TL;DRBeards are wanted eventually as selectable options, but there is no timeline because the team is first focused on getting enough new hairstyles into the character customizer.
I'll start: eventually. Right now, we are working on updating a lot of what you see in the character customizer in the PU in Star Citizen. We have really nice looking new hair that was first done for our Squadron characters, and we're in the process of really just getting enough hairstyles out there where there'll be meaningful choice. That's job one. We need to get that stuff in. But will we want beards, facial hair choices? Absolutely. That will be something that we'd love to have. We don't really have a timeline as to when, but it's something we'll be working on. What we've discussed, and again, discussed, is they'll probably be varieties to pick, not necessarily facial hair that grows and all this stuff, but like a beard, a mustache, other things that you'll be able to choose through and pick and customize your character. It's just for us, we need to get to the hair first. So that's going to be our first step and then eventually.
I think we showed off Mark Hamill's old man character, I think two years ago. So there are characters with facial hair in Squadron 42, and they look so good. But like Chance said, we need to get the hair done. And the beards actually use the same, very similar setup to the hair. And so they'll look really sweet. It's just we need better looking hair. The PU is very outdated with the hairs. I know the players have been wearing our old hair for how many years now? And so once we get that looking sweet, looking up to the standard that Chance, Chris and CIG pretty much were like, that's the standard of where the hair is supposed to be, beards, facial hair will come in probably after that.
Yeah, for us, what we didn't want to do is just add in one or two really nice looking hairs and leave everything else untouched. That doesn't really make a very cohesive look for anything. And we also didn't want to just give you a couple hairstyles and tear everything else out, because then there's no choice, right? You have three things to pick from or something. That's not great either. So for us, we need to make enough varieties of hairstyles where you've got some choices for both male and female hairstyles, and there should be something there to pick. So that's kind of it for us: finding out when we have enough hair, when it's going to be the right time to do the full update for the character customizer.
TL;DRThe hair tech is in a very good spot, with tools and shader finished and artists trained, so more hairstyles can be made, with Squadron 42 getting priority and PU hair planned to follow.
So the first step was really finalizing our proprietary hair tools so that the creation of these things is seamless start to finish for the artists here, as well as getting the hair shader to be able to do all sorts of different hair colors and look good. And it took some time. The good news is we got all that done. After we got it all done, one of our artists, our principal character artist in LA, James Koo, went and recorded tutorials of how to use the tool, how to make hair from start to finish, which has been super helpful to roll that out to other artists as well as some of our external vendors. So now everyone is up to speed on that. And the good news about that is it means our bandwidth to create hairs went up dramatically. And so that will only help us get more of these complete for Squadron, but also, again, more of those complete for what goes into the PU. So the short answer: we're in a very good spot with our hair tech.
I think it's one of the aspects that kind of gets undersold a little bit: it's one thing to make a new tool, which is awesome. We showcase the tools that our developers make to help other developers all the time. We just did with the terrain modification tool on ISC yesterday. But there's another step that happens after that. We have to train people. When you develop a brand new tool, that takes a fair amount of time itself, but then you can't just hand the tool to a bunch of people in different studios and be like, use it, it works. They have to learn it and they have to bring their own individual skill with that tool up. I imagine as wonderful as the tool is, the first couple things that somebody who's never used it makes won't quite be at the quality that we're looking for. So even talented artists need time to work with it and develop their own skill set with it and get better, so that we have more than one or two people that can make things at the quality level that we're looking for.
Can I talk about the hair tool a little bit? So two years ago, when we showed the most recent Squadron trailer, the one where we show Henry Cavill at the very end: when we did that trailer, that was pretty much the beginning of when we were starting the next-gen hair. And we used XGen to try to get that realistic hair feel. And it looked real. The problem was that hair poly count was like, I think, two mil, six mil at one point on some characters. It worked for a time, but we're like, okay, we need to fill the screen with 100, 200 characters. And so we're like, how can we get this to look as close to actual realistic hair, but then still be playable in the game? Because we don't want what some games do, where they might have the main character and that character has hair and everyone else is bald. We can't have that, right? So we tried to come up with a bunch of techniques, and that went through a lot of different artists. We also had a lot of people who were trained at other companies as well. James Koo did a lot of VFX stuff for TV shows and also for film as well. So he brought his knowledge as well. And so we were trying to make this hair tool that works for Star Citizen, where we get that realistic looking hair, but then still efficient and cheap enough for us to run the game at a normal FPS. And so that process took a while. And then we made the gold standard hair for our character Kelly, which you guys have seen before. And that was our first gold standard hair. Then the second one, for the male, was pretty much Captain White. And then the next point was, okay, can we change the colors of the hair? And we tried changing the colors. We got to the blonde. The blonde looked super fake. So we were going back to the shader, going back to the tools guys. And we were just doing this back and forth. We flew Nico and Rob Dickerson out here multiple times. It was a character artist and the two of them; they were in this room in the corner of the old studio and they were just cramming every single day. I remember Nico had his head in his hands. He's like, I don't know. But we finally got it there through a lot of hard work and dedication. And the hair, I wish we could show you, but I don't want to spoil anything. When it's in your hands, I want the players to be like, oh my god, the hair looks great. And the hair looks absolutely phenomenal. And when Chance and I look at the hair in the PU, we just kind of shudder now when we look at it. But once we get a list of hairs, especially for Squadron 42, that's got to look really good, we can easily port that over to the PU. And that is the plan. And also, I saw some of the Spectrum questions were like dreads, cornrows, curly hair. Those are the type of stuff that we would like to do down the line. But we have the tools and the training. Because I think when we first finished the hair pipeline, two, three artists knew how to do it. And then the other 15 were like, what about us? And so we spent a good six to seven months training a majority of the character team. And we've gotten some new hires recently as well, and we give them some ramp-up time to teach them that. So the setup was long, but it's super worth it. And I'm super excited. I can't wait for the players to get it.
It's been said before, but because Squadron 42 is the priority of so much, especially on the character team, and because Squadron 42 is in the heart of the military, a lot of the hairstyles are very conservative. It creates an unfortunate but necessary bottleneck for this. We've got to focus on that stuff first, but I don't think there's anybody on the character team, if I'm allowed to speak for your team, just from who I've spoken to, who isn't super chomping at the bit to get as many varied and interesting hairstyles into the game as possible.
Yeah, so our current process is every time we make a piece of clothing, we do both male and female at the same time. What we do have, as you've seen, is a discrepancy: a backlog of older assets where that's not the case. We are currently working on that backlog and getting the female versions in. It's simply a lot of work. There's a lot of pieces. We're working on it. But yes, that's absolutely something that we were aware of and we are getting updated, but going forward, for any of our new stuff, we're doing both. And that's kind of one of the great things about all these locations coming up and all this stuff coming that's brand new: we have to obviously make NPCs for all that new stuff. Because of that, it means that we've got to move that stuff up. It'd be a shame to release new landing zones and not have proper NPCs in those zones. So that's why we have to tackle that stuff now. But we also have that backlog and we are going to address that over time. It's hard to put a date on something when you've got such a big amount of stuff to work on, but we are working on it.
You guys have made a lot of improvements. The pipeline that we have today makes these things in parity. Everything that has a male version gets a female version. It's been an important change that we made to the pipeline over the last couple of years. Now we've had it in place, but there is that backlog of just older legacy items. They're still in the stores and stuff like that. Tech debt is real.
A lot of the fans that have been following the project for quite a long time know that the female rig and the male rig are completely different. And we don't scale rigs, because there are other games where, when there's an item, like, let's see, my phone, they'll just reach their hand out and it'll snap to their hand. For our game, our characters actually reach out and grab the item. Scaling the rig would scale the mocap data. The female, though, has a different height than the male, and the entire company on the art side had to do a lot of smart work to make sure that the female characters could actually reach out and do the same things that the male counterparts could. And the thing is, animation, oh my goodness, they have to go through thousands and thousands of animations. While they were doing that, we couldn't stop the character team from producing assets. And so we were like, we still need to make clothes for the players in the PU. And so we made a lot of clothes. I think we brought all the armor over, so I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, both male and female can have the same armor. But for clothes, I remember we made a, I'll almost use my swear budget, a crap ton of clothing. And then when the female player got in, we were like, oh my goodness, we have hundreds of assets to make. But then we still have new requests for new landing zones and Squadron 42. And so it was just bad timing at the time. But we'll get to it.
Well, I know we did talk about it: we do have female-specific clothing and also male-specific clothing, if it's one of those. Because I remember I answered this question before: will there be clothes that just the female characters could wear and just the male characters could wear? Then I said that there has to be a one-to-one. And that's kind of been our motto for the character team. I don't know which clothing it is exactly, but I can talk with QA and talk with the team internally, see which one it is. Let's just take a look.
TL;DRRole-specific armor archetypes such as support and utility are actively being worked on, while modular armor add-ons remain unclear and are a design decision.
So this is really probably best as a design question. But what I can speak to is something that we are very actively working on right now with design, and that is new armors that do have specific roles. So there's archetypes that we're working on, like specialists. We have combat already quite a bit. We're working on ideas for support as well as utility. And that is something where we're looking at what design wants to do, getting in there with lore, making sure the manufacturer is correct, the look and feel of it's correct, and all this. And there's a lot of stuff that needs to be defined in there; we definitely want to have these specific armors that have these specific purposes. But it's really a matter of prioritizing which ones give us the best things first. And it's being worked on. As far as the modularity thing, that one's still unclear. And again, more of a design thing for us. If that's something design says that they want, we will have that conversation.
You mentioned that's a design question. That's one of those things we talked about earlier that's really for the actor feature team. But we did want to reiterate that we are still pursuing the archetypes that Rich Tyrer discussed back at CitizenCon 2948. If you haven't watched that panel, check that out. It has a lot of information about where we're going as far as the different armor archetypes and being designed for different purposes and roles. And it's absolutely still the design and absolutely still the intention.
We fleshed that out even further, actually. Chance and I had a talk further about the archetypes, I think this week. So it's been more refined. And I think a TL;DR version of the answer to this question would be, and I've said this for years, there will never be an armor that is considered endgame, where it is the best armor and can do everything, right? That's the same way for ships, same way for guns, same way for armor. There will be armor and modules that would be the best for what it needs to do for that specific gameplay. So you will not get an armor that's best at sneaking and best at protection, best at hiding sound, best at catching people. There will be the best armor for combat. But then there'll also be the best armor for heat resistance, the best armor for tracking players, the best armor for sneaking and doing infiltration. So we'll do specialized stuff. And within those archetypes, there might be different types of armor with specific types of gear that design have and will continue to flesh out, and be like, if you want to do this specific mission that's sneaking, there's a bunch of different types of armor you could put on. How granular we're going to get into customizing that is 100% on the design side. I just make pretty pictures. But the overall concept is: best armor for fashion, which is just unequip everything. But there will always be the intent, at least for the gameplay, that there is always the best armor for a specific thing or specific gameplay, but not the best armor at everything. The granularity, you can ping Richard Tyrer. Don't shoot me.
TL;DRChildren are deliberately excluded, and body types and heights are limited by the single male and single female rig, though varied body types would be nice to work toward.
Yeah, as far as children, that is a choice. We don't want children in a game where people are running around with guns and knives and there's violence and things. That's not what we're creating. So don't expect that. As far as different body types, that is something that we would like to have. I think absolutely, that's cool. The limitation that we have, as Jeremiah kind of brought up, is we have one rig for males and we have one rig for females. And what that limits us to is the sizes, right? And it allows our game to have all those things look very seamless, where people pick up things and interact with things correctly. And a limitation of it is that you also get a set height right now. So yes, the body types, that would be cool. We would love to work into that. The children, nope. And as far as the size of people, it's a limitation of the size of the rigs.
I want to add to that. The reason we went with the unified rig is there are so many benefits that it gets us. It's what allows the characters to push all the buttons in the spaceships, coming up with the new physicalized dashboard. It's what allows people to pick everything up off the bar stools and stuff like that. It gains us a whole lot of things. It does come with a trade-off, just like most things in game development do. It's like statting a character in a D&D game. You can't put 20s down the line. If you're going to put all your points in dexterity, you're going to have to take them out from somewhere. So one of the things that we lose is variable height on the character. So I think it's a known thing. It's a thing that we chose to do. And I think the benefits far outweigh the detriments.
I mean, isn't it cool just the fact that when a character aims down sights, they're actually looking through the scope, right? And the bullet is actually coming out of the barrel of the gun. And when you point to something, it's the same thing. From your perspective, you'll be pointing at the same exact thing that the other players will be seeing. So there's so much. And the biggest thing with Star Citizen is immersion, right? And we want to make sure that things are just next level. The unfortunate part, like you said, is customizability. It's always a thing. The more bespoke you make it, the harder it'll be for customization. And then the more customization that you bring, the less unique and bespoke things are. It's a balance.
Yes. That has been the biggest challenge for the concept team and the character team when it comes to clothing and armor, which is why we have zones. And we have some countermeasures to that, some that I will not disclose here. Because everybody in the company, we love art and we love bespoke stuff because it's cool. I'm an artist myself. I love doing just crazy things that are unique, just for that one thing. And a lot of artists feel the same way. But customization is part of the gameplay of Star Citizen. And so design and the character team, we've kind of come to an agreement on some things that I will not disclose.
I can say we are working on some stuff with creatures. It's actually some different creatures. I can say that, I think. We're working on some other stuff right now that is exciting in the creature space. It's not currently the space cow. It's some other stuff. I'll leave it at that.
TL;DRXi'an characters have moved from concept into modeling, with open questions about size, ships and clothing, while Tevarin concept work lags behind; this is not confirmation of appearing in Squadron 42.
Actually, the Xi'an is coming along quite nicely. It's past the concept stage and into modeling right now and looking really cool. We're doing a lot of stuff on that. There's some work being done on the facial rig and how that all animates and how that looks good. It's the challenge, of course, with non-human characters. Once you get to facial animation, it's not quite as straightforward as a human. So we're working on that right now and making sure that they have a really unique look and feel. They won't just be a human in a costume, right? These should have a unique way they animate, the way they look and everything. So there's some exciting stuff happening. One of the things that Jeremiah mentioned is, with the Xi'an, for example, there are some things that do come up when you have characters who aren't the same size. That's actually something that we are actively discussing. What do we do? How do we deal with this? Because it's one thing for them to be featured in Squadron: here they are and they do this thing and that thing. It opens up a whole bunch of conversations about, okay, well, what happens when they're in the PU? Can they fly every ship? How do we account for this if they're not the same size? And obviously, what clothing can they wear? Yes, it is a big can of worms right there.
The Tevarin, on the concept side: I think the last time we worked on it was quite a while back, around the Prowler. When we released the Prowler, we did some concept support on that. It has taken a little bit of a backseat on the concept side. We wanted to flesh it out even further. We have a generalized look, but we were like, okay, I think this needs its own specific time. And the Xi'an was a little bit higher on the priority list. So we kind of focused more on that. So the Tevarin race is a little bit behind, but the Xi'an is definitely moving a lot further along than the Tevarin.
TL;DRWearing armor over regular clothes is not planned because the systems are separate, but they are discussing with design a possible combat clothing or ground-only armor that would not need an undersuit.
So the system that we have in place right now is clothing has its own system with its own setup, and the armor has its own system with its own setup. There's a lot of reasoning for this. The armor in particular is for going outside into EVA, the EVA capability of the undersuit, and also breathing and oxygen, power, all the fun stuff that Rich's team brought in last year. Now, clothing does not have that. And so we cannot put the two together. However, I have talked about this with Rich and JJ on the actor feature team, which is combat clothing. So it is like armor and protection that you would wear not necessarily out in space, but, I don't know, there could be a player that wants to wear armor on the ground and will always stay on the ground, right? So there are talks about that. And so we could potentially, if we go in that direction, have armor that has some clothing capabilities.
Yeah, but I'm actually talking about actual armor. Maybe there's just some armors that don't require an EVA suit and you just have armor on top. You could look like a SWAT person that doesn't have to go to space, right? So those are conversations that we're having with design. I brought it up with Rich, I think, last week. And so I think if we do head in that direction, that would open up a plethora of different things that the players could do on the ground side, not space, where you could put on a trench coat, or put on, I don't know, a poncho as a jacket item, and then have the clothing armor underneath it. We would like to, and we're in talks. But armor right now, mixing armor and clothing would break a lot of systems, just because there's a lot of data for setup. There's a lot of things that Sean's team has very meticulously put in place for the two separate designs and the two separate setups on the tech side. And so they will never cross, from what I know. If they come up with some crazy, ingenious thing, maybe. But as it is, with the information that I have, those won't cross. But then to counter it: combat clothing. That is something that we're talking about.
TL;DRTattoos, scarring and implants are being discussed but have no finalized plans; decal tattoos looked fake, and body modifications and scarring would have to come with Death of a Spaceman.
I can say it's being discussed. We don't have any locked-in final plans of, like, this is how we'd want to feature it. We're talking about that. We were also discussing the ideas for cybernetics. How would that happen? We're all excited about it. It's all definitely cool. Just the question is, how do we implement it? Is it something you just get right out of the character creator? Would we want it right out of the character creator? Or does that make it not as special? Is it something where, no, actually, you've got to go do this and this and this in the game to be able to access it? Is that cooler? Those are the types of conversations we're having. So no finalized plans. We do think it's cool. It's just a matter of where it would feel best. I think that's really the thing that we were looking to solve.
On the art side, I think I can kind of bring this up. We did do some slight R&D on tattoos in general, because you guys have seen in the Squadron trailer, there is Vat Tagaka, and he's got this massive tattoo on both of his arms. That is actually on the diffuse map, the albedo map. So that is actually painted on the actual texture of his skin, right? I remember this so clearly because I hand drew every single tattoo of Tagaka. That was fun. But I remember we tried to make it a decal, kind of like how we have decals on armor, where you have the numbers or the little things, and also on ships. The problem was that it didn't look like skin. We tried to get it as close as we could. It just didn't feel real. And tattoos, when I concepted it, I did Photoshop first. It just didn't feel right. Tattoos on skin almost have a little bit of a graphite feel, especially with the gradation and stuff. So I actually hand drew it in pencil, did a couple of those, scanned them in, and then touched them up in Photoshop. And then I realized I had a pencil brush in Photoshop and just did it in Photoshop anyway. But we tried putting it as a decal and it just didn't feel like it was actually on the skin itself. It felt almost plastic. It felt very fake. And so that just didn't hit the quality bar. If we made it a decal, sure, I'm sure we can come up with techniques, but it just doesn't seem real, and it would be super triggering for me and a lot of people. And so, yeah, we all love tattoos. We all love scarring. And whenever Death of a Spaceman actually is in full implementation, we have to do scarring and implants and body modifications. But until then, we'll see what happens. We'll see what the priorities are and when things come in place. But we have to do the body modifications and scarring.
As those systems begin to come online, those teams make those requests of your team officially and stuff like that. So there's an order of operations there.
TL;DRThey still want the holographic skull helmet, but it needs a new graphics shader and the graphics team is prioritizing work that affects all of the game, so it remains on the list.
For the last half of 2019 and for all of 2020, one of my moonlight side jobs was running the subscriber program. And that was one of the things that Jeremiah and I pushed for to get into the program. We absolutely still want it. It's just that it requires a new graphics shader, because the hologram tech that we have right now works great for ships. You saw it at IAE. It looks great for that stuff. The visceral experience we want in the helmets, it wasn't quite there, so we need some additional work from the graphics team. And unfortunately, if you read our monthly reports, you know the graphics team has their work cut out for them. They have all kinds of stuff they're working on, the new Gen12 renderer and stuff like that. And it's more important that they prioritize stuff that can affect all of Star Citizen than just the stuff for the subscriber program. So as much as we want it, we want it bad, it's just there are other things that need to happen first. So it's still on the list.
It's still on the list. A big shout out to the graphics guys, because recently they gave us a ton of stuff that is coming for characters that makes all characters look better. So in the grand scheme of things, would we love our hologram shader? Yes, of course. But when we get some of these updates that are coming for characters, all of them got better. We had some stuff that was just kind of bugs, other things that we've been asking for for a long time. We got a lot of stuff from them over the last month or so that we're very excited about for characters, because these aren't things that just make this character or that character look good. All of the characters are going to look better because of the stuff that we've got.
And just to put a button on the subscriber stuff, I've now handed that stuff over to Emily. If you're a Concierge member, you've already been contacted by Emily. She's doing some terrific stuff. She's got some exciting stuff planned for this year. So stay tuned. I'll keep pushing for the hologram skull helmet. But she's got some other stuff coming for you that is pretty cool coming down the line.
TL;DRCharacters don't age at present and no design request exists for it; a wrinkle slider is possible but needs work, and lore says aging is much slower in the future anyway.
Okay, so this is actually a great question. This is more of a Todd Papy, Rich Tyrer, Chris Roberts question. Maybe a little bit of Tony Z. But if we were to go with Death of a Spaceman, technically, you wouldn't age necessarily, but you would deteriorate. Your body would deteriorate. And as time progresses, your actual character would die. And then your next of kin would pick up. It's kind of like a little refresh. So as it stands right now, I don't think we have anything in the game to have characters age. However, we do have that DNA head pool, and we do have some heads that we haven't put into the DNA head pool, and there are a lot of older men and women that we have scanned and that we can plug in. So we could potentially use a slider to bring in some of those wrinkles and stuff like that. That would require a lot of setup, and some on the tech side, which would be more Sean's department. We haven't gotten a request from up top, from design, to implement that type of thing. I think there could be some solutions to do that. I have one or two in my head that I could theorize that we could potentially do. But as it stands, no. You will forever be whatever age.
Well, there's also some lore aspects to take into account. If you've followed Star Citizen's lore since 2012, they release a new story every single Tuesday. There's stories in Jump Point, a digital magazine available to subscribers. You know that aging is different 940 years in the future. It has been slowed. It has not been stopped, but humans often reach the age of 100, 110, 120 while maintaining the looks that we would associate today with people in their 60s, 70s, 80s. So that whole process is much slower in our fiction too. So even if one day our game does develop to the point where we do include aging, it's not likely to be at the same scale that we know it today.
Yeah. I mean, also the medical... okay, Dave's going to kill me, but you know what, YOLO. I think I have talked to him about it before. We were talking about this before on the Death of a Spaceman type of thing, where we were saying that the medical technology has advanced so far that... Starship Troopers, with Rico. Remember Rico's in that tank and they're putting him back together? Anyways, so the idea for that med bed, I think, was also that when they're putting you together, they would use pieces of your DNA to reconstruct the disembodied limbs and stuff like that. But then if you've died so many times, a lot of that DNA would be damaged, I believe, and there wouldn't be enough biomaterial for the bed to regrow, which would then require cybernetics, or for you to eventually just die. So I think that part's kind of cool, and that kind of plays in with the delaying of age, just because it would be reusing the DNA. So I think people would age a lot less, just because we have more DNA to play with, I think.
TL;DRUnderwear is part of the base body to avoid nudity, and although different underwear could technically be made, it isn't a priority compared with work that gives players more value.
Representing the concept team, I would love for the concept team to concept a bunch of underwear. But as it is right now, the underwear is part of the base body. We don't want nudity in our game, so we've given the male and female assets pretty much underwear, undergarments to cover them up. Can we make different kinds of underwear? Technically, we can. Would it be a good use of our time? That would be a Chance question. Probably not. I just draw things. I would be more than happy to draw male and female lingerie.
So yeah, it just comes down to what's the best use of time, as Jared mentioned, right? We could spend our time on all sorts of things. What we'd like to spend our time on is the best bang for buck for players. And so for example, hey, these new armors that have gameplay tied to them, damn, that seems like an important thing we should be working on, and we're super excited to. So that's really how we're making our choices. It actually goes back to, I'll touch on one other thing about the hairstyles. Squadron is obviously our priority. That's where we first implemented these new hairstyles. When we go and choose what hair we're doing, we have to pick the ones that are actually on quite a few characters, because that updates that many characters to look that much better. And so as Jared mentioned, it's a military thing. A lot of these characters are in the military, right? So in the military, you only have so many choices for hairstyles. You don't go there and just pick anything, right? So we were picking the hairstyles first that get the most characters updated that we can. Once we get those done, then it makes sense to get really unusual hair that is only on maybe one or two characters in Squadron. That's kind of how we're prioritizing those things right now. Again, best bang for buck, best use of time. That's what we're trying to do.
TL;DRThe hardest challenge with the alien races was facial animation and speech, making non-human anatomy express emotion convincingly from human actor performances, which took months of work for the Vanduul.
I could speak on the hardest thing. Was it all challenges? I'll just say the hardest one, at least for the concept team and also the character team and animation department and tech anim, was the facial anims. The body animations are pretty straightforward. We just communicate what the anatomy is of the creature or the alien, and the tech anim guys are amazing. The problem is speech and expression, and having the aliens speak specifically, because in most games, it's just lip flaps and words come out. But the thing is, for us, we want to make sure that... we even put lips on our aliens so that they can actually purse their lips, so that physically you can see that they're actually phonetically pronouncing certain words. And so coordinating that with tech anim, character art, and concept is, man, it's a lot of work. Making sure that the alien can express themselves in a way that we can visually understand and feel emotions for is very difficult. For the Vanduul, oh my goodness, we spent months, months just coming up with different expressions of surprise, sad, angry, puffed up. That's probably the hardest part, especially when these aliens have speaking lines. And trying to have a human actor's expression be applied to a completely different anatomy and have that express the same type of emotion. It's crazy. Crazy, crazy sauce. That's probably the hardest part.
TL;DRThey argue color doesn't break immersion and players should have the choice of serious or colorful gear, while NPCs will be given palettes that fit their location and most assets stay muted.
Have you gone outside, whoever you are, person? How does color break immersion? At least in LA, there's a car that drives around that is bright gold and has a giant mural of Jerry Orbach's face on the hood. Google it. It's real. We see it all around Southern California. It doesn't break immersion. That is immersion. That's life.
For me, what's important when we talk about clothing items and stuff like this is: somebody wants to have the super serious military gear, there should be that choice. Somebody else wants to express himself in a different way and wear something else, you should have that choice. This should be a big game that lots of people come to and express themselves in different ways. What's important is we offer that variety. Some people enjoy the colorful stuff. Some people don't. You should be able to pick those things. And I don't want to say, oh, there's no color in our game, there's nothing like that, because that's just limiting. And to Jared's point, that's not reality. When the world was normal and you were gathering with some people, you would see everyone expressed themselves in a different way. And I think that's what we strive to do. Sometimes we want to do something that's colorful and maybe more fun. Other times it's much more serious, but we should have those choices.
Yeah, I think the designers, and I'm talking about the latter end, when they start plugging in and implementing, those designers and also the character team: when we set up landing zones, there is a palette that we generally put on the landing zone NPCs, unless it's specifically called for that they have to be very colorful and very diverse. So at least on our end, we'll try to make the NPCs feel more grounded and feel more relevant to the actual location. But as Chance said, for the players, you can go in with a pink helmet, green torso, neon pink pants. And that's the beautiful thing about this game: the ability to have choice. And we actually had this conversation with a couple of directors this morning. We're like, yeah, we've seen some abominations online. But that's also just humans. So maybe this person is seeing this a lot in the other players, where you might see very crazy neon light type of stuff, but that's more of a choice thing. And we will always give the freedom of choice to players. But NPCs, we'll make sure that they look fitting, unless there's an NPC that's specifically called for to be very bright.
I'm willing to bet if you did an accounting, the overwhelming majority of our assets are still muted and subdued. The color is the exception, it's the rarity, it's the flair.
TL;DRFangs or tentacles could be included only if they serve a plausible function for harsh-environment Pyro settlers, since good design hints at functionality rather than decoration.
I mean, we could. We could, but also the biggest thing is what would be the purpose of it. So that's another thing. The settlers in Pyro, without spoiling too much, they live in a very harsh environment. And so, yeah, they probably would have some flourishes here and there, but I don't think they would run around like this for no reason. It would have to serve some sort of function. So we can think about how we can incorporate that. So if we can find a really good excuse on the functionality of it, then yeah. Because the thing is, for me personally, if I had free rein to do whatever I want, I would give it spikes and he's got a little whip and a little foxtail. The thing that really sells a cool design is when you hint at functionality and coming up with new ideas from that.
No, I normally start with the helmet, and the reason why is because we as a species, we communicate by looking at the eyes and the face. And so when you talk to somebody or when you see somebody first, you don't look at their feet or their hands first. Most of the time you look at their face because that's how you identify people. And helmets, it's the same thing. If you're wearing glasses or something, your eyes will go there first and then your brain will swap to whatever it's interested in next. And so for me, when I concept something, the helmet is always the most important thing. And then I try to have the armor or everything below follow through afterwards. Unless there's a specific lore reason or design reason for something else to be more important.
TL;DRNo designer was present so gameplay perks can't be confirmed, but the artists say the team is discussing rewards like craftable or valuable shell and possible radiation resistance, all still undecided.
We don't actually have a designer with us on the show today, so as far as gameplay implications, we can't really talk. That would be the purview of the active feature team.
One of the things we're discussing is, if we get creatures like this in the game and there's this high risk to, say, fighting one of these things, there needs to also be a high reward for if you are successful. And so that's something we're just in discussion about: well, maybe, for example, the shell is a craftable resource and you can do something with it, or maybe it's also quite valuable and you could trade this for other things. The plan for Pyro is that it's a very harsh environment, a lot of radiation, all kinds of solar storms, and so maybe this hardened shell is something that would protect you from those kinds of elements and stuff like that. So all of it's still TBD, but those are the discussions that we're having right now about what, from a gameplay perspective, makes sense. And so yeah, maybe this armor, if you get this stuff, you've got better radiation resistance or something else like that.
Capes? Dude, I've done so many capes. I mean, capes always make things look super majestic and really badass. I can say badass, right? I mean, that is one way to do it. And that'll also make it look asymmetrical, too.
TL;DRIt depends: Photoshop is faster for quick early variations, while ZBrush suits refining a concept already approved, and CIG lets artists use whichever tools work best.
It depends. For me, when I'm doing a bunch of blue sky stuff where I have no idea what it is, Photoshop is the fastest and most efficient tool to do these things just because of how quickly I can change things. For ZBrush, as much as I love the program, and I do, you're a lot slower in making variations. Because sculpting something like this could potentially take maybe five minutes when I can just do it in three seconds in Photoshop. Photoshop is just about getting the initial feel and the idea of said asset. It depends. If I know for sure that Chance will like something, and maybe Chance has seen a napkin sketch of something, then yeah, I might jump into ZBrush and just refine the heck out of it.
One of the things I've discovered through the six years here at CIG now is that we're very accommodating as far as letting the artists work in the tools that work best for them. We have an entire tools team that's separated across several studios dedicated to building all the different converters and importers and stuff necessary to let artists work in the things that allow them to be most effective and then bring that in.
Also, for a concept artist, there's never one method to solve a problem. I think I've said that multiple times, concept artists are problem solvers. I have the most respect for concept artists, and a lot of the guys in the studio will ask me how long they have and they'll try to solve the problem, and they'll pick whichever program or workflow is the most efficient to get the job done. Because if you're like, hey, I only do ZBrush, and I'm going to be like, hey, I need 10 of these sketches by 6 p.m., they're going to struggle a little bit because they might not have enough time. Or I might be like, hey, I need you to figure out the anatomy of this thing, but I need you to be very specific. Or maybe a character modeler needs more context of what something is. Maybe you do it in Photoshop, maybe you do it in ZBrush, maybe you actually sculpt on top of their mesh just to help them out. It really depends. There never is one method of doing concept, because it's just ideas at the end of the day.