TL;DRYes, two Herald interior shots appeared in the previous Ship Shape while discussing component placement; they were white box layouts, not final looks, so the interior can still improve.
If you only read a transcript, you may have missed that we had two interior shots of the Herald in yesterday's Ship Shape. So if you haven't seen them, check that out.
Yeah, Matt Sherman joined me. We were talking about placing components on our ships and where they're going to be and how that works design-wise. And we showed some of the layouts with where those spots are going to be on certain ships. And the Herald was one of them. I just told him, go find the coolest, most interesting ships.
We can't answer those questions, guys. We're on the super, super final stretch where we pretty much have the look that we want and we're working on some concept art that highlights some of the cool functionality. So on the production side, on the development side, we're wrapping up, but I can't speak for these guys and their plans.
Any question that involves the word when, guys, we're probably not going to be able to answer. Of course, after I say that, the CCU system is coming along, and we are hopeful for next week. We're launching just before CitizenCon.
The Constellation is actually going really well. Almost all of the artists, honestly, in the LA office have banded together for the final push to get it as good as we can. And we just had a review on it the other day. We're having daily check-ins, just 'this is what I'm working on', to make sure that everyone's handing everything off pretty quickly as we're finishing up all the peripheral parts. So it's going really, really well and really fast since we have everyone on it.
I'll let Ben decide how much he wants to tell you, but he actually gave us this huge write-up maybe a month ago that was awesome. It got me excited looking through it: five different categories and different specialty pods and 20 or 30 different ideas in there. So there's a lot of them, but I think we just kind of prioritized the ones that came out for the sale. We want to get ships out to you first before more Endeavor pods.
Yeah, I think it'll be a while before we see additional pods. I mean, we have plenty of ideas. It's just a matter of having the time to connect them with design and actually build them out. You guys have a lot of pods already.
Yes, it can land is the short answer. What we're thinking of for the hangar is that just the Explorer module would be the part that lands and you fly up to your science complex in orbit.
That's actually a really good question too. So right now, all the guys that we have working upstairs are just working on the base, the Andromeda. I've actually been busy this week putting together some schedule projections for what those guys are going to do afterwards and how many people we might want to move on to variants and modules versus how many people we might want to move on to other ships. So I'm putting together a bunch of options and getting all that info for that decision to be made hopefully early next week.
We have Gurmukh working on that right now, and it's going pretty well. I haven't seen it too recently, but it's going good. He most recently did the Vanguard.
Yes. The CCU system will cover ships that are currently on sale. So if you can't go in and buy the ship now, you won't be able to CCU to it. So it doesn't grant you special privileges. It just makes existing functionality easier.
Probably not. The most is we might have an idea of when it's going to start getting worked on next year. I know it's on our first-tier ships, so we want to make sure it's tackled, but ships take a long time, so it probably won't get started before the end of this year. Sorry.
The Freelancer's in the UK, I have to follow up with them and find out where it's at. I think they have some people working on it, but I don't know for sure.
I'll be honest, I don't know what's planned for the base of that ship, but it's a pretty big ship with a lot of room for modularity, so I would be surprised if there weren't some sort of variant with some sort of medical abilities, but I'm not 100% sure.
The UK is currently working on that. I don't know how many people they have on it, I think two or three, which is a good amount. So I know that they are making progress, but I haven't seen it particularly recently. We're trying to split it up a little bit more by manufacturer, and that's one of the first ships of that type that they're doing to this level, so they're hoping to take a lot of that stuff and bring it to some other ships afterwards.
TL;DRCompany policy lets anyone play the latest build, though most staff lack time, so production playtests have recently been held on Fridays and have proven helpful.
If you haven't booted up the game and played what we have so far in a while, it takes a really, really, really long time, if it's been forever, but theoretically anyone can. You just have to make sure you're updating.
We've started having, and this has actually been really helpful, production playtests every Friday where we carve out time and actually enforce this, because everyone gets so busy and it's easy to be like, oh, I know. But we're starting to be a little more diligent about it and it's been great, because every time we're like, oh, hey, this little thing right here would be great if we addressed it. So we started those a few weeks ago and they've been really helpful.
Again, right now we're working on the base. That's one of the other ships that we're trying to decide how much we're going to give resources there versus the Constellation. So hopefully more information on that soon.
There will be a monthly report. The internal deadline to get it to us was today. We are doing this one the same day as CitizenCon, because so many people in the company this past month have been working on very cool things for CitizenCon that we can't talk about yet. So we made the decision for the monthly report this time around to have people write it as though CitizenCon has happened and all this stuff has been revealed, and then we'll publish it the same day as CitizenCon, so you can get an actual picture of what we've been doing instead of just 'I did something secret I can't talk about.' October 10th is the monthly report.
TL;DRNo date is given; the UI director only just did style updates for many ship HUDs and is on vacation, so timelines may come when they return and the speaker hasn't seen details yet.
I was talking about this before. To recap, a few weeks ago I was talking about how we have Zane over in the UK, and he was actually promoted from UI artist to, I forget his new title... UI director, something, very well-deserved, so I'm very excited about this. And as part of that, he went out to the UK for two weeks, and they did a bunch of style updates for a lot of the HUDs, for a lot of the ships. And then he went on PTO for two weeks. So he's on vacation right now. Also much deserved. Very few people deserved that more than he did at that time. So when he gets back, which I think is in about another week, I'll be able to get some more timelines to you guys. But I haven't even seen details of what they've been working on yet. So I'm excited too.
But he's actually going to be working out of the UK for a while, I believe, with the UK UI guys there. So we're losing our Zane to the UK. He's still with the project. We just don't get to peek over his shoulder at all the cool stuff he's working on anymore.
TL;DRThe LA office is still working on the same ships, with a few people temporarily redirected to help a final push on one ship's next milestone, plus pipeline-alignment work with the UK.
That's too vague, but I'll tell you what comes to mind. So we don't have anything super fancy new going on here. We're still plugging away on the same ships, and people are actively working in the LA office on the Herald, the Reliant, and the Constellation. Although we are going to be redirecting a few resources for just a week or two to help with one of the final pushes toward the next milestone stage for the Constellation. So we have a few people that are pulling off onto that. It shouldn't affect anything too big. And a lot of stuff we're doing now is not super exciting to talk about, but we're trying to globalize a little more and make sure that our pipeline is exactly the same as the UK pipeline. So a bunch of meetings to bring our practices into even more sync. Not very exciting, but that's what we're doing.