Mike Kinshella

I mean, yeah, so that's a good example of something like that, where we wanted to get that into the game, and that was originally pitched as something that would be fun to put in as just a visual thing you could find once it happened in the series. And they made it happen, which is really cool, and that was super fun. There's some other times that it's happened more accidentally, which is a funny kind of weird thing. Take for example the Banu Defender commercial a few years back for that ship. I wrote the script for that and included in it a sort of MacGuffin piece of alien tech that the woman in it picks up and it kind of glows or whatever. And it was really just meant to be like, ooh, we're in an alien environment with things that they don't understand. And props came up with this weird little cube, and it was really just a throwaway thing in this commercial to establish tone. And then they eventually made it as a real prop in the game, because people loved it or something. It was like people demanded that we be able to have the Banu cube. It exists in real life now. That's really crazy, that it's come full circle from something that was totally tossed off in a script. And similarly, in the Tevarin Prowler commercial, in the original script there were supposed to be these mercenaries whose face masks were painted as sort of vaguely avian, bird-like, almost skull-like. And it was, again, just supposed to be a flavor detail, because the Tevarin are these bird-type aliens, and it was meant to just be evocative of that. But characters came up with a really cool-looking helmet. They took it and ran. Instead of just having a decal, they created an entirely new thing that then everybody was like, oh, well, we want that. Everybody's going to want that. So we actually made it as an armor and then had to come up with lore retroactively for why. And then we had to literally come up with some lore for what company put that out and why they did it, because, again, something that was meant as just flavor in a commercial then became a real life thing in the game and in the world of the game. So these things can come from accidents and then end up in the game, or things that we generate as background details then become fully fleshed out things.

Adam was the one who figured out who made it and what it was called.

It's a shame Blythe isn't here. She would be able to walk you through it step by step. I mean, usually, a standard week, we kick off on Monday mornings with a stand-up meeting with everybody, talk through what current tasks are on the docket, if there are any major priorities, if anyone's been working on anything that has got blockers or issues that have come up, talk about their goals for the week and stuff like that. And then that ends with a fight club. But basically, we will assign tasks. Again, we have a lot of different requests coming in, covering a lot of different topics, as everyone's been saying. So it can be a bunch of item descriptions, proposals for mission types, new organizations, rep charts, scripts, meetings with design to talk over level reviews, stuff like that. So one of the fun things about this job is that there's no such thing as a standard week. You're always getting weird curveballs, and there's unusual things to be working on, and you switch up your mindset and stuff like that, which can be a blessing and a curse at times. It certainly doesn't get boring. But then everyone just goes off and starts tackling the things that they were looking to tackle. And we will source each other if we need to, and reviews move up the chain. So we do rewrites and iterations, and if it requires things with the outside teams, or dependencies, or stakeholders, we'll have those meetings. By the end of the week, we usually have a thing called our weekly narrative jam, where it's an opportunity, a scheduled hour-long meeting where we can bring the entire brain trust together. And so if people have questions that they want to put to the entire group, like: hey, does mustard exist? And if mustard does exist, what kind of mustard is it? Have we finally kicked spicy mustard to the curb? Are we finally embracing yellow mustard for the great condiment that it is? That type of thing. And then talking it out. Or it just becomes an opportunity for everybody to hang out and talk movies and exchange memes, stuff like that.

We have finally cracked mustard 900 years in the future, by the way. Just a spoiler alert.

Galdereen is a fictional animal, I believe. I don't think it's been established quite yet what it is, but it is a fictional animal.

Yeah, I think sort of the idea of it was just that, again, we had a handful of known animals, but in the era of this time, they would have planets that were not terraformed, so they would have their own wildlife, basically, and some animal would be of note that would be a good inspiration for this weapon is the idea. But what it is, we don't know yet.

Yeah, it gives us a little room whenever the character team designs some cool animals in the future; that gives us one out there to be able to name it. And when we do name a bunch of things like that, sometimes there's a philosophy like two real, one fake, just kind of make up something that would be a word or a thing that could be in this world that kind of helps build a little mystery into it or give it a little history outside of what we know, just so it's a nice reminder to the player and everyone that, yeah, we're in a different time. So it is something we build in. And like I said, we need so many names for so many different things and the world keeps expanding. So it's nice to have a few of those there to be able to rely on whenever we might need a name like that. So we shall see.

Well, I think part of it is the hope that we want players to be able to experience it firsthand, that storylines will be developing while they're in the universe. Again, down the road, we want to be able to start making these have more direct influence on the actual players and what they're doing and stuff like that. Basically, if we were to introduce something and then resolve it purely in the fiction, then it's not something that the players get to ever experience. Again, the idea has always been to make this a living, breathing, growing universe. We want to allow for that growth with the players. It's not just something that we're doing arbitrarily on our own; we're creating all this stuff that players are getting to experience in real time as well, which is fun.

I imagine there's got to be some aspect of time management, too. You create a bunch of hooks and then see which ones resonate with the players, which ones don't, and then you take the ones that resonate further. You don't just spend hours, days, weeks developing a thing and then watching it fall flat. Because not everything works.

Yeah. And in general, it's also an extremely collaborative process here between the character team, design. And so we're also a part of a much bigger picture. And I know this is a metaphor that they've used a lot and I love to use, is that we're sculpting. And when you're sculpting, you're basically putting in the very rough base form first, the big general idea, and then you start to dig into the details. And not all those details are coming from us. So for that Tevarin sentiment on Branaugh, we need to let the teams go off and be like, oh, wouldn't it be really cool if their houses look like this? Or maybe they've evolved this way, to give them the breadth to be able to add some of their personality and their vision to the game. So yeah, there's also just giving that little bit of scope to put people in the right direction and then let them also help tell the story.

Yes, the Galdereen also is a good example, too, because yes, we could have sat there when we came up with the name and been like, all right, it's an eight-legged lizard-like thing that has huge claws and massive teeth and a stinger tail and all that stuff, which would be fine. But we kind of intentionally keep that stuff vague because once we have a creature designer, an artist or designer who are starting to actually build that creature, we want them to have the freedom to be able to do what it is they want to do and satisfy whatever gameplay needs they need to have, or combat things if it's supposed to be an enemy-type animal or something like that. And if we outline exactly all of these things, we create an expectation that it is all of these things, then they don't have as much freedom down the road to make it feel as fun or interesting or cool as it can be. So, yeah.

Yeah, I was going to say you really kind of handcuff yourself if you're getting everything too much. That's exactly what Jared was saying: you don't want to have everything just really, really locked in, and then if something kind of doesn't work, or if a design element thinks something else will be cooler, or something in gameplay affects it, right? That's a huge part of this, that this universe is a living, breathing kind of a thing, even in alpha to some degree. So it reacts and it does these things. And I think that's always been the idea with Star Citizen. Also, a bit of mystery is kind of fun because it stokes the imagination. Star Wars to me gets less and less interesting the more stuff we know specifically about it. And that's why the original stuff is cool, because it kind of throws out all these vague ideas that really stoke your imagination. You see things and you hear terms that don't necessarily have context. And not everything would, right? In a real world, you would hear people talk about animals that you don't necessarily know: oh, I've never seen that animal before, I wonder what it looks like, or whatever. And I think that's really kind of fun. And some things we may never describe, right? You may never see one of these things out there in the wild. It could just be something that exists somewhere off on a planet you'll never see or whatever. And I think having little pockets of that stuff makes the universe feel bigger and also does just kind of stoke the imagination.

Well, it's a lot of naps. Each of those games have vastly different requirements as far as what we do on them. With Squadron, the storyline is a lot more locked down just as far as what the missions are going to be doing. It's basically helping the teams as they're building on them and iterating on them. We'll do reviews as levels are coming along and go, does this need additional content? How's it feel with the existing dialogue? Has the mission changed where we have to showcase a new thing that the player needs to do that maybe wasn't captured in the original line set, stuff like that. So it can be a bit more support stuff for that. It's basically to be on hand to help with whatever's needed, whatever team is working on whatever facet of the game they are at that particular time. Star Citizen, the Persistent Universe, is a bit more of an open thing. We'll work with the mission team when they're developing new mission types, sit extensively with them as they're figuring out what are the line triggers of the events in the mission, the mission flow, basically, to figure out when we need to have a line, when we don't. Writing mission text. I mean, we've alluded to it earlier, the item names, descriptions, all that stuff. And then we're even working with the AI team as they're working on behaviors, kind of similar to what we're doing with the mission team. We're like, if we need to have dialogue, what dialogue requirements do these characters have? What makes sense? What feels like too much or too little? And then that's just the active development stuff. There's also developing the universe. So we're still working with Britton on languages, iterating on those. Anyone else jump in? You could start throwing in tasks. We've got a bunch.

I love that you're even involved with things like graffiti. You don't really think about that as being narrative-driven. But yeah, even things as small as graffiti on the walls kind of gets run by narrative. Like, hey, does this make sense? Would this be in this area? What would it say? What would it look like? It's really interesting to me.

Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned before, too, we obviously interface with teams that narrative teams don't traditionally interface with a lot, like marketing and sales, right? Because of the unique nature of the way Star Citizen started, a lot of our marketing initiatives are sort of baked into this in-lore, sort of semi-diegetic thing; they walk a fun line there, which we've been able to have some fun with over the years. And because of that, there is a heavy narrative element to a lot of the marketing stuff. So even the big things that cross the line, like the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo or Invictus Launch Week, where it's technically a marketing thing, but that has this big in-game element that you can go and interact with and stuff, right? Which is pretty neat and pretty different than a lot of other live service games or whatever you want to call them out there. And because it is very narratively focused, it's not just the marketing...

Yeah, and as a narrative team, we're somehow both an upstream and a downstream team, so we can be involved on either side or both sides of a task. And when it comes to managing all that, having Blythe be around and be able to track everything and run down people and be able to say no at certain points is so vital to the process because, again, it's such a wide world and we are looped into so many things. So all her hard work and being able to track everything internally is just a job in and of itself on a whole other level, which blows my mind.

I mean, again, in the early days of the project, we would use that vagueness with our dispatches. We were doing a lot more stories back then, as well as the news updates and stuff like that. The idea was that it was trying to capture the sense of what it was going to be like in the universe. That being said, we made a very conscious effort to not, kind of what we're talking about with the animals, get very specific about stuff. So usually, as far as how much lore influences gameplay and stuff like that, usually the lore starts as a launching place for the gameplay. So they can kind of go, what's sort of established? What's kind of the rough vibe of it? Back in the day, we would have Tevarin characters in stories, but we never described them; we'd maybe make a light allusion to a physical feature or characteristic, but we never were like, they're six feet tall, blah, blah, blah, they have 85 tentacles, none of that stuff. Because again, it was about capturing the feeling of it more than the nuts and bolts of it. So again, the lore will usually work as kind of a launching pad to start discussions about new things. But at the same time, it still tries to be flexible enough where if there's a gameplay reason to do something, they're not inhibited by lore. So it's kind of a give and take. So it depends on the situation.

I think lore is a lot like concept art. In a way, it's a fantastic exploration of ideas. It's a fantastic fleshing out of: this is how this can work. This is a jumping-off point for the game designers, for the artists and stuff to leap from. And sometimes it's a one-to-one. Sometimes what you develop in lore ends up exactly in game, or 99% in the game, just like it matches with the concept art. And then sometimes it deviates quite a bit. Look at how many variations the Freelancer went through before we finally ended up where we were at. So I don't think there's any hard rule. I think that's one of the reasons you struggle with answering that question, because there isn't just a hard and fast 'this is how it always is.' It's where it works, yes.

And also, you'll notice in our stories and fiction that we'll get more specific once the gameplay has come out. Because then it becomes a little bit more locked down. So then we can talk about nuts and bolts stuff and have it factor a little bit more into the storyline. But again, to use the sculpting/sketching analogy, initially the lore is that rough shape of 'it's vaguely meant to be like this.' It's still flexible enough where you're not locked into a specific form. And so you can make adjustments, is usually the approach we try to take. But yeah, like Jared said, sometimes the gameplay kind of lines up perfectly with what we've established. And sometimes, yeah, we'll have to kind of go back and go, all right, well, how can we sort of retcon the lore to fit with how the experience is actually going to be? Because ultimately, that's kind of the thing: this is something that people are going to be playing and doing.

Yeah, when you create so much dense lore, again, ahead, like you said, in the early days before there was a lot of gameplay out there, clearly, like with everything, things are going to change, right? As gameplay concessions are taken into account, and as people get in there and actually start playing it and see what's fun and what's not fun, all that stuff is going to change, right? So I think, obviously, it's a fool's errand to parse through all the lore and be like, well, in this thing, they put a data card in this one machine and you can't do that in game and that's weird. It's like, okay, don't do that. Don't nitpick every little aspect of a thing. Please complain to me. But I think it's very malleable. I like the concept art analogy. I never really thought of it that way, Jared, but I like that analogy. It's kind of cool. And like Dave was saying, those first sketches of it early on are more vague and more like it might go this way or it might go that way. And as it manifests in game, you can narrow it down and narrow it down until you've got lore and stuff that matches really, like you said, one to one, as opposed to being more of a concept.

I mean, that's a very detailed, interesting question, and I think something where there could be a lot of interesting, cool gameplay, because, yeah, I'm going to assume those types of contracts would violate the UEE Common Laws, which UEE systems are supposed to uphold. But as you've seen in Stanton, UEE laws aren't always being completely upheld where they are, so certain Banu ships may be able to travel through certain parts of systems and maybe not run into any interference, but they could be in big problems if they do. It's going to be an interesting cultural question going forward. And I think it's also going to be the same with the Xi'an, as there's a Xi'an system in particular that is essentially run by gangs. And when humans pass through, it's like, what's going on here? Why aren't the Xi'an doing anything about this? Until you realize that in Xi'an culture, they have essentially authorized certain gangs to operate within that system. So there are going to be these cultural differences where from a UEE perspective, it's like, that's not right, that's not how we do things, but Xi'an space is different and they handle it certain ways. And instead of saying all gangs are bad, they say, all right, you few gangs, go ahead, you just do all your stuff here and we'll leave you alone. So I think that's what's going to be really cool and interesting for the players that go out there and experience and see what happens when they brush up against these different cultures and different ways of approaching things. So yeah, of course, we don't want to lock ourselves into something quite yet. But just by bringing up the question itself, you're realizing the possibilities and the storytelling and gameplay potential that comes from these kinds of fringe systems or just differences between the species in game.

And it might be one of those things, too, where, based on whatever interstellar trade accord the humans worked out with the Banu, maybe, I mean, the question specifically called out the slaver Souli, maybe they're not allowed to do business inside UEE space because it does violate the Common Laws and that type of thing. So maybe they don't venture into UEE space and they kind of stay in Banu territory and stuff like that. So yeah, there's a lot of opportunities for us to play with that, because it raises really weird, difficult questions from the UEE's perspective of how do they deal with that facet of Banu culture that they certainly don't agree with.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's a great question. It's a great thing to bring up because, sort of like we were saying, the lore sparks things in y'all and y'all spark things in the lore sometimes. So it's nice to throw it back once in a while. It's like, oh yeah, how would they deal with that? It's an interesting question, an interesting sort of political-economic question for the future.

Everybody poops, Jared.

It's so they can be accommodating.

So the Banu are very accommodating. And once they find something that works, a design that works, they just stick with it and they keep it in there. And they know they want to sell their ships to other species. They found out what the optimal human bathroom setup is, or at least in their mind, and they put it in. And for them, that's what sells ships.

And also, it's a ship that's meant to be open to the public because it has this sort of marketplace aspect to it.

Yeah, you might need to open those up to your customers, right? So even if you're Banu or human, if you're in Xi'an space and you have a bunch of Xi'an coming on board to buy your slaves or whatever, then they need to poop because they get excited when they are buying stuff from you. That's why. That's the answer.