Jason Tonks

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.

Well, how can we generate a lot of environments quickly? For example, the first mandate we checked was for the space station. So we want to create a lot of them. But if it takes you one month to do a space station because you assemble the different rooms manually, it will take years and years to do all the space stations for all the star systems. So what we are doing: we already have a tool, the procedural layout tool, that is a way to stitch those rooms together. You give some rules, you want the kitchen next to the bedroom, something like that, and it can generate different layouts. But the problem with that at some point was that it didn't give enough control to the user to define exactly what you wanted. And so we are designing a new way to do this procedural approach so that we can assemble those bricks more quickly and easily, and so that every artist can say, okay, I want that there and specifically that there, giving different rules, and so that we can generate a lot of them that are interesting and beautiful and fit with the fantasy of the game. And so for that we are integrating Houdini, which is a software used for procedural, into the editor, so that it can communicate between the two: the editor you normally use to create the levels, and this tool that is made for using those Lego bricks and making rules to assemble them. So it's mostly how can we do that.

One super interesting aspect to what the guys are doing is, in other companies, when you have the pressure of being on a two-year project or a three-year project, there's a lot of pressure to do tech and tools super quickly. And developing this type of idea that the guys are putting together, which essentially took a good, and correct me if I'm wrong, six to eight months of actually really thinking about it, looking at the architecture of the project and seeing how you guys can implement this, is not usually a luxury that we have on a project. So having CIG give the team the time to develop and think about a solution that can scale throughout the years was a godsend, essentially.

You've got to remember that one of the missions for the studio is to be able to create star systems. You can't create a star system by hand. The mission that Benjamin, Guillaume, and the rest of the procedural team have is basically to assist all these nice artists and level designers so that they can make more of the good stuff, in a way that keeps gameplay interesting and fun. And one of the things, you guys are a bit modest in your approach, is that it's also in the small things. Yeah, you can stitch a space station, and it's really great, but it's also in the small things. Let's say a small cable run or placing objects and stuff like that, and the ability to make that procedural so that every step is faster.

Yeah, because we think big at first with procedural, like planets and all that. But when we see our environment artists work, like if you see the books behind me, if you want to place them by hand in a level, you will have to place them one by one. You lose a lot of time, when you can say, okay, fill this shelf with books. And that's the type of tool we can do also with procedural. So we try to tackle the big stuff and also the small stuff to help them fill the world with interesting stuff.

So that Jason and Rainer don't have to spend all day placing Lego bricks.

Yeah, we can focus on the important stuff.

Yeah, placing books in a bookshelf is not always the funnest part of the day. So any procedural tools to speed things up and get into the more important stuff. And as I said earlier, the scope of this game is so massive. It's tools that we need to help us create content at a quicker pace.