Jon Hayter

Now, I'm assuming that means the ability to kind of find something or set your own point and then have that in your history, kind of go back to it. Yes, is the short answer. I tie this to the whole data running type of experience, exploration, being able to sell those off. I would expect this around that feature timeline, but this is definitely something that we want to be able to do in the near future sometime. Exploration is being talked about a lot more heavily now, so it's definitely coming.

And I would assume being able to mark waypoints and stuff, there's the development of the feature, but then there's having to implement it in a way in which backers can understand it and it's easy to use. And that usually falls under UI. Sometimes feature work has to have the relevant UI to go with it. A lot of times, even if the underlying work is complete, finding a way in which to integrate it with all the other systems so that UI doesn't become cluttered can be a big challenge.

We've had several conversations about this internally, whether or not we're going to execute some sort of management app in mobiGlas for these things, or if we'll integrate it into a much more robust Star Map. There's a lot more functionality that the Star Map could use. We've had a lot of discussions about that and the direction we want to take that in. So if I were looking forward to this feature, I might look forward to it there, or on the mobiGlas somewhere.

Oh, man, do I even want to say it? My big thing is to try and get it into the front end. So one of the goals for the friends efforts this quarter was to allow people to see, create parties, see who's online, easily add people, connect to people, get that two-way handshake, have a unified friends list so we don't have platform contacts and Spectrum contacts. We wanted to bring that all under one umbrella and just make it easy for the players to get into the game as easily as possible, with the people that they want to play with. We added stuff to easily just right-click, join contact. You can shoot off to their server immediately. You can party jump easier now. If you miss the boat on the party jump, you just have a join leader button up at the top of the party window. We're trying to do everything we can to reinforce that, get people playing together who want to be together as fast as possible. Part of that game loop, in my opinion, is jumping into the client and messaging your friend, "Hey buddy, I'm online, add me to the party." It really, to me, kind of completes that loop, and we'll have access to all the same chat functionality that we have in game as far as the groups and party chats and all that stuff. So it should be pretty easy to throw into the front end there. So yeah, that's my next big one, to kind of complete that game loop. And then from there, I don't know if I even want to say, but I'd like people to be able to create orgs in game. Those are my future thoughts on this, just to really create the backbone of the social structure here. Right now, there's things we're doing on the website that I feel like it would be great for players to be able to pull in and manage in game.

It's worth mentioning that these front-end UI features are finally starting to come in for fun stuff because we're going through this arduous process of moving that over to Building Blocks, our new UI tech, so that it's actually possible to do things in a not deprecated system. Now that that's rolling online, the features are starting to come.

As more Building Blocks features come online, you'll see these new UIs improve in terms of functionality as we just get more and more tools.

That's been the benefit of Building Blocks. We have gone through and iterated on that new front-end friend stuff so quickly compared to what it would have been in Flash. That would have been a couple quarters of work to try and get that into Flash. We could change the whole design of it right now this afternoon if we wanted to. It's that easy to kind of bounce stuff around. So it really came together very quickly. We got a little bit of a late start this quarter and we still kind of got it in before the end of the actual official quarter. And yeah, it's in PTU right now, so there it is.

I am excited. So I'll tell you a little story about a playtest we tried to do a couple of years ago. This has been something that has, I think, been a bit of a sore spot, at least for me, because I want to quickly jump in and just go test something out and get a crew together and go try one of the ships. And we spent about two hours with 10 people in a room who could literally talk to each other and had a hard time getting on the same server at the same time. And that was really frustrating. So we did a 50-man playtest, just to kind of put it in comparison. We went through the process of friending everybody, getting into a 50-man party, and we're in the server together. And that was about 35 minutes. And that was the entire process from start to end. That, to me, was amazing. I think this is going to start really encouraging the group play in our game. I think it just makes it so easy, the fact that I can right-click on somebody and guarantee going to their server, assuming it's not full, right? These are the kind of ease of use things that I think are going to be game changing. I really hope to see concurrency kind of start to spike up a bit. So yeah, I'm super excited and I think this is a massive difference.

The difficulties involved in getting together with your friends in game previous to this, I have to assume they turned some of my friends off. I mean, get them in the game, and then we want to get into a group together in the same session, and the amount of time and effort that that took, it was very difficult to maintain their interest. So this social system, especially the front-end one, right when you log into the game, I think it's critical for onboarding new players, keeping existing players happy, allowing them the confidence to suggest the game to their friends and be able to have a play session that evening with no problems. So that was really the main kind of anecdote we were taking forward when we developed this. And that's the one that most of our further development on the feature will include: how do we make this easier and fun?

Now, I should mention that the goal as a project going forward is to minimize and reduce the number of wipes. No more wipes every patch. The ultimate goal is to reduce the sheer number of wipes to none if at all possible. But as far as the rare occasion when something like that might happen, what do you think with regards to the seed numbers?

So there's a couple things. For one, it is not a challenging problem to solve. In fact, for the core of what people are probably most concerned about, like the facial structure, because that's so floaty, a continuous amount of changes, it's not easy to get the exact result again. That's actually just 48 numbers that define that. And so the number of characters you would need to have this seed is, I think, like 200 characters, which is not something you could remember, but it's very easy to copy and paste. I would actually personally really like to see that feature added, of being able to copy and paste this and insert that seed. Like Jared said, not because we want to get back to where we were after wipes, because we're trying to get rid of wipes going forward. But I think it'd be really cool to be able to share this with your friends. Be like, "Yo, I just made John Cena," to everybody. There is a design risk of, do we really want everybody running around the universe looking like John Cena? The exact same face, copy and pasted a million times. So I think it'd be fun and really great. And at least that aspect, the DNA changes, is not super complicated. We'd need to do a bit more for remembering and serializing your gender and hair and skin color, eye color, all those things. I think it's really more on design, if we want to schedule the time to do this.

If I recall, we had a conversation that included the ability to share your character structure and design with other players. We hadn't even been discussing it in terms of wipes. We had been discussing it more like, your organization wants to set up a clone army or something. How do you do that most effectively?

Or two players want to play as twins.

Yeah, or whatever. Or a family, like a family-owned freighter or whatever. Mom, dad, kids, that kind of thing. Which is really useful.

I think there's several ways we could do that. It's not in our current plans right now. I think it's just because Character Customizer was kind of, we put a pin in that back in Q3 last year for the moment, right? It's not done by any means, but I'll think about it. Maybe we can do a stored seed number and that can get saved out to our long-term persistence variable somewhere, and maybe we can restore it. I think there's options there. Do you want to have to copy and paste a 200-digit number? What does the UI for that look like? Maybe there's some more graceful ways we can do that. I think it's more important to focus on the long-term persistence side of it. That to me is what they're really talking about. How do we ensure that this is going into a service somewhere that doesn't get wiped as often, if at all? Because there's some things that we definitely don't need to wipe unless data changes out from underneath it and it's just not possible to put it back. And that's usually the cases where we end up getting into a situation where, oh, we've got to wipe the DB again, right? But hopefully we're figuring out how to avoid that as we go to this long-term stuff.

Certainly the friends system, the social system. Man, I'm excited about the work that we're going to be doing on that in the future as well. Like I said, my anecdote before wasn't a lie. I've got friends that I want to get in here and playing with me, but I've been a little hesitant because the onboarding experience hasn't been particularly good. And now I think it's particularly good. So I'm looking forward to getting some of those people in and looking at the amazing work that everybody else has been doing in the game. And that's really what our job is, to make all that stuff much more accessible and visible to the users. So that's my favorite one so far.

My answer is a little less about the feature and more about the process. I would say the Character Customizer is probably my favorite one to work on, specifically the Character Customizer experience, because I was not the one who implemented the actual face morphing, but rather the whole front-end experience of it.

It's definitely the funniest to work on, too.

Making that random button is pretty fun, especially before we had symmetrical faces. So that was a ton of fun just for playing with, but the process of making that was the most enjoyable too, because the core of that work was done between myself, John, and one of our other designers, Calix, with lots of ancillary parts and helpers and such. And this was actually before we were under the purview of US PU for most of that development, like Q2, Q3 last year. But that was most enjoyable for me because we were actually able to iterate on it multiple quarters. I'm sure you guys remember, technically there's been three live versions of the customizer, and I did work on all three of them, but ignoring the first one for now, when we redid it with DNA initially in Q1 of last year, we had those radial sliders and stuff. We did that, but we weren't super happy with it, so we spent more time to reiterate on it, and we had a really close-knit team of only a couple developers, and personally, I could iterate with John and Calix, and even though I'm a programmer, I like to pretend I'm a designer sometimes and be like, "Well, guys, what if we did it like this?" And that was when the job was the most fun for me: a small team doing lots of iterations to make the best experience. And obviously, we have the benefit of this being a very isolated feature that's separate from the sheer cluster of PU features, but the process itself is what made that one so enjoyable to work on.

The Character Customizer almost got to cheat in a way, because it was completely separated from everything else, where everybody else has to develop their feature and then integrate it with everything else, which is where bugs often come from.

You'd think that, but now we're relying on so many microservices that break all the time, and I get bugs. It was the loadout service. It was the variable service.

Oh, man. I've been here for too long and worked on too many things. It's been six years. It's crazy. There's something to be said about it: I've had the most fun working on projects that have, again, kind of been an isolated thing that the team doesn't have to go to a bunch of external teams to get support from. It's just the iteration time, the turnaround speed that we can do things is much better. I had fun working on the quantum travel stuff. I had fun trying to figure out the mission givers. Talking with Tony on the economy stuff has been a blast. My role has kind of changed and morphed over time, much more trying to work with Tony on future schedules and plans and trying to keep these guys moving on a day-to-day basis, more so than making things as much nowadays. Which in and of itself has been kind of fun. I've always enjoyed the games industry because it's always something new and different every project. So I'd say those things. I'm really happy with the Friends stuff. I've wanted to work on the social system for a while. I look forward to what we're going to do with that, and I look forward to seeing how that's going to affect the game and just the numbers that we're seeing. So yeah, I think anything that I've worked on where I've gotten to actually see a tangible result or comments and thanks from the fans has been just a joy. Because that's why I do it, right? I make games because I want other people to experience things and have fun. And so to see the fans on Reddit or Spectrum or wherever react well to something that we did was cool.