you basically gather them through that, you will have those materials and then there will be processes to separate them. But this is something that is still being decided of what way we want to go down there.

The thing I really like about this is that it ties it into the dismantle side of crafting. That if you dismantle something, you'll get back some of what it's made of. Same thing with Salvage. Your ship just kind of becomes a portable dismantling fabricator thing.

But as an additional note, there will be some materials that you won't get back in the crafting process. So you will use some materials in the crafting process that are, let's say, volatile or in some way exclusive. So if you would then structural salvage your recently crafted vehicle, you might get some of the material not back at all. Like if, for example, bad example, but for an example, if you used antimatter in the crafting process, you won't get that back. You will just get back aluminum or copper and stuff like that. But those exclusive materials you won't get back in the reverse process of crafting.

Yes, yes. Again, we're trying to make it very dynamic and open so that different bases can cater to different players and different player experiences. So you'll be able to build small bases and maybe even slightly larger bases, but it might take a while by yourself. And then, of course, you can just team up, and you can, together with the front, really quickly build a smaller base or really start to try to literally take things to the moon in the future. But you'll be able to build larger structures. We'll be recommended to do that in groups.

I think I saw some people discussing whether they would be able to sell services on their base, though. Yeah, I think that'll be pretty cool that you can build up some infrastructure and have people pay to use it.

Okay, when you say sell services, my mind went to a different place. What are you talking about?

I'm talking about, you know, I've built some really high-tier crafting machines, and I'm just going to let people come to my base and craft stuff with the best machines.

Yes, absolutely. But I'll talk about the current plans. So first of all, there's different kinds of blueprint. And most of them will be upgradeable through research. Different kinds of blueprint will get different benefits from researching them. So like a refining blueprint will get more efficient. So you get a better yield of refined goods for raw input. Or like a repair blueprint might be able to repair a little bit more effectively, stuff like that. But the one that everyone's probably asking about is the creation blueprint, which lets you make new stuff. And a higher tier one of those will let you craft the higher tier of the relevant item. So let's say you've already got the tier one blueprint for a gun and it has stats like fire rate and recoil. You'll be able to see on the crafting UI the stat range for those stat types. And the exact value that you get when you actually make the gun will be dependent on the quality of the resources that you put in. When you upgrade the blueprint to tier two, you'll see the tier two version of the gun and those stat ranges will be shifted. So it'll have a higher top end and a higher low end as well. It'll be on average better. But the actual number that you get is still dependent on the quality of the materials you put in. Of course, the higher tier blueprints also need you to bring more advanced materials to them. And related to that is that these blueprints have aspects, we call them. It's kind of like parts of the product. So like the barrel of a gun or the grip of the gun or something like that, which will influence different stats of the item. So if you put materials into the grip part of the gun, the quality of those materials might impact the recoil, but it's not going to impact the rate of fire. And this becomes especially interesting for the very highest tier of creation blueprints because then you'll get a choice of what materials to put in to certain aspects, and based on the choice you make, it will influence different stats. So you might be able to choose between improving the recoil or the reload speed, depending on which material you put in. Yeah, and then I guess the only other kind of blueprint that's interesting for upgrade is the upgrade blueprint itself. Because research and upgrade blueprints are not quite the same thing. But if you use an upgrade blueprint to increase the tier of an existing item, none of the existing stats or materials on that item matter anymore. It's just the new materials that you put in or the upgrade will affect the stats. And the important reason for this is so that whether you craft an item straight at tier 3 or craft it at tier 1 and then upgrade to tier 2 and then upgrade to tier 3, the resulting item will be the same if you use the same materials.

So you can't skip a step if you have the blueprint.

Yeah, if you have the creation blueprint, you can skip, and you skip straight to whatever tier you want. The upgrade basically only exists if you already have the item and you don't want to spend all of the resources to make a whole other copy of it. You just want to spend the smaller amount of resources necessary to turn it into the higher tier one.

And that upgrade blueprint, I assume one of the ingredients, is the original item.

Yes, yes.

And so you were speaking, you're speaking primarily of guns and items, but this system, one would assume is also applicable to the ships as well.

Yep, absolutely. And not only ships, also ship components. It's like something that we really want to make sure is that we don't want you to go through the process of, because you crafted your tier one item, you then have to disassemble it to just craft a tier two item, right? So that is like nonsense. So we really want to enable players to have their item and then use the upgrade to actually still have the item, but then the better version of that.

This is where we start to see the differential between not just individual ship models, but within the ship model itself. And when some decisions are made that affect the baseline of a ship, the one that folks can buy in Astro Armada or whatnot, those decisions don't happen in a vacuum. They have to account also for the potential upgrade path that is coming with crafting. If a ship is a certain way where you're like, well, I'm not really a fan of it in its base configuration, through time and effort on the player's behalf, maybe you can take a ship that you weren't totally happy with and now make it into something that becomes your daily driver.

Yeah, this calls back to the heavy balancing effort that Torsten was talking about earlier, that one of the big challenges is going to be very carefully balancing all of the different possibilities that you'll have access to with crafting. Because instead of just one ship with these values for these thrusters, the ship hull can change and the thrusters can change, multiple tiers of them, quality scaling, lots of potential for variation. So, yeah, we will be paying very close attention to this.

Well, trying to explain it to your granny is always a bad idea, because they're not going to be interested. But what we do is basically we turn the designers' ideas into something that will actually work in the engine. Often what we do is we make the tools that then the level and content designers use to create the gameplay.

Yeah, I guess Torsten comes up with an idea. He sends me a GDD. I then look at it, and then we translate it into code and tasks, and then do the tasks, and just combine the code together.

Well, depending on the feature, a lot of the times we will also be doing a bit of the initial UI work or a bit of the initial design work, because we need to actually test the features before we give them back. So you end up doing a bit of everything, honestly.

One definitely stands out. Recently we've had quite an amusing one with the room system, because we found that we were getting some room system crashes when people were doing stuff with the inventory, and that doesn't make any sense, they're completely unrelated. Eventually, after a lot of pain, we figured out that it was to do with helmets. When you drag a helmet out of the inventory and it goes as a preview on your head, well, a helmet has a room inside. But it's not a real room when it's just the UI preview. It's the hologram UI helmet. But the room inside the hologram was still trying to talk to the real room system and going horribly wrong because of that. So we had ghost rooms from helmets.

There's a room inside the helmets?

A room is anything that contains atmosphere to breathe from.

I think we had some interesting ones when we added refueling. That was another feature I worked on. Mostly about the docking, because up until then, docking was something that happened between the stations, which are static and have infinite mass for all purposes, and a ship that is also not trying to move away. But once refueling came in, people were trying to quantum travel with ships, were catapulting ships: you extend the arm, accelerate to cruise speed, and you release the fighter and it goes spinning, stuff like that. The code was supposed to handle that. It was supposed to break, it was supposed to punish the players. It didn't. So we were getting some pretty funny situations where ships would start clipping back and forth inside the Starfarer. Hopefully you guys are not seeing that so much these days, but it was pretty funny to debug.

One of my favorite classic bugs was way back in Arena Commander days. I think this predated the PU. Ships like Hornets would just explode randomly. Sometimes they would explode after two minutes of flight, sometimes after eight minutes of flight, and it was so hard to replicate. Some people could fly forever and be fine. Eventually what they determined was the old flight suit had a flashlight that hung on the belt. And because of the physicalized nature of the thing, when you were doing certain moves, hitting certain Gs, the flashlight was dinging the side of the ship for one point of damage, one point of damage, one point of damage, until eventually the ship exploded. And there was no predicting it. It was impossible to track because everybody flies differently and pulls different moves. So that was my awakening to, holy crap, these things can come from anywhere, even from a stupid flashlight.

I think we still have that one, but for mining ships: the mining consumables that you can put on the heads tended to detach without inheriting the speed. So if you were cruising through the Yela asteroid belt after mining a rock and suddenly one of your modifiers expires and tries to detach itself from the ship, you would suddenly have a collision at a thousand meters per second. I'm really sorry for all the mining players out there.

Yeah, that's definitely not on us to decide. It's on the economy side, but yeah, I fully agree. So I'm not a huge fan of Quantanium being the only profitable resource. I have the feeling that it is something that will change once we have crafting there and player demands and maybe even AI demands there so that the values of each item shift. But this is not on us to decide.

I'm thinking in general with those systemic things, it's almost automatically going to grow with time. And I feel like those values will change naturally over the development. So I can see it only getting better, basically. But again, not up to us.

I think the takeaway is that from a design perspective, correct me if I'm wrong on this, Torsten, we don't want there to be just the one thing that's valuable to mine. We want it to be valuable for you to mine different things at different times in different places based on market conditions, nearby shops, etc.

And rarity. So if a material is more rare than another, it should also be worth more.