TL;DRDearsley wanted to be an architect, was sidetracked by an accident and years in catering, returned to university for 3D graphics, and got his first industry job at a studio working on an unreleased game.
Yeah, it's a really long story and I'll try and abbreviate it as quickly as I can. In school, I always wanted to be an architect. I was fascinated with engineering and all that kind of stuff, and physics and maths and art. All of those worlds sort of come together. I was due to go off and study architecture, but a quite serious car accident meant I missed my window at that time, and bizarrely I ended up in catering for a year, which ended up being two years, which ended up being three years, which ended up being four years, because I got used to the money, I got used to the lifestyle, and I just thought, you know what, I'll just kind of do what I do, and I just ended up hating it. Absolutely hating it. So I went back to uni, what you would term a mature student then, and just studied. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I just wanted to do something with graphics. I didn't know it was going to be 3D. My whole family is quite creative. I just wanted to do something creative in 3D. Yeah, that's what I did. I just threw myself at it hammer and tongs. And then literally every living, breathing hour that I had spare, I was doing 3D work. That's what I really sort of leant towards. And I got my first gig in the industry with a company called Free Radical Design. They no longer exist anymore. Well, they do actually. They've just opened up shop again. But they're the people behind TimeSplitters. And my first game that I got to work on, unofficially, was Star Wars Battlefront III. It never was. And that was the game that, well, it was just the 2008 financial crash, a lot of bad stuff happened. So yeah, my first title was pretty awesome to get, and I've just sort of lived and breathed sci-fi ever since.
Yes. Yeah, it was the first game as well that was trying to push what we called a vertical battlefield. So we had live space battles at the same time as battlefield maps going on. Super fun. It was really cool. But unfortunately, it never got to see the light of day.
No, no, no. Not on the creative decision side of things. I was just a standard artist then, going through the motions and climbing the ladder. The second asset I got to work on was I had to make the Millennium Falcon.
So obviously we then rolled into the Crytek days. I worked for Crytek for many years as a lead artist and principal artist. I helped develop a lot of their tools and engines and pipelines. I was there for many years, multiple titles. And then I rolled into Alien: Isolation. As you know, I'm a huge, huge Alien buff. So I just wanted to get my fill of Xenomorph and Ridley Scott, who I'm a huge fan of, as you know. And then I went to work for myself for a bit.
TL;DRJake Ganey likes that games combine many disciplines and let players immerse in a world, while Nathan Dearsley loves games since childhood and values the culture and people at CIG.
I think for me it's the combination of so many different elements and fields coming together into a single product, so to speak. If you were to work on a film or on a book or a piece of art, it's very singular. Whereas a video game combines so many of these different disciplines together. And I think video games are the only real thing that you can immerse yourself into that world. Equally, with other media, it's not quite the same feeling that you get to capture somebody with the world that you create. So that, for me anyway, was always the appeal of video games: making that cohesive unit of different disciplines.
For me, I just love video games. I've played video games since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. I'd rush home from school, play video games. This is way back. Do you remember the Vectrex? I actually brought it up in studio the other day and everyone looked at me like I was from outer space. I was like, okay, I'm getting old. Nobody knows what this is. So there is that connection. But of course, you fantasize about going to work on a film every now and again or doing different things, which I've had the opportunity to do. I've been very lucky. I've managed to work in architectural previs. I've done some film work. I've worked for Apple. I've worked for the McLaren F1 team. I've gone through a lot of industries to get where I am. You just find your path, if that makes sense. But the key thing for me about working on video games is the culture and the people. You don't really get that anywhere else. Especially with CIG, it's a very organic process, putting the game together. And I love that. And bizarrely, the years that I had in catering, not that the catering thing was that bad, taught me to appreciate people more than anything. Because in catering, you're dealing with 70 staff at any one time. That's what I used to have to do. And then you would be dealing with two, three hundred customers at the same time. So you've got to develop your human social skills and be able to communicate clearly and know when you're winning, know when you're losing. So I'm always quite thankful for that experience. It's taught me an awful lot about just working with people and I think it serves me quite well with the team that I'm with now.
TL;DRNathan Dearsley says an art director stops playing the instrument and becomes the composer, needing to understand everything they ask of others, and ends up back at square one learning new areas.
Where to start? It's really hard to explain in a non-crazy way. Art direction, first and foremost, is different for different people. No two art directors are going to deal with it day in, day out the same way as I do, or Ian on the PU may work differently. And I know Jake works in a potentially similar fashion to me, I think. But for me, you step out of being in this sort of, not a bubble, I don't think that's the correct way of putting it, but you've got a very, I would say, linear set of goals that you need to achieve. You're part of a thing, you're part of a big chain. When you step into the director's position, you're no longer playing the instrument, you become the composer, if that makes sense. And you need to have a pretty good understanding of all of the things that you're asking people to do, right? So a composer, for example, will play music. He wouldn't compose without understanding what he's asking people to do. So I think there's a very large element of that going on. That's at least how I work. I pride myself on trying to understand what I'm asking people to do, because otherwise you're just talking complete rubbish, in my opinion. And that's a struggle, right? So you have to go off and you have to learn things. On Squadron I'm responsible for quite a wide spectrum of teams now, many of which I've not had much experience with. And I've had to adjust and learn. So it's not like when you get to be a director, you're done. It's literally the polar opposite. Once you get to be a director, you are literally back at square one with a lot of stuff, which is tricky.
TL;DRDirecting for a 360-degree view is very difficult but film principles like lighting and guiding the eye still apply, and the biggest challenge is conveying the vast scale of space and focusing detail.
With great difficulty. When you're comparing it to looking at something in what I would term 2D, which is film, as in a linear point of view, it's completely different. Everything needs to hold up, for a start. But a lot of principles do trickle through. The eye should never stare, it should always wander. There are certain things that you can do to feed into that. The laws of the golden ratio and lighting, the principles are still the same, it just takes a lot longer. You can do a beautiful corridor in a matter of a day, maybe two, but what's around the corner? It's very tricky. I can't really put into words the challenge, at least on, I know you get it in the PU, but on Squadron, that we have, especially with a game that deals with vast scale. I think Jake will attest to this. The biggest challenge that you have with our game is trying to portray scale in space. Because in everyone's head, when you're going across the surface of a space station, they're instantly going to go to the Death Star. And they're going to fly past all this greeble sort of stuff. In reality, the Death Star would be gone in a couple of seconds. That's the flight model that you're dealing with. So trying to balance those expectations is tough.
When new people come to join the team, that's always one of the biggest challenges: getting people to understand that scale, work at that scale, and understand where to keep the detail. You get someone who's used to making FPS environments and making the corridors and things, and then you go, okay, now we've got to make a solar system effectively. And they're trying to break it down in the same way that you would do a corridor. And it's about focusing the art in the right places. And then it becomes more about how do you craft the experience. And again, you're asking about why video games? And it's because of the experience. Sometimes you're not just directing or creating artwork, you're directing and creating an experience for the player, right?
Yeah, I do. There's one thing that I'm adamant about that I will not let go. I always try and lead by example, right? So if I'm asking anybody to do anything, it's generally something that I will happily do myself, if that makes sense. So I'm developing, I can't go into details, but I'm developing certain visuals now. I already know what's on the next thing, and I like to own that. I certainly see Squadron as sort of my baby. It's Chris's baby, but on the visual side of it, it's very much an extension of me, if that makes sense. So yeah, it really helps the team when I give them something to work from, rather than delegating absolutely everything. I still delegate, but I like to get my fix.
TL;DRThe December visual video began as an internal year-end compilation to motivate staff, and after Chris suggested showing backers it was cut to remove spoilers, with visual quality described as roughly 40% done.
I wanted to do something that pushed the envelope a little bit more as a closeout for the year, so everyone can go home for the Christmas holidays and be motivated about coming back in the new year. It's been a tough one. And so I went through the year of data, the year of visuals, collated all that information and pretty much cut it all together into one edited video to show to the entire company, internally only at that point. I think the original video was just over 10 minutes long. There was an awful lot of content; it had characters in it, it had lots more cinematics and everything. And then of course, it's funny, because I showed it and everyone was quite silent in the meeting. I was like, oh, there we are then. And then I get the email from Chris: "Hey, man, this is really cool. We should totally do something with this. We should show our backers." And then, long story short, we just basically went through all of that footage and removed anything that was too spoilery. Because obviously, with it being a narrative-driven game, it's very hard to show content to the outside world without spoiling certain characters, without spoiling certain story moments.
Yeah, I mean, everything's quite sensitive. There's not really much that goes on in the story that wouldn't give stuff away, if that makes sense. So, for example, if we just showed you one character, you'd just go, okay, I get it, I know who he is in the script. Want to avoid that. So that's how we ended up with that, basically like a show and tell. It's certainly not finished, it's not polished. I'd say visual quality wise, probably about 40% in that video. There's still a lot to do visually. But I think it's coming together. And it was really nice actually seeing the video where it shows how diverse the locations are; the game's not going to suffer from visual fatigue in the slightest. It's one of the key things I wanted to avoid.
TL;DRVisuals are approaching the upswing of the development curve, with a recent long review running with only one crash, planetside locations, stations and ships still in development, and something planned for a year-end show.
So visually, we're pretty much on a curve up. Game dev, if I just draw a curve, it's kind of like this for a long time, and at the end of the process, it goes straight up to the top. So it's not a linear curve, but I think we're just approaching that crest now. But we've come in in the new year. It's always nice to get that break and then just really resurvey how the team's operating, how the teams are split up and what they're focusing on. We have our internal reviews as well. So it's a good time for us all to speak about the project, get a lot of stuff out in the open and just really work on that feedback as a team. But as for the game as a whole, it's genuinely really beginning to come together now. We had Chris here the week before last, and it was really refreshing to be able to sit down for what was a six-hour review, and at the end of it, the game, okay, it crashed once. That's sort of unheard of at this point in dev. And pretty much everything was beginning to work. One of the most technical aspects of the game was running, and people were doing their things, NPCs were doing their things. You could speak to people, have conversations with people. You're in the Idris floating around the system and looking outside at the epic view. And when you see these little nuggets coming in, it's really helpful and really motivational. So visually, it's just continuing to grow on that momentum now. Obviously, we've got planetside locations in development, we've got stations in development, ships, other ships from other races we're trying to get into, all sorts, a bit of everything. And part of the review process is also always really trying to make the most of people's passion. So I'd never want someone on the team to be working on something that they don't want to work on, if that makes sense. You're not going to get much out of them. So that's generally what's been happening. And of course, dare I say it, there's a lot of cool stuff being put together for a certain show at the end of the year.
TL;DRNathan Dearsley shows an unfinished station he is lighting, a comms array in the middle of being decommissioned, which has its own power and comms systems like a ship and is fully explorable.
What I've normally got on my screen is I'm hunting for faults. I'm jumping in and finding things that we can improve on or anything like that. I like to lead by example, so I try and stay completely in touch. I've got one of our stations in front of me that I'm going through. It's not 100% finished yet, there's like two areas which I can actually show you, so you can see what this sort of looks like mid-dev.
We're not usually a visual show, we're usually a talking head show, but let's end on a high note here. What can you show us? And I haven't seen this. I don't know what we're about to see here.
No, I'm just in here balancing the lighting at the moment. So this is Eido Station. You've seen this briefly in the... I'll just pull you out and go through some of the setup of this stuff. So it's one of our comms arrays, set up by Arsiedo. You'll have to excuse some of my shadow issues. We've got static shadow region issues at the moment. And obviously you'll notice this is in completely black space, because this is an object container setup, and these object containers get stuck into the larger system later. We don't alter them. But without further ado, just jump in, I can show you the setup of how this thing lives and breathes. It is very much similar to what we would do on a ship. It has its own power systems, it has its own comms, it has everything that it needs to function correctly. On entering this space, you'll probably notice it's not a sterile station. There are obviously story elements that are going on here. And the main story element for this station in particular is that it's in the process of being decommissioned and ultimately recycled. So this is the comms center room. You'll notice the dark side is generally the bit that's being decommissioned. Everything's starting to get covered in cellophane and cloth and whatnot. But if you come through the other side, you'll see that this side is still operational and is functioning as you'd expect it. So yeah, I'm sorry if I've made people dizzy, because I'm one of these people that just looks around at everything as I'm going around.
TL;DRThe vehicle art director says the team is very busy with unannounced new and legacy ships, multi-crew item work and Squadron, with a focus on raising everything to a standard, and gives no dates.
I wish that was the case. No, we're just super busy. We've got a significant amount of ships coming on board for the PU, which I can't talk about at this moment. We've got a lot of work being done on the legacy ships, which I can't talk about either. There's all the ship item work that's being done for the multi-crew stuff, so there's a huge gameplay push for that as well. There's obviously Squadron ongoing. There's all the new mechanics to think about. And we went over the schedule, I think the day before yesterday, and it was going a very long way into the distance. I can't say when, but you get the gist of what's going on. The primary focus from CitizenCon is we want to focus on bringing everything up to a certain standard. And that includes some legacy ships that Chris doesn't want left behind. So he wants to give them as much love as the new stuff that we've done. They're coming back into the schedule so the game runs better. The older ships are more expensive. So, yeah, there's a lot.
TL;DRNathan Dearsley apologizes that few had seen the Javelin and says the crashed-ship workflow is resolved though not fully finished, making wrecks good points of interest once planets go live.
Yeah, sorry about that. It was quite funny. When we recorded the footage for that, it kind of dawned on me. I was like, you know what? No one's seen this ship. And I actually apologized on the thing. I don't think it made the cut, but it's just like, yeah, really sorry. Whoever's got one, it's there. You can fix it if you want. But no, it was really a domino from the Starfarer stuff that we'd done. And I spoke briefly about that at the time, wanting this kind of work approach to scale. And myself and Chris caught up, and I kind of shot myself in the foot to some extent and said, look, everyone's seen the Starfarer and now it's done. We need to move on. We can do this stuff. We need to make sure that it's going to scale and it's going to work. And it does. And it's by no means 100% finished right now, because there was the demo, there's a deadline, and you always want to take a little bit longer to get things resolved. But it's there in its foundation. So with that capital ship, the downed Idris as well, and the Starfarer, and the Cutlass, that workflow is resolved. And so this becomes a really good point of interest now for the planets when they go live. Like I said to you before, don't expect to see all the time these massive epic wrecks in a desert. I think it's just as powerful to just see a bunker door in the floor, and you drop down and then you realize, oh, actually, I'm inside a ship that's got buried over time. So it's about creating options and about creating gameplay. And I think we're on the right path with that. I think it's going to be pretty good.
TL;DRGiving ships and environments a history through small ambient stories makes them feel lived in, and Squadron 42 lets the team do this in ways the persistent universe currently can't.
It's kind of a double-edged sword. As a vehicle guy, you've got this trait that you want to make things aesthetically pleasing. The shape needs to work and you're making these beautiful ships. You're creating sculptures, right? But a sculpture without history is just a thing. It's just there, in my opinion. And as I touched on in the video, we're all environment artists. I spent a long time being an environment artist. And one of the things that was always a very important thing to get across was some kind of history to put into the environments that you're creating, or if not history, a future. And if you can create this with a background script and tell these little ambient stories of, oh, there was a dude in the vent there, why was he in the vent? It's like when you see Newt in Aliens, and she drops down into where she stayed and she's got all the little toys in the corner and marks on the wall, a photo of her parents. There are all these little things that are so easy to do. And you think about it from the ground up like that, and it's just that extra layer of thought that goes into these things. And I just really like that stuff. And as I said in the video, it's a break for the guys to try and do that, because we can't really do that in the PU, because if I go off and put a photo of his wife on the captain's console on a Javelin bridge, at the moment everyone's going to have a photo of his wife on that thing. There are systems on the horizon to sort that stuff out, but as soon as we get a little nugget where we can tell this little story, it's great. And that's why Squadron is a bit of a relief for that stuff as well. So we've got the Idris on the go, and now it's starting to get all these little personal touches into these spaces that make it feel like it's lived in and not just a sterile box.
TL;DRPlayer ship dirt, litter and decoration are something they'd like and will push for, but not right now; the Flowgraph part is easy and storing the data on the server is the tricky bit.
There are all these kinds of systems. There's also the maintenance side of things. Another thing that we want to achieve is that if you don't clean your ship, it's going to get dirty and it's going to fill up with rubbish and whatnot. And there are these systems in place that we can prototype now. And that's something I would like to do. I'd love it if you play the game and then log off for a month and come back, and your ship's just in complete disarray. I would love to see stuff like that. And it's definitely something that we will be pushing for, but not right now. But the systems are there. It's Flowgraph driven. A Flowgraph system that injects litter and marks on the walls and stuff is fairly straightforward to do. But it's how you store that information on the server. That's the tricky bit.
TL;DRThe Redeemer is on the list, but it needs rework to fit the newly settled ship metrics and component systems, which is substantial work on a very complex model.
Yes, it is. And if you want a little bit more information on what's going on now, I'll speak quite openly about it. Obviously the Redeemer came from The Next Great Starship. And it was at a time when the project was in its infancy. And obviously having people off-site make these things for us is a fantastic idea and it's great. But it's got to a point where we're realizing that, again, it's linked to the legacy ship stuff, that a lot of stuff wasn't really resolved at that point. The standard metrics: how big is the doorway, how steep is the staircase? How do you get into a turret? Can we reuse those turret metrics and animations for other uses? So we've got all that information now, and it's really a case of going back over these things and the legacy ships and making sure that they work with those new systems. And it goes way above that. That's just the basics. We've got all the ship components coming in. The ship won't be able to function without these, and these are actually going to be physical things that you can interact with in your ship. If they're not there, the ship will not function. There are these layers coming in that, for me, are going to unlock a lot of really cool gameplay. For me, with a lot of the ships, you look at them and you can't put your finger on what that space is for. When you're making the bathroom, you know it's a bathroom because there's a bath in it or a toilet, but there are a lot of spaces where you're just like, what can we do here? How can we give this place purpose? And the components are feeding into that. And we're like, oh, you know what? If the shield generator is going there, then we should totally address it like this. And that's a positive thing as well. But the Redeemer for sure, we know how important it is, and it is on that list.
So the model that's in the hangar right now was the model that Paul D'Alessi and the team there created, and we just brought it into CryEngine, but it has to be rebuilt with the component system in mind, with the metrics in mind. So it's got a substantial amount of work.
Yeah, they're just incredibly complex ships. I've got quite a lot of experience. I've handled some really complex models in the past, and I get a little bit of a fear factor even now when I open a Max file. 3ds Max is the program that we make the ships in. And it's really complex, and there are a lot of dependencies on one another. It's kind of crazy in a lot of respects, but it's worth it in the end when you pull it off. It is actually pretty much rocket science.
Yes. The answer is yes. It's kind of amusing, because the artist that made that is Matt, and it was an ongoing joke between us all when we were making it. Not a joke as in, oh, let's not put a chair there for the lols. It was a case of a few people went up and said, well, where's the captain's seat? And we were like, oh, yeah. It wasn't there in the concept, and I can't remember why it wasn't put in, but it will be put in. It's a bit of a given that the captain would want to sit at a desk. Anyone would want to sit at a desk. So it will get put in. And whenever that will be, it wouldn't take long to fix that.
TL;DRThe Javelin is nearly done, with two interior areas left (one significant) before final detail and optimization, but showing it is up to Chris Roberts.
Ask the big boss. The big boss being Chris. He was here this week, actually, and we went over the ship. There are two internal areas left to do. One of them is fairly significant: it's the cargo bay. The ship has been designed really well, actually. It's been designed how I'd expect it to be. So the sub-decks are engineering, the mid deck is all habitation and the top deck is all technical. So you've got this beautiful separation on each of the decks. We've got this lift at the front of the ship, and there's obviously a lift at the back to balance the internal route out. But we've done a really nice little touch at the front where there's a very thick glass panel, and you've got these two forks at the front of the Javelin going away. So I said to the guy, when you're in this lift, I want to feel like I'm looking down Fifth Avenue, these huge structures going away from you. So it's quite cool. There are a lot of cool little touches going into it. There are two main areas left to get to what we call LOD0. And once LOD0 is done, it's a case of going through your profile and optimizing it. And then she's ready. Turrets are done, thrusters are done, bodies are done. It's all there. And I want to share it. It's just when the boss is happy to.
The archetypes, like technical, habitation, all that kind of stuff, you reuse them. So you get to a point where you can pretty much block the ship out using the existing assets from Aegis. And then it's a case of, okay, this is just too much of the same, let's remix it a little bit. So it does save us a significant amount. And I think on the schedule we optimize around 40% less time. So if we're going to start a new multi-crew ship now with a substantial interior, for example a MISC ship, we would know that we've got 40% of that covered already with the existing assets and textures and shaders. And then the other 60% is what makes that ship unique.
Yeah, it's interesting you say that. So the Bengal, which has been in production and which we showed a little while ago, obviously we haven't shown all of it. There are the hangars that you've seen. The bridge on that ship is four stories high, and there's another two stories above that in a sub-bridge, should we say. And then we've got all the corridors, we've got the ready room, we've got habitation, the toilets, the showers. So we had an awful lot of stuff already, and it was Dan who originally did the raw concepts for that stuff, like the overall profiles of what a bulkhead should look like. If you spawn next to an RSI wall, you should know within two seconds you're in an RSI ship. And that's just through bold approaches to an angle. So the RSI stuff will always slope away from you at 30 degrees or slope into you at 30 degrees. And if you're going to have two slopes on one wall, generally one is roughly 60% dominant over the other one. So that way, if you spawn in an Imperial ship or an Imperial hangar, you get it, not just because of the colors and the tones, but it's very brutalist. It's very monolithic when you break it down. And that's what we wanted to push for the Bengal stuff, simply because with the scale of that ship, you had to have a more primitive approach to the art. So how do you make less go further? That almost dictated the art style. And then Dan kicked off on the Polaris with Paul and the concept team. And for sure, he came to us and I said, look, take all this stuff. We've made all this stuff already, see how far you get. And if you look at the concepts and the stuff that we've shown on the Bengal, you will see roughly about 40% reuse and 60% to make it unique. And that's a given.
TL;DRThe derelict Starfarer is part of planned derelict passes on every ship, aiming at ambient storytelling and reusable layouts for missions and the procedural system; it's not final.
No, it was always, when we discussed the Idris stuff, it was always a plan to start these passes on every ship. We'd done the Gamescom derelict, which was really like the first step of that. And then from there, it was: we've got these assets. We've got this cool ship that the guys have made. And it's really about taking those elements and getting creative with what we can do with those on terrain surfaces. So for sure, there's been inspiration from the Episode 7 stuff, which is very cool. LV-426 with the alien downed ship. There's these call-outs that you can... The most successful ones for me are always the ones that have got the emotion and the human aspect in there. With the Starfarer, anyone can go along and plow something into the sand and call it a day. I'm not saying that we're not going to do that, but there's also that emotional drive behind everything. Hence, someone's made it their home. There's a little chimney there. There might be a little boiler. All these little touches, we've got that stuff ready to go. So yeah, just a little bit of ambient storytelling, which on the ship team we don't get to do too much of, as it's more environment driven. So it's a nice break from that stuff. Obviously production on the ships continues. But it's nice to jump around a bit. And like I say, just get creative and tell a story without any dialogue. And if you can do that, you're winning.
No, not this one. Not this one at all. I've not looked at anything Alien related. Not for this one, no. I wanted to do it for ages, and the planetary stuff, when it's come on board and we got the proper scattering system for the light, so we can totally drive a proper desert feel or sunset or sunrise. So it's just, yeah, go for it. It's by no means final. It'll probably end up looking a bit better than that. But yeah, that was put together fairly rapidly. So the overall approach for it all is to essentially have loads of these made with different compositions, different stories, different layouts that design can populate with NPCs and create missions. Yeah, create missions, but it also feeds into the procedural system then. So yeah, I'm excited. There's a really good scene in Oblivion, the Tom Cruise movie, where he's just walking along this terrain and he just falls through the glass. There's nothing there. And even that excites me. So he falls through and then all of a sudden he's in some sky... I think it's the Empire State. I'm not sure. But that's super cool. So you could be walking along and you could hear the sound of the terrain change. Okay, what's under there? And down you go. So visually, it could be interesting, but also visually, it could be nothing until you're on top of it. So yeah, stuff like that.