Mark Skelton

The answer to that is yes. So the last few months we've really been focusing on characters and character customization. We've listened to you guys and you guys wanted more flexibility with the characters and so did CR. So we kind of set down this path of how do we achieve what you guys want to see. We've been working pretty close with the UK studio, as you know, Squadron 42 guys. They have been setting up a pipeline for how character customization is going to work. As a matter of fact, we just had not too long ago a character summit in the UK to talk about that, which went really, really well. A lot of the things that we're going to do are things like layering now, so you can have various shirts with jackets, with pants tucked in, untucked in boots, untuck your boots, things like that. So a lot more flexibility than we had originally planned, which is good. I mean, it forced us to think through the process and figure out the best way to do this. We've also done things like switched out our base male for a complete body scan. Now what this does is obviously the resolution and the fidelity goes way up when you do that. We have an actual physical scan that we can adjust and build around. So we get a lot more real world body metrics that way, which is great. Also, Chris had been looking at obviously Ryse for a little while and he wanted something a little higher as far as the fidelity of the face rig and to be able to have emotion in the face. And so we were looking around for a little bit and we started talking to 3Lateral, which is, they're actually one of the companies that was responsible for Ryse. They were really interested in the project and wanted to come on and help us. And it's fantastic because they already had a lot of technology that they had learned from Ryse because they were using the same CryEngine base as we were. So started working with 3Lateral and got some fantastic fidelity out of their head rigs. Just the fidelity in the face and the way that the face is structured now and works is incredible. And soon you guys will be seeing a lot more of that. Per the stretch goal, we got a fantastic face scanning and body scanning rig which has been set up at the UK studio. Right now it's got between 80 and 90 cameras, I believe, but I think we're going to expand that actually for fidelity reasons. I think Chris, you just got your head scanned not too long ago. Although he won't give it to me.

No, actually I was trying to find, unfortunately they've all gone home or are drinking at the pub right now in the UK. But no, it's pretty impressive. Down the road, we'll sort of show you, but the concept is that all the character heads are, we're going to scan the actors that we use in Squadron 42. We're going to scan a selection of character heads for the persistent universe, both male and female, and then we're going to allow you to blend between these so you can change the size of your nose, the jaw, or ears, and color of eyes, and color of hair, and all that kind of stuff. And it's at an extremely high fidelity. And so we don't really have the stuff to show you the final stuff. I think there's sort of a range of motion test that maybe was sneaked on Around the Verse. But that's still down the road because there's a whole level of rigging that's about two weeks off in terms of the fidelity where we're simulating the muscle, the secondary muscles that you would have on the arms and stuff. So there's a base rig and a skeleton now which is kind of what you're seeing. The more subtle stuff is the way the muscles would move and flow and that will probably be completed in the next two weeks. We're also working with Imaginarium in the UK, and Imaginarium is the company Andy Serkis started to do performance capture, and they do a lot of R&D into how to capture the performance on the face side. So we're partnering with them and investing in R&D with them and 3Lateral, who Mark already talked about. There's another company called Cubic Motion that's involved in that pipeline and workflow. But the ultimate idea would be to have an incredibly emotive and fluid facial animation and also body animation. So you guys haven't seen the results of it yet. The stiff character walking around the hangar is definitely not anywhere close to the final result. But probably I would say when we're showing the social module and the FPS stuff, we'll have some of the first iterations of it. Although the stuff that we're doing is going to take beyond just what we're going to be showing you guys in March, in April. But it's all pretty exciting. I wish we had some images to show you of this today, but we don't. We just like to talk and tease you about it.

As we were getting ready for this show, we were looking at various things that we wanted to show or not wanted to show. And for the most part, we decided to show a lot. However, we just hooked up this new mocap to the new rig. And like Chris was saying, we're going to do the musculature. And without the musculature, it looks like this kind of hideous rubber man. And nobody wants to see that.

Well, I think they've seen a little bit because it was on Around the Verse. But basically, the pipeline for the next generation character literally is in the process of being finalized. And once the pipeline's finished, there's a lot of things that are happening that will also come together. And then you'll start to see the results of it in the next few months, where we'll actually be able to show you, OK, here's the layering of the cloth. Here's a jacket. Here's a pair of pants. Here's a T-shirt. And how it layers, how it would all move.

All the pipeline has been worked out for that. It's just a matter of implementing it all. Going through some of these other questions: can I layer my clothes? Yes. Can I select my face, my hair, my color? Interesting thing about hair, we've been looking into alternatives for the way that we do hair. Now, traditionally, you've seen in the past what we call fins, which are pieces of geometry that make up a head of hair. That's really old school at the moment. We want to go beyond that and do something better. We've been looking into a couple of ideas. There's this process called TressFX that we've been kind of looking into, which is more of a spline-based hair. You get a lot more resolution out of it. It's still kind of in its infancy. We're looking into it, but I'm sure it'll get better as we go. But just things like that. Upping the resolution, upping the fidelity, we're always pushing for that. I know Chris is always pushing for that because he wants the absolute most emotive and realistic looking human that we can possibly do. So we've been putting time and effort into all aspects of the character customization to allow for that. Some other things: yes, the color of your face, you'll be able to adjust. Can I wear jewelry? Absolutely. I think we're going to absolutely do that. Thin and fat. So here's an interesting question. We've been going through this. You will be able to adjust your character thin and fat. Now, there'll be a maximum and minimum, obviously, because we've been talking about some of the...

Yeah, I mean, we don't want [inaudible]. You also can't be too small. So that's why, it's kind of like today, if you're in the Air Force, there's a range that you're meant to be between to fit into the cockpit. Otherwise, we're going to have to have way too much variation in all the ships.

But there will be a thin and a heavy and adjustable between them. We're definitely setting it up where that's going to be possible. So, yes, I think all of these are absolutely on the horizon, and we are building the base pipeline to allow for all of these things to happen.

The game begins at the hangar. Basically, we're probably about two versions away on the Persistent Universe release schedule from allowing you to actually select your starting planet. Where you'll actually spawn is obviously within your own hangar. Your hangar, as you already know, serves as a kind of inventory repository. Right now, that's predominantly in the form of your ships. It's in the form of your flair objects. One thing that we'll be adding to your hangar in the very near term with the social module will be what we're calling a sim pod. I think we've actually got an image of that. Yeah, so basically this is going to become your new gateway into Arena Commander and the upcoming first person shooter module that you should see in the roughly March timeframe. We're eventually going to add a lot more customizability to the hangar that's going to include everything from a room system to where you'll be able to add targeting rooms, overclocking rooms, entertainment rooms, a variety of things. One of the things that Chris is very big on is allowing players to basically obtain trophies, pictures from the different areas that you see within the game. There's obviously a tremendous amount of effort going into building out some of the visuals and the locales that you're going to be exposed to within the game. And so one of the very appealing things is just the ability to take snapshots, obtain a trophy from the top of Terra Prime that says, I was here, and you can actually store that on a little display table within your hangar. We're going to add elevators into all of the hangars and the elevators are going to become your transition point to the primary city. So what you'll wind up seeing in the upcoming social module will be an elevator that's been added to your hangar and you can take that and basically select the main landing zone level, and all of a sudden when the door opens, you'll have transitioned over into the full-blown ArcCorp city. You'll be able to wander around, but we'll get into that in a little bit more detail later in this discussion. One thing that we just announced earlier today is the addition of some different skins for your buggy.

Before you get on to that, I just want to mention something about the sim pod itself. So you guys notice the date there on that image. That's a concept that just came in this week. And we are modeling this right now. This will be in pretty soon. One of the reasons why we're adding this sim pod is we want to get away from some of that very gamey user interface of hitting the escape key to have to get into Arena Commander. So we want to actually have something you walk up to and have to interact with to make it feel more alive, really, is what it is.

It feels more like a futuristic arcade game that you're stepping into and experiencing some sort of virtual reality as opposed to what we were basically building into the ship before.

Actually, before we jump on to the buggies, there's one other large feature. It's still a ways off, but obviously a lot of you know we had to put in kind of a stopgap measure because the number of ships that you can fit into your hangar is limited to five right now. And we had played with a few different things where we're going to expand your hangar horizontally, where we're going to expand it to different floors vertically, and then that winds up becoming very impractical. You want to go get a particular ship, you've got to take your own... So one of the things we'll wind up adding in the relatively near term will be the concept of an automated loading hangar, such that you may still only be able to have five ships visible at any one time. But as long as you've got one of these auto-loading hangars, you can go to a little display panel and select which ship you want on which pad and bring it up right then just via a whole mechanical process. Skelton could probably add a little bit of detail in regards to that.

Yeah, if you guys have seen, we were using kind of the Japanese parking structure. Basically it's kind of a big Ferris wheel under the surface and what it does is it basically goes down and dials in which ship you want and then comes back up and then you have your ship on the pad. Obviously, if you want to get to a ship quick, that's going to be a really fast and easy way to do it. That way you don't have to have a million ships that you're taking your buggy to back and forth to see. So the primary ships that you want to show your friends and stuff, you can have five pads worth of them. So we've been talking about this for a while, and I think it makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, the Idris stuff, we've been talking about, where do you park the Idris in your hangar or anything bigger than that. Initially, I think we've been talking about maybe parking it in orbit and then taking jump ships down, but that hasn't completely been worked out yet, but that was kind of the premise.

Yeah, there's obviously going to be a limit just in terms of, at some point we're going to have to have a cutoff between what's practical. I mean, some of these ships, just given the mass, it makes no sense given the overall level of realistic fidelity within the game to actually allow them to be sitting planetside. And so, what is the largest ship we fit in there right now?

I think the Retaliator fits in there. The Caterpillar I thought was the largest. We've talked about having a big landing pad for some bigger ships that isn't in your hangar, that just happens to be a landing pad out there. [...] ship will stay in orbit and you'll have a shuttle craft sitting in your hangar and that's how you'll go back up to your big ship. We'll just have to see because the Idris is twice the size of what it used to be. It's a big ship. That may stay in orbit. It may not stay in orbit. But basically, that was the idea. The idea would be that the bigger ships, like the Starfarer and stuff, would be out on a jumbo-size landing pad in whatever the spaceport is on the planet you're on. But most of your ships would be in the hangar, and then the really big ones would be in orbit.

So there's a lot. I think we've actually got a few images to show for some of these. But one of the first shops that you guys will probably wind up getting familiar with is the clothing shop. And this will be pretty common throughout most of the popular landing zones within the environment. We don't actually have any shop art for that. So we were just going to show some concept art for some of the clothing.

So here's some of the initial concepts where we are thinking through some of the layering system. You see some people have base shirts with jackets on top and various things. Obviously with the NPCs and stuff, they need to be environment specific, so these specific ones I think were for Terra, I believe, initially. But obviously we're going to mix and match. You guys are going to be able to wear pretty much what you want. Yeah, the cargo pants. See, those are up there in the left corner. That's my style, the maintenance guy. But basically, thinking through the characters, we have expanded our flexibility as far as what you guys want, as far as depth of use, and obviously everything that you see should be character customizable too. So you see a fashion on the street, you like it, you can go to the store and buy it if you like. I hope so. It should be. But that is a Chris Roberts call.

This is actually some game walkthrough of some various environments that we've got going on here. The Astro Armada, which is a ship seller.

So yeah, Astro Armada is kind of an upscale, kind of a Ferrari dealership. I mean, we're still kind of working on this. You guys are seeing WIP for sure.

Yeah, it's got a bunch more stuff to be done, right? Lighting, atmospherics. This is just [inaudible] update progress on these locations. These are basically all the locations that are going to be in the planetside module that we'll be showing at the...

We're aiming to actually have all of the initial half-dozen shops. I say eventually, we're aiming to probably have 9, 10, 11 variations of shops, different things and stuff, by the end of this year. But obviously, over time, that list is just going to expand. And so a lot of what you'll see here in terms of shops are at the 50, 60% completion stage. Dumper's Depot is obviously where you buy and sell a lot of secondhand scrap materials and stuff like that, used parts, et cetera. You can get things that are not necessarily in pristine condition or the latest and greatest, but you can get a little bit better prices than you could get at one of the full-blown retail stores.

But you risk getting lockjaw by stepping on a rusty nail.

Yeah. And so Cubby Blast, this is the personal weapons store. This is actually one that we're doing a lot of work on the user interface right now. And that's another thing that we're hoping to deliver with the social module in late March, give or take, which is the full ability to navigate through the inventory selections for the stores. You won't yet likely be able to purchase anything, but you'll be able to get a very good sense of how the interface for browsing and inspecting and finding out basic informational statistics on the weapons works.

Yeah, well, the way the purchasing is going to work in most of the stores is you're going to go in with your mobiGlas and you'll look at all the physical stuff and it will have prices and you'll say, I want to buy it. You could say, I want to buy one or two or three or whatever you want to do. You do the transaction over your mobiGlas and then in most cases, the item will appear back in your hangar or in your ship or something. So you don't have to wheel a cart of weapons out of Cubby Blast. It's like they deliver them to you after you've bought it.

And that's actually true for a lot of things. I mean, if you're already wearing as many layers of clothing as you can and you buy additional clothing and you don't want to swap out what you currently have, then the clothing would be delivered to your hangar. The same thing for personal weapons. You want to buy several different rifles. You want to buy a large chunk of ammunition, parts for your ship. In general, kind of like what I mentioned earlier, your hangar is going to become more and more this large repository for all of your stuff.

So on the art side of a lot of these stores, what I'm trying to attack is to give a lot of these stores, obviously, personality when you walk in. We've got a wide variety of stores, everything from corporate chains to kind of mom and pop, scary gun store owner, redneck guy.

I think Cubby Blast is not a chain, right? Yeah, Cubby Blast is not a chain. So there are the chains that you'll see on a lot of planets and then there'll be unique stores that'll be on the planet. So Cubby Blast is one, I think there's some other ones like clothes stores and stuff like that. But the idea with what's happening on ArcCorp is it's going to be the first planetside prototype that shows you the variety of stores that you can likely expect, and interactions like the bar or getting healed up in the hospital. And then from there, it's more our production. But that gets the functionality for everything that we want to do planetside stubbed in, and then we build it from there, is the approach.

The reason why we put the hospital right after Cubby Blast is specifically because the hospital is basically where you're going to respawn, assuming you die out in space. It's going to find the nearest...

So the last environment bit is the Trade Development Division.

Yeah, this is basically the shop where you'll wind up being able to pick up a lot of missions, you'll be able to find out a lot of information in regards to commodity prices. Basically, this actually doesn't do justice. Come the release of the social module, this is actually one of the more attractive shops I think you're going to see, not just because of what's internal to it, but because you can actually see ships landing, cargo being unloaded outside. You can see all of the outside traffic through this...

Basically, right, this is the combination of the commodity exchange and the mission clearinghouse. You would go in here to get a job. Okay, here's a job to haul cargo from ArcCorp to wherever or something. You could also go there to sell and buy goods for you to trade around. So that's the commodity broker of Star Citizen. And it's also going to look different depending on where you are. That's the big flashy corporate version. And again, like Tony says, this is all very early work in progress. There's a lot of detail. It's still not there. The lighting, a whole bunch of other stuff. The process is all the base rooms and all the rest are getting stubbed in, and then hopefully in two months' time, you'll see something a lot more impressive.

Yeah, so visually, some of the things that we had thrown around was the idea of, I don't know if you guys have ever seen Fantastic Voyage, but it's basically a movie about shrinking yourself and injecting yourself in a human body. And that was kind of the idea for this, where it was an organic thing that moves and undulates and is alive in a predictable way. So a lot of these things that you see, it's almost like an organism that is connecting and reconnecting itself and snapping apart. And you're in the middle of this chaotic, almost like an intestine or a vein or something. So we kind of attacked it that way, because obviously these things would have to be organic in nature, we were thinking. We were thinking a lot about fractals, which occur in nature quite a bit. So we were rolling around those ideas, and also the color and the vibe of things also has a lot to do with electrical impulses and things, again, kind of body oriented, organic oriented, with this feeling of undulation. So that was a lot of the direction that we went, which kind of evolved into this interesting gameplay, which was like, these things could collapse or open up at any given time, and the walls could contract or expand. And it's up to you as a player to be able to move your ship side to side and also up and down and left and right. It's not just one dimensional, there's a lot of aspects of it. And the whole thing is turning like a large tube also while all this is happening. I think probably what we want to do is certain wormholes obviously have certain characteristics. We were talking about that quite a bit too, where maybe a certain wormhole has got more of that where the walls are connecting, and then some are more like the walls contract and expand, depending on what wormhole you're in. And like Tony was saying, we were also talking about the size of the ship that you can traverse through it. Obviously some wormholes are more optimal for smaller ships, and obviously big freighters are going to have to have more consideration. And certain wormholes you just cannot take a certain size freighter to, or you'll be destroyed. So that was some of the ideology behind the art direction of it.

No, that was another thing that we started addressing four or five or six months ago, which is we wanted the ability to do a lot of first-person battles in environments where we'd have a little bit more flexibility to create exactly the type of environment that we wanted. So as we were talking about earlier, we have combat on a lot of the major planetary landing zones, but it's in a controlled fashion for the majority of those areas. Some areas are large enough. Terra Prime, for example, will have another area that you can transition to called the Blocks, where it's much more unchained in terms of the level of violence that you can actually encounter there. But that's not going to be the case for a lot of landing zones. And so what we wanted was the ability for you to have these big raging first-person battles according to whatever dynamic missions we were creating to basically provide you with content. And so what we wound up adopting was just the concept of these space stations. Mark will talk a little bit later about it, and we're doing the exact same thing for space stations that we're doing for the cities in regards to building these things out of all of these component pieces, so that we can quickly create a variety of different space stations that will suit a wide variety of different mission needs: medical facilities, research facilities, mining stations, military outposts, et cetera, all from these same building blocks. There will be a lot of custom art that will basically help to give these things a very custom feel, despite the fact that there's a lot of commonality in terms of the external space station components and such.

Hero props.

Yeah, hero props. That's exactly it.

In the last panel, we didn't quite get to the question, but the question was: okay, so you've got all these hundreds of places that you're going to go, and obviously we're going to have to have a tier system way of looking at it. How are we going to make these all different? How are we going to make them different enough where it's just not the same thing over and over and over? So we've been thinking about that quite a bit. We just had an environment summit not too long ago to talk about some of these issues. One of the things that we broke it down to is architectural styles. So we have pillars of architectural styles, which you guys have seen already. The Self-Land, the AeroView, and the Revel & York hangars are kind of pinnacle styles of the low tech, high tech, and super modernism, which are our base first run at making a modular system and to see how far we can go with those. Now, obviously the architectural styles are going to expand. I know Chris wants history, which is huge from an art direction point of view. These environment locations have got to have history, and they do. A lot of them have it in the stuff that has been written for Star Citizen. There's tons of history to draw from and tons of things that have happened on any particular landing site location that, as an art director, gives me something to grab onto and be able to expand and give detail to. The more history someplace has, the more detail that you can pull out of it. And we've also been talking about places like Terra Prime and stuff like that, that are not only just places to visit, but they're destination places, where you have this idea of exploring the universe and actually, like going to Paris and seeing the Eiffel Tower or going to Egypt and seeing the pyramids. We want to convey that in Star Citizen, and the way to do that is to have historical places that you go visit and significant things that happen within the universe, and you're like, oh man, I want to go see that. Well, okay, you can, and it's on Terra Prime, and there's a big statue there of an important thing or an important person. So these architectural styles kind of feed into that. And what we can do is we can take historical styles and also mix them with modern styles, because, as you know, in Seattle and a lot of places, what they'll do is, as the culture evolves and the architecture evolves, they'll build on top of stuff. Or I'm sure you'll visit locations that are ruined, so you'll land someplace and see that there was a big battle here at some point. So all these architectural styles are being worked out as far as the tier goes, for the breadth and the width of what we want to achieve. So a lot of these things are going to be: you'll have a base architectural style that you start with. And then, like we were saying before, there are other things that you can put with it, like props and lighting changes. And there's a thing called theme changes, which we're doing, and which the ships have been doing quite a bit of. And that's using a blend system to be able to convey things like economic ruin. So you go to a planet, it's nice, you come back a month later, it's in ruins. It's got spray paint on the wall and it's rusted out. The economy has just totally gone south and things are looking bad. And we obviously want to convey that through the architecture also. So we've been putting some thought and time into creating these things with themes embedded in them, which are controllable by materials.

Yeah, they absolutely will. We were just talking about the economy, which is obviously a huge catalyst for the evolution of any given location. We want to make it where you can land on a planet and I want to convey that it's uncomfortable, that you are in a dangerous place and that you should probably watch yourself. It's my job as an art director to visually clue you in to things like that. So we're setting up the architectural styles, like I said, to convey some of that. Now, the next question would be weather and stuff like that. I absolutely hope that we will have various weather on different kinds of planets, obviously. Yeah, absolutely time of day, too. We were just talking about this whole time of day with Sean Tracy, actually, and going back and forth on the ramifications of it. If you think through it, there's a lot of dominoes that fall when that happens. There absolutely will be a time of day, because you want to be able to go to Terra at night and do dealings in the dark, or go down...

And that's actually an important point, which is it's not just a cosmetic effect that we're applying. I'd separate it into two ways that planets evolve over time. There's the short term, the 24-hour cycle. We've talked before about how there's this economic simulation that's going on in the background. It's basically running a simulation with, give or take, 10 million NPCs. The values that are thrown out of that simulation wind up informing, affecting what the player actually sees. It takes things like the population, the per capita wealth, the employment rate, the landing zone GDP. All of these things wind up getting factored into what you see when you actually land at one of these things. And so as GDP, as employment, as these things start to increase, you can actually see ripple-through effects, like we were talking about the other day in regards to the addition of smog to some of the environments. As a planet starts to produce more goods, the amount of smog can increase. The number of blue collar workers that you might see, given the type of product that they're actually producing, may actually start to increase. Depending upon whether or not they're creating higher end products or lower end products, it may affect how many tourists, how many businessmen you actually wind up seeing at this location. But then going back to the smaller scale, the 24-hour stuff: if you wind up landing on a planet in the middle of the day, the shops will be open. You'll tend to see security guards within the street. You'll see, in general, kids frolicking, et cetera. If you wind up going to that exact same destination in the middle of the night, then some of the shops may well be closed. We haven't actually discussed it in this panel yet, but there will likely be some sort of compressed time schedule. We don't know exactly what that will be, but in general, a day in the game will most likely not equate to a day in the real world. And what this means is that within some multi-hour period, you'll actually be able to watch a planet go from day to night. So if you arrive in the middle of their night, you may have to either elect to wait some relatively small portion of time for the shops that you're after to open, or you may have to pursue alternative means. You may have to go to the shady arms dealer at the back of an alley, and you may have to be willing to put up with his inferior selection, his higher prices, because you want it right now. There are a number of ways that we're trying to basically make these planets feel like they're alive, as opposed to just these static entities where you go, you restock your ship and then you head back out into the universe. You will see significant evolution, both in terms of the NPC constitution, in terms of the missions, in terms of commodity prices, in terms of some of the atmospheric effects and stuff, in terms of what types of weapons, ships, et cetera, are available on that planet, and what the constitution of the NPCs is in terms of criminals versus businessmen versus all of these other types of things.

Usually we have Skype meetings with them twice a week, which you know.

I do. But I'm pretending not to.

Yeah, you sit in on them. You know how good they are. So usually what we do, especially with the asteroid hangar, which is what we're currently working on, it's usually about an hour meeting-ish, maybe sometimes more, maybe sometimes less, depending on what we're doing, but we usually do a full walkthrough of it with them and just point out things that could conceivably be better about it, maybe things to consider in the future when they're working on stuff. Currently, it's what we call a gray box stage. There's a white box stage, which is straight white boxes, and that's just mostly for design. So design can figure out the pathing, and they figure out if there's going to be a firefight in here, then where's the cover? What's the cleanest way to get from A to B? And then after that it goes on to a gray box, which gets a little more detailed. The boxes become higher detailed, higher resolution for the model, and then they start putting textures on. Actually I think they're a little farther than that. Yeah, they actually have textures on them, and they're starting to light while they res things up, so it's really cool, man. It's been a great process with those guys because they're talented. So every time I see it, it's just like, whoa.

So the asteroid hangar is actually their test bed for the room system. Now the room system, what that's going to do, which is really cool, it's going to allow the user to add on different rooms and be able to place things in those rooms and fill them up as they will. As you guys know, we have posters and flair stuff that we put out there. And obviously, if we just keep shoving them in these hangars, it's going to be like Sanford and Son pretty soon. It's getting a little crazy. So what we decided would be good is if you have rooms that show up off of your main hangar, like a dude cave, or a trophy room, residence. And it's not just that. There's a lot of stuff that we're going to add later as far as different functionality and usability for these rooms. But one of the big things is, where are you going to store your crap? And that's a good place.

Well, the firing range will eventually move?

The firing range will move back there. Yeah, that's going to be moved. So all that stuff is going to be compartmentalized, where you don't have it all in one big hangar. You can move from room to room and expand on your rooms.

I mean, it's a ton of people all checking in stuff, so sometimes it stomps something, or sometimes you change a little thing not thinking it's going to affect this system over here, and it does. And you're just like, well, why did that happen? So everyone has to kind of work together: I'm working on this and you're working on that, and we have to make sure that we're all working on the same stuff together so that we're not stomping each other or checking in something that breaks everything. And so we have a build system that does a lot of continuous integration to make sure that whatever we check in doesn't just break everything. But we don't have a test system. So Justin is our only QA tester. Every time we make a new build, he's testing it. And there's a lot of stuff there that needs to be tested for one person.

And to be fair, I don't want fans out there to be part of our QA, but we are going to be adding a lot more QA.

A lot of the thing is that it's a linear process. You can't just take any element out of it without conceivably domino-effecting the whole thing. And we have a lot of people working on a lot of different things in a lot of different locations. So to coordinate all that and have everything come in at a single point is a huge amount of management. Especially the ships, because the ships involve everyone, all the way down: from the XML files, loading in the weapons and the swap-outs, to actually setting up the ship through engineering, and then art. Animations. So all that stuff is integrated in these ships. And so, again, if you find something that's messed up or there's a bug, then you fix it, and conceivably you've broken other things. It just happens that way. Things that you can't foresee happen because there's so many moving parts. It's like taking out a spark plug of your car. Well, conceivably, if you keep it that way, it's going to break your car. There's a lot of things that cascade down from that.

Actually, I decided at that point in my career I wanted to do movies. So moved out, actually got with this company named Luma Pictures in Santa Monica, which was an interesting experience. Worked on a few movies. I worked on Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

I liked that movie. I was one of the few that did, I think.

That movie was a mess, man. Oh, my God. It was interesting. At one point, I think there was like seven VFX companies working on it all at once. It was a mess. But I'm surprised it turned out so good. It actually turned out pretty damn good.

So then you wandered back into the game industry from there?

I was done, man. It was rough. I was doing about an hour and a half drive each way. I was living in Orange County and driving to Santa Monica at the time, and that just took its toll.

Well, actually, I'm a lead artist here at Cloud Imperium. So, honestly, I have my hands on a lot of different things here at Cloud Imperium. Right now, I'm specifically working on characters. I've been working on the character customization stuff, figuring that out, which, I think I told some people in chat, some of the decisions that we decided to make, there was about a 50-50 firestorm there. Had to kind of sit back and let it happen. But I think all in all, I think everybody's pretty happy with it. It's interesting. It's a little different development process when you're this close to the fans.

Didn't you do a character, and they were saying the irises were too small or something, right?

Which, hey man, it's like, the more input the better, but man, we really have to pick and choose. Because we can't do it all, right?