Manuel Heider

I mean, asteroid bases are a bit like Bunkers 2.0, more or less like a development. It's, in the sense of, it's a more condensed space, but we try to segment them a bit more like in different categories in this regard, like also encounter design, like encounter asteroid bases that we have or that we plan for, covering more like sandbox missiony designs. Then we want to have more explorative ones, and then also contested ones that tie more into the contested zone experience that Khan and John are working on. But yeah, we try to cover more different gameplay types, more different player interests, or player interests in certain game mechanics or types, so yeah.

Can you give us an example of something, I don't want to go through every aspect of the experience, we just did an ISC on it, but can you give me an example of something that players will do in asteroid bases specifically?

I mean, if you go to one of the encounter asteroid bases, you can find bodies, you can kill X amount of guys, that's more like for the mission ones, but they will always be populated, so you don't need the mission to go there, you can just go there and check it out yourself. But these are more like the playground for missions, but you can also find other ones that are inhabited, and you can just explore and do puzzles in them. At least that's the plan going ahead.

And certain kinds of puzzles and treasures to be found?

Yes.

I guess I should go for that one, John, right? We're looking for multiple entry points, like establishing multiple entry points that can come from the interior, but also from the exterior of the station, so that we just don't have one bottleneck. I mean, I guess you kind of spread the options out a bit. We can't fully eliminate the possibility of this, but at least giving players the option and giving them some sense of opportunities in and around the station to enter this contested zone will definitely help it out.

Yeah, exactly. I think whenever you have an entrance into a place like this, where PvP is possible, it naturally creates a bottleneck. You have to be able to enter the space, and there could be people camping that space waiting for you to enter. So what we can do as designers is try and offer alternate paths in, as Khan said. There are side elevators, there are ways in from the exterior of the station. So we're just trying to provide as many different opportunities to enter that space so that it's more difficult to use those bottlenecks if you are of a griefing mindset.

Yeah, what's also important is that there's like exfiltration points inside these contested zones. So if you hit a specific depth of the contested zone, you can get to a part that offers you a one way exit that brings you to the social area, so back to practical safety.

Interesting. And you're talking about things that we can do to battle or defeat the bottlenecks and stuff that the camping and stuff like this, but some aspect of that is intentional. Some aspect of that is not a bug. It's a feature. These are still intended to be PvP zones. They are intended to still have a certain level of friction. The balance in all of this is in finding the right level of friction, not eliminating all the friction altogether.

Yeah, that's a tough part of designing a map like this. Definitely.

Yeah, ultimately, it is a PvP space and griefing, unfortunately, you know, is something you try to design against. But this is a kind of a whole philosophical debate we could get into about griefing versus PvP. But griefing is just PvP, ultimately, at the end of the day, there's technically nothing wrong with someone finding a defensible position and using that as an advantage over another player. And that aspect of being on the defensive in the PvP kind of equation is you dealing with those kind of bottlenecks and those camping positions, you know, which cover do you use? How do you approach a room? Do you breach the room? You know, do you use like grenades to flush out a room before you enter it? You know, scouting opportunities. And there are things we can do as designers to kind of aid that as well with like cover placement and, you know, lighting and things like that, that can alleviate these issues. But ultimately, you can't get rid of them. And you probably shouldn't because ultimately, this is pyro and this is a PvP space as well as PvE.

So it's also part of opting in, right? It's just like, you want to do PvP. And then I mean, that can also spark like new things. Imagine like back then in the days in WoW Classic, right, when Crossroads was raided, and then suddenly you try to ally with some friends or like people and just like try to push back on things. And I think that can be really interesting.

Yeah, yeah, we obviously we obviously do want to, this is not the place to do a giant Griefing versus PvP discussion. We've actually done that on SEL a number of times. It's, but ultimately, just because I can already I can already see the chat now. Hi, Twitch chat. And I can already imagine the YouTube comments later. At the end of the day, I think a baseline here is is that there has to be an alternative, there has to be a solution available to the player who's being attacked in order to turn the tables when there's not a solution when there's not an any an option that's accessible to that player to continue to go on and have a good experience to continue to do the things that they want to do. That's when PvP turns to Griefing when you when you when you when you take away the gameplay experience, not not just make it difficult. That's PvP. But it's a fine line. And I think every you sit here, we could we could march a parade of 500 developers in front of this camera, you'd probably hear a solid 400 different answers about what that is. So for those of you for those of you who are already working up your YouTube videos and stuff saying CIG says this or CIG says that, that's not what's happened now. We're hearing a couple of people express some individual opinions on what the difference is. And again, I promise if you brought 400 people in here, you get 300 different answers. So it's at the end of the day. It's about our job here in this situation, right? And this is me where I'll put on the CIG hat and speak on behalf of CIG here. Our job in those situations is to find alternatives for the for the players who are suffering at the hands of PvP, find ways that they can counter it, provide ways that they can counter it provide alternatives that still provide the same experience other places where they can go other things like turrets and things like like factions that NPC factions that can come in and help defend to find the things that can help when when a player runs out of options. And the only thing they can do is be killed over and over and over again. That's where there's a problem. So I said some friction is intended, but it's all about finding that point.

I mean, yes, the whole concept of asteroid bases is quite expandable and it has lots of potential because it's a very small scale and doesn't need that much development time like a big flagship location. It's not for the initial release right now. So we are focusing more on the free archetypes that we are currently looking into, but there are certainly a lot of potential and stuff we would like to do going forward in the future and expanding on social spaces as well.

Yeah, one thing when we prototyped these, one aspect that we envisioned was for refueling. Like instead of needing a large station, you could have these astro bases like strategically placed around where you could, for example, refuel, rearm. So we definitely envision this as an expandable feature, but yeah, it's something we want to do.

In ISC just yesterday, you know, which was about the more social aspects, not the combat stuff, but we mentioned that, you know, the Pyro system is so much bigger than Stanton, that the distances between planets are such that having to strategically figure out where you can stop and refuel along the way just to get to the outer ends of the solar system is an important part. And that's what you just mentioned is a great kind of follow-up thing. I mean, obviously we've been adding to the Stanton system for years and years and years. We'll continue to add to the Pyro system after the release of 4.0 and that's an easy consideration. You know, well, maybe there's an asteroid-based gas station there and that'll help deal with a stress point along that travel route stuff.

Yeah, I think that's more interesting as well because, you know, we have these gigantic stations, but you know, when you travel down the motorway in the middle of nowhere, you hit a little gas station and I think there's some fun there. There's some different kind of style and aesthetic we could use, a different experience than, you know, having to go into a station and everything that comes with that.

Not right now from the get-go right? It's something that can become more interesting once resource network hits. So yeah, not initially. Though that said, we have doors with keycards and fuses. So there's some elements where you can already manipulate but I guess what players might have more in mind with these systems that you can manipulate like power resources and all these things. We'd really love to implement them once we have the systems available to us.

JH:Now you said something there and I want to make sure that we get some clarity on that. At this moment, the moment that we're recording, what day is this? Friday. What's the date? As of Friday, August 16th resource network is scheduled for release in 4.0. These things are scheduled for release in 4.0. When Manuel says when that stuff is in, when that stuff is ready, he means when it's up and running and functional for him to utilize it in the design of this experience. Because these experiences are being developed concurrently. We can't have them sitting around waiting, we can't have asteroid bases sitting around waiting for work on resource network to come along. So the first version will use little pieces of it, like you said, the keycards and the fuses and stuff like that, but as things progress, 4.0, whatever, 4.0, whatever, whatever after that, then as the feature hardens and gets more developed and stuff, we'll be able to utilize more and more aspects of that. You've already seen if you watched ISC yesterday, some of the locations teams are already using aspects of the resource networking system for their charge and drain stuff and for the different homesteads and habitats and stuff like that. So it's just a question of do we want to wait or do we want to put out a first version that can do all of these other things and then add that later? And that's what he's talking about here.

I think they can make narrative sense in there, right? You can have domesticated Kopions, right, they bring with them. As far as I know, we have variants.

Yeah, we actually have a domesticated variant. Pet Kopion, basically.

They just look feral right now, so that will be more fitting-looking. But I don't think it's a far stretch that they can narratively be around there. But if we have more fitting creatures as well in the future, that's it. But for now, it's what we have, what we are working with, right, as human NPCs and then the Kopions. So we try to utilize what we have to create more variety and more interesting combat with the ingredients that we have.

Manuel voiced interest to have a space cow in an asteroid base.

We don't really talk about it for the rest of the season, but the domesticated Kopions are one of the new aspects that are coming online with 4.0. These are domesticated for NPCs. We're not stealthily adding pet gameplay to players just yet.

Yeah, they're attack dogs, essentially. We have them in contested zones, and the narrative idea is that they have been breeding them and training them, and they will attack you. So as you engage a group of outlaws, there could be a couple of attack Kopions that they have that are charging at you, which I think provides a really interesting gameplay dynamic. You're not just dealing with humanoids now, you also have these fast-moving, low creatures that are attacking your ankles, and it adds a whole new aspect to it.

To go back to what Manuel said, I think we can narratively explain why there are Kopions on the abandoned asteroid bases. I think it would be a shame to remove them just to lessen the encounter variety. And I definitely agree that it would be cool to get those creatures, like the mimic facehugger chest we talked about. These kind of alien creatures that you would expect to see on asteroid bases in the future would be amazing. But for now, I think they do offer something useful.

I'll take it from the start. Basically, what we're doing is the initial process of creating a location. First of all, we get a pitch, and we have to create a level design document that goes around it, where we do a bit of research and we detail what the location will be about. And from our side, we also have to do some research like this one, where we try to just find interesting pictures on how to create the layout. It's a bit like what artists do with the image references, but for us, we're looking at the navigation and what cool things can happen here and so on. So what I'm going to show today is: I wanted to take an underground facility and connect it to one of the caves that we have, the new caves, that one big opening cave, and then try to make a connection between those two. Like you could go down into the underground facility and then you have a section that opens up into a cave and so on. So from the modular aspect of it, it's just one section of it that we'll be creating. I won't actually connect it to a cave, but it's just to show you guys the process. We start off with some of the pictures to explore some of the ideas we could bring into this location. And I was thinking here is this open space, and we have maybe some areas where you can go from the underground facility to this thing. Quite like this thing here, where you can see some part of the cave but you still have the underground stuff, that can open up to mix this and this image. So this is what I've been looking at on the side. Then usually we would detail all that stuff into a level design document. We'll also get the mission guide that would tell us what we would precisely be doing in there, but I'll let the other guys explain a bit more about this. In here, what I'm showing you guys is an underground facility. I took this because it's a well-known place that everybody knows about, and so it's quite easy to expand from. What I'll be doing is I'll just show you guys how this place works in general. We have a hub. This is the modular aspect of a location. In landing zones, we create very bespoke layouts, but in the modular aspect, we have to think about a hub section that has multiple connectors that are very similar, on which we create these modules that can snap to it. And then we can use the procedural tool to generate different types of [layouts]. So what I'm going to do is just take out one of these, and then I will have a few sets of white box elements on my side here, and then I will start to construct something. So as you know, in the universe, we have a bunch of sets that have metrics, which is very important for us, that everything just goes with the right metrics. And all these are preset things that we can use to create our location, where we will know that this will be the right metrics, the right space for us to use.

A small note, we do have a few more pieces to build our locations than the five that he just showed there. We have quite a few. Going back to what Jared said in the beginning, I think one of the reasons why people sometimes are maybe not so aware of what level designers actually do is that, to my knowledge, depending on which company you actually work in, a level designer does slightly different things. In certain companies, they are more like scripters. In other companies, they are more block-out people. So generally, here at Cloud Imperium Games, a level designer is a person who is part of the process from the beginning to the very end. He is part of the story when, like Antoine said, we get the kickoff and the narrative. We put together the level design document, which is a fairly extensive document that contains all the information that is required for a location to be considered fully functional. These documents are usually written by the level designer, and then I review them and sign them off. And after that's been signed off, we go into a white box phase, which is what we're seeing here. Part of the level design document is also doing what Antoine did, which is gathering reference images and just getting an idea of what we want to aim for. But then we move into the white box phase, and that is the creative bit. There are, in general, two parts to level design. There's the creative bit, which is blocking out the location, building it. And then there's the slightly more boring or tedious bit, which is the markup. And that is setting up all the volumes, everything that defines atmosphere in a space and determines if it has gravity or whatever it might be. I'm sure everyone at some point went through a doorway in Star Citizen and suddenly started suffocating for some reason. And that's just some level designer who missed our room system, and he gets a big slap.

The same goes also for systems like the elevators, the trains, restricted areas, ATC, landing services. There are lots of things that come afterwards.

There's a lot of markup that we do in locations. Take, for example, the room system and the transit system. There are quite a few components to them, if you put it that way. So many times, the setup can be done completely correctly from our side, and it might break for some other reason. It could be object container streaming or whatever it might be that causes it, or it might be that there's some conflict with the layers, or there's a million things that can go wrong. So I think a lot of people who are outside of level design don't quite realize the complexity of certain things.

Yeah, most of the stuff is already loaded, so it's more about the culling, I would say. But yeah, absolutely. A lot of locations that we have in the game, you will notice that when you move into them, there's a dogleg or something that just brings you around the corner. Because let's say that you have a long chain of rooms, all the doors are lining up, and 20 players each stand in one doorway and create this two-kilometer tunnel where you can see down. It's going to bring everyone's performance down to even lower levels. So that would be an unfortunate thing.

That would also be boring. So you can also create more interesting ideas.

Exactly. If you look at a combat space, for example, a straight corridor that just goes on forever, that's not really interesting. You want to have some bends. You want to have some nooks and crannies to take cover behind and create this interesting... You line up there, you peek around the corner, and then you move forward. It's not just straight. No one likes to explore just a straight tunnel route.

I guess everybody has a different background on that. For me, I think it's funny to say, but I think Minecraft really helped to get the sense of space and scale and just what makes sense, what feels cool to build and so on. But then I jumped into editors to try to build games out of these editors, and also other game engines before getting into the industry, just building games and so on. And I focused on level design; building worlds and just thinking about the spatial aspect of things is something that I like.

On my end, when I was young, I played around a bit with Warcraft 3, for example, but that was just more on the side. But when I was playing games like the Gothic or the Risen series, this is when it actually started getting me interested, and I really wanted to do this for a living. Because for level design, you actually see what you're building in the editor in the game, rather than in game design, where you do more theoretical stuff and do a lot of write-ups and things like that. So it was always more appealing to me to build something in the editor and have the freedom and try to abuse some of the assets or play around and just create a location, and also a bit of scripting and all that stuff.

Where'd you get your start, Manuel? What was the thing that made you go, I want to do this?

Well, it's just all the logic of the spatial aspect of it that made it very appealing. And when I realized that I could do that as a job, that's when I was like, oh yeah, I'm doing it.

After I knew what I wanted to do, I actually looked around at how you can get into the industry or into the job. In Germany, they actually have schools for that. At the time, it was just, I think, two. So I just applied there and I took a course in game design and level design. Once I was done, I looked for jobs in the industry and I started working for a 3D browser game and did some fantasy-type, top-down level design. In between, I also did a few years of QA, which was also quite interesting, to see how all the other departments and how testing and everything works. It's quite a different point of view. And at some point, I showed up at Andreas's door.

I thought about expanding this into a connector about the same size as the one we have over there. And then I realized that basically we have the shaft over here, the elevator shaft, which is a problem. So in this case, for example, if I make it too big, we would have bounding box checks that would ensure that nothing would collide with one or the other, stuff like that. So maybe that new section that I have here could work over here, but maybe it wouldn't work where I'm building it right now.

That's why I mentioned that sometimes it helps if you just have a longer corridor that brings out the whole space a bit further and then allows for more generation options, because otherwise the procedural tool would tell you, hey, it would collide, so it wouldn't generate. And then it tries different combinations or different slots where it could connect this new piece to.

One of the design philosophies that I've been pushing for as well is that we really want to get away from this room, corridor, room, corridor kind of approach to building. That's not really what the world looks like. It's a series of rooms. It's a bit more structured than that, so you will never get that. But at some points in the game, you might use corridors, to what these guys have been saying, to push some content a bit further away. Because otherwise, we will run into bounding box issues with all the items that lie around it, and things will just never be able to generate. But with the procedural tool as well, we have the ability to procedurally construct corridors. So the game, when generating, can build corridors by itself.

What I wanted to say is not necessarily dependent on the procedural stuff, but what Antoine was building before: we sometimes already plan for future spaces where things could connect later on. For the initial release, it would just be cut off; there would be a locked door, and you couldn't go any further. But we already try to plan ahead a bit for how we can expand the space in the future. We already know from the level design documents what we want to build in the Tier 1, Tier 2 stuff, and we already plan out these spaces. Let's say, Area 18, the hospital: we already know where it would go, and place a facade there and something like that. So we already plan for this space and leave that for the future.

Favorite aspect is the utopian atmosphere.

For me, it's the plates. It really is that feeling of being under the plates most of the time. They're so oppressive. I think we really managed to put that through, right? And I think that's what makes Lorville so special. What I would change is, I think we've learned so much from building cities. I think there's a lot that we can go back to and do to the feel of the scale, either by improving materials, improving meshes. But even if we keep it within the same boundary of Lorville, I think there's a lot that we can do to the visuals to make it feel even bigger without changing much.

Yeah, I would double that. I think also the buildings especially. We learned a lot doing buildings. I would love to go back and do a pass on them and make them hold up from a lot closer, which would allow the player to get closer as well. So I think that would be a great thing. And I guess what I love most about Lorville for me is actually the CBD area. Because I was just doing low tech for a pretty long time, the grimy art style. Then we suddenly went to do this super shiny marble, this golden utopia. And that was super fun for me to work on.

It was refreshing for everyone, right?

It was a shock when you entered there from the rest of the city. You were like, damn.

I did panel materials for as long as I was here at that time. And then suddenly we had requests for marble and gold, and I was like, I don't even remember how to do these organic materials. What are we going to do? That was fun. It was a really good time.

I think that location in the CBD is probably my most favorite location. The brutalism, the sense of oppression that you get from just standing in that lobby is immense. And the only thing that I would change about it is a selfish point, and that is that I wish I did work on it, because it's fun.

I love the aspect when you get out of your hab and you see the dirty windows, and then you take the elevator down to the L19 Plaza, to the balcony, and watch all the spaceport and you see the dust and everything going off. I think that's really cool. What I would like to work on in the future is maybe expanding the outskirts, the suburbs of the city, more, adding more shanties in and populating it more with life.

Actually, Manuel, isn't your favorite part of Lorville, and my favorite part together, the restricted areas? He tells me every day, he goes, man, we should really make some more restricted areas.

I can't get enough. So we worked a whole lot of time on that last year and did some changes and reworks on that. So that was a fun experience, right?

To return to a previous question, I didn't really answer properly, right? My answer was a bit jokingly, but it's also a little bit serious. I do find the dystopian atmosphere of Lorville one of my favorite points there, because it lends itself to a lot of environmental storytelling. You can do a lot of interesting scenarios there: Hurston family versus people who are against them and all that kind of stuff, all the suffering of the small people versus the absolute decadence of the rich. So that's also something that I would like to return to work on in the future, because that is something that's really missing there.

Manuel and myself did the white box for it. He was quite fresh in the company then, actually. So I did some of the main areas and he helped with a lot of the extra stuff around. You can talk about it.

Yeah, so I personally worked on the Metro Center, actually, and some of the alleys leading away from that, and the alleys leading to Pacheco, connecting everything, and as well the plaza you come onto when you leave the habs.

Transit routes of those shuttles flying through there. First time we did a transit route that's not on a track, and we had to take a fairly solid object and make it bank and all this kind of crazy stuff.

That was a nightmare. It actually gives some freedom because you're not bound to the tracks, but it also creates more challenges.

How much do you bank? Like this in the curves? Like everyone just loses their lives. It took like three weeks to set up the transit.

For you guys, this is just something I was thinking about: how easy did you guys think it was to visualize Area 18 and how it would feel during white box? Because usually you get a feel for it, but I feel like Area 18, because of its nature of being a city planet with cities everywhere, it was really difficult to get a sense of how that space was going to feel in white box until we had some proper buildings and everything in there.

When I started with the white box, we did have the previous Area 18 to reference back to, of course, but there were certain things that we wanted to do to really sell the scale, right? For example, with the streets, we knew that we wanted to have buildings go up really high. And I know the first versions of Area 18 that we did had capped streets, which basically felt like they were going into a tunnel, right? So what we did in the white box, we tried to break that up. You have the buildings coming out on the side, but you still see a glimmer of light really, really far up somewhere, to give this illusion that you're really quite far down, right? And in general, just looking at various movies and stuff. It is one of my favorite settings, this cyberpunk-y feeling to it. So it is stuff that I also like playing and looking at in my free time. I kind of have that mindset of what to do. It takes a bit of creativity to see a white box, imagining this white thing here, that's going to be an amazing skyscraper. But it's just a box. Yes, but it could be a skyscraper.

I remember way back when we were trying to look at the initial version of Area 18 that we first put on a planet for one of our CitizenCon demos. We took the original Area 18 standalone level and basically just dropped it on a planet with the first iteration of the procedural planet tech, with all the hard surface elements on there. And internally, everyone's jaws were just on the floor. It was nuts. But in that same moment we also realized how much work was ahead of us as well, with how we were going to have to change that environment to make it not only work with the newfound physicality of the location but also performance-wise. And like Andreas is saying, this is half the reason we changed the layout as well, because a lot of those performance considerations had to be made. But also we learned a lot from the original layout to make it better as well. I look back on that fondly, because that was one of my first locations that I properly contributed to in the company. And from the art side of things, we did a lot of loose exploration into where we wanted the vibe to go for that version of Area 18, at least in the CitizenCon demo that we did way back then, that you can see is being brought through now, even though it's a completely different LZ now. But yeah, it was really fun for me.

You touched on a point there about dealing with the new tech and everything. What I did for Area 18, I specifically worked on the planet, along with Pascal. And I think I did some material work for Area 18. Taking the organic planet tech, I've spoken about this a lot in previous segments and things, but taking that organic planet tech and making that work for assets that are sometimes kilometers in size, sometimes hundreds of meters in height. And something that Boy said before as well: how do you take a flat city and put it on a curved planet, especially since our planets are a sixth scale or something like that, right? I don't know what the scale of our planets is, but there's so much work that you've got to do to figure that out.

I remember having so many conversations with you, with you pulling your hair out going, how the hell do I do this?

Yeah, it's like, hey Josh, meet me down at the pub after work, I've got to cry a little bit. But honestly, it was a lot of fun. I think me and Pascal had a lot of fun doing that. And there's so much that I'd go back and change about how we did the city. One thing specifically is just the mesh quality, really, for the planet city meshes. I think there's a lot that I can do to bring a lot of diversity to that now while still really keeping within the same performance. One really fun thing we did back then: basically, the way our procedural planet tech worked then is that you take these meshes and you spawn them procedurally on a splat map. So basically, a map that says on the red area, you're going to put in these meshes; on the green area, you're going to put in these meshes. And then it puts them in at different scales, rotations, et cetera. And one thing that I thought was really fun to do, because it felt like the planet was really still, and I really like adding movement to our locations, my favorite thing is to add movement to the locations. So, I hope I don't get too technical here, I'm going to try to make it easy: I got a texture that was panning, of these little glowing cars, right? And I got some strips of polygons that just went left, right, forward, and I spawned that across the entire planet, just to have a feel for it. And then you look back on it and suddenly there's all these little pinprick movements on the overall frame. And it just made it feel so much more alive. And I think now, with all the improvements in the tech and shaders and material work we've done, had we the chance to do that place all over again, it's one of the things that I could really, really improve, I think. Another thing, not that I want to take up the entire time here: because we went with a much more modern vibe with this ArcCorp than it was before, right? It was a bit more cyberpunk-y in feel before, whereas now the architecture is a little bit more contemporary. It feels a bit more like a downtown L.A. than it does a more 90s grungy city. But it was our first time doing large-scale panels, large-scale windows, large-scale this, large-scale that. And if you look at the quality of a building in ArcCorp and you look at the quality of a building in New Babbage and maybe Orison, it's leaps and bounds. The material work, the mesh work, it's leaps and bounds. We've really managed to take everything that we learned there every time and just improve on it, to a point where I'm like, man, had I had a chance, I could do so much more with ArcCorp.

I think I could jump in here because you touched on some things. My involvement was lead environment artist. So that's overseeing the landing zone from an art point of view, managing the team, giving them feedback, looking at schedules and things like that, boring stuff. I also did some actual artwork, looking at the composition of the cityscape as a whole. But in terms of what Luan was just saying, we had a lot of new stuff with ArcCorp. Again, Luan and Pascal really pushed the procedural planet tech to its limits at the time, because it's made for organic terrain, to spawn lots of trees on. It's not made for a planet to spawn lots of buildings on. There's a difference between a cluster of trees and a cluster of buildings and how they work, right? And also just in terms of the budgets: obviously we know an in-frame budget in terms of draw calls and poly counts, but in terms of how you distribute that between buildings, it was completely unknown. So you've got a landing zone itself with the hero buildings that you're walking around, and then you've got some buildings that you can fly around, and maybe they don't need to be such high detail, and then there's buildings lower to the ground and the small scattered ones by the procedural system. But in terms of trying to balance that all out, it was very much a new process. So it was a bit of trial and error, really, finding what we could push, what could work, knowing that it's not just a city, it's a planet city. It's a city that doesn't end. Whereas something like New Babbage is a city that does end eventually. It's a big city, but it eventually ends. And so you know, okay, let's do 1,000 buildings of 8,000 polys or something, and that's more quantifiable. Here it's like, well, I guess we just got to see how many buildings we can put on, how many polys we can push, and all that kind of thing. So it was very tricky trying to figure that out. But yeah, we did learn a lot from Lorville going to Area 18, such as don't have the spaceport in the city, which is what we did with Lorville. They're still quite close, but they're pushed away, and that helped with a lot of different things.

They're close in Star Citizen terms.

Yeah. Well, airports usually are not in a city, right? They're usually on the outskirts of a city, generally. So that's a good reason for that, right? You don't want planes flying around skyscrapers. But anyway, the other thing that Andreas touched on was the whole track and flying shuttle aspect. And I think it was actually a really good decision not to have trains everywhere. Not every landing zone is a train track. Some are flying, some are trains. And I think there was an expectation that every landing zone would just be trains at some point. But we decided collectively, no, let's mix it up a bit with ArcCorp and let's have a flying shuttle. And that allowed us to fly in between the buildings with the bus, which I actually really enjoyed. That's one of my favorite bits of Area 18, actually being able to go through the city and past the landings. It still gets me whenever I walk on the bridge and the bus is going past you. It's still such a great moment for me.

It is still one of my favorite landing zones, actually.

I have one. And it's pretty surprising coming from an artist. You probably think it's going to be art-related, but I think it's actually, for me, the sound design. I think that sound makes up a big chunk of the experience, right? And we look at the art a lot, so we get used to the art. And it's super refreshing when the sound designer submits their stuff. You go in the editor and it's like a whole new place when the sound kicks in. It's pretty awesome always to hear.

It's often one of the last things to come into the landing zone as well. When we've done all the art, well, most of the art anyway, we don't hear much of the sound, they've got to compose the music, and it often comes in quite near the end of production of the landing zone. So it is really nice to boot the game up and go, ah, there's either music or actual sound around, and it sounds like it's part of the location. It's really nice. I think Area 18 is quite successful in that.

Area 18 is my favorite for that. And I think for that exact reason too, the mood and vibe that you get in Area 18. There's a lot of other games out there that do it quite well, but Area 18, I don't know, for me it has that feeling of, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

I can second that actually. It's the whole mood and all the neon signs and the city vibe you have around. I think Area 18 also has a lot of potential for further expansions, with all the rooftops we have and all the things we can potentially do more with the city. And I think it's probably the location I would like to do more stuff on.

I agree, the ambience of Area 18 is by far one of my favorite aspects. It's just this sensory overload when you walk around, all the music. You walk around in the city, and after a while you get used to it, all the ads playing in your face and everything, and then you do your stuff and then you leave the city and go like...

Quite successful, I would say. The word diegetic is when the soundscape is coming from the environment. For me, I think New Babbage is my favorite landing zone, partly because it feels like the most realistic landing zone. It feels very grounded as a city. It feels like a realistic city. I know it's all sci-fi and everything, but the way it's structured, the transit route, talking about the navigation again, going around the domes, as well as flying around the actual city, it feels the most grounded in reality, which I've really enjoyed. And I just love snow as well. So I like seeing all the snowy dusting over the whole city, I think it's really nice.

I'm going to cheap out and agree with Boy. I used to have a career in audio before I did this. I think audio is one of the things that's the most important to me in almost any piece of anything. It drives the emotion, it drives the feeling. There's a particular moment that I find quite memorable during my time here, and that was my second CitizenCon that I was actually on location, which is when we showed off New Babbage. And there was something so incredibly special about the Carrack coming in, and the music just hit all of the right notes, and you'd see the landscape of New Babbage and you hear the wind and you hear the thrusters of the Carrack firing and the music is just swelling up. And that in an auditorium probably amplified the feel of it, sure. But to me, the music and the audio is such an integral part of the experience. And it's sad that we see it so late. It's totally understandable why it's so late, but we often just put on our own music that inspires the feel of the location. And sometimes we send that to the audio team to send to Pedro for some inspiration. So many playlists. But yeah, that's it for me.

The amount of times I've listened to the Blade Runner soundtrack while working on this game, it's insane, many, many, many times.