I'm getting on that right now. We're splitting up apartments into modules so that we can use our procedural tools to generate apartments. So we're looking to create lobbies, apartments, common areas, rooms with office spaces. We're looking to integrate everything into our procedural building tool and then just start creating buildings. We have our technical director, Jean-Philippe. He did some great work. He showed us a full building created with the rooftop and every single element in the building going all the way down to the lobby and exiting the building. So for us, the progress is doing great, and so the next step is just to add more modules, more diversity, different paths, side paths, main paths.
TL;DRStaggered development means separate teams work on Pyro, Lorville, underground facilities and more in parallel, and modular assets built for Stanton can be reused in Pyro, so content keeps shipping steadily without bottlenecks.
That's where staggered development comes into play, and that's where having a team of, including Turbulent, around a thousand people between our five collective studios comes in. Not everybody works on everything at every given moment. There are teams dedicated to Pyro and there are teams dedicated to the underground facilities, there are teams dedicated to Lorville, there are teams dedicated to this, just like there are teams dedicated to the platform fixes and the stuff that's going on there. And that all exists that way because, well, what's the common analogy? Nine doctors don't deliver a baby in one month. There's an inflection point in developing any feature where adding more people to it doesn't make it any faster, it doesn't make it any better. And you don't want any one thing to become a roadblock or to become a bottleneck to other things. Sometimes it's unavoidable. But for the most part, you try to avoid that by having this team on this, and this team on this, and this team on this, so that if something pushes, everything else behind it doesn't have to knock on. There are always going to be dependencies and stuff. And like I said, the only constant in game development is change. But the idea, and it works out this way more times than not, is that by having these staggered teams all working on different things simultaneously, we can continue to deliver content to players at a steady pace.
And even when, Nemanja, you said, "I just started on building interiors," that was you having moved on to building interiors. Obviously, we've shown work of other folks already starting on building interiors.
So talking about Pyro, I'm also supporting a team, if they need, for the derelict settlements. So for example, we're using the Raastar tool to create those, and we're building right now the library of all our modules to create the settlements in Stanton. But every single module that we create for Stanton can also be reused in Pyro. So the work we're doing in Stanton is just making our life easier in the future whenever we get to Pyro. For us, it's going to be a matter of a week or two maybe to create one settlement, max. And then we're going to be able to churn out a lot of those.
To follow up on what you said earlier: yeah, Lorville may not be the biggest priority, but that's the point. We overlap things. People on building interiors are already coming in as we're wrapping up and polishing.
And the building interiors work for Lorville applies to buildings in ArcCorp, applies to buildings in Orison and stuff. The underground facilities are designed to be placed within Stanton, they'll also be placed within Pyro, they'll also be placed within other systems.
We're building the foundation for things to be used everywhere. I just want to mention that when we built the space clinics, that was the first project where we got to use the early version of the procedural tool that will now be used for the building interiors. So it was like the proof of concept. So everything has a foundation and a use for the next steps.
We talked about the building interiors, we talked about the underground facilities, even things like the space stations. Even the stations of the Stanton system can serve as the basis for many of the decrepit space stations in Pyro and stuff like that. It's all designed to feed, and that's the whole reason we do as much as we can modularly.
TL;DRAnother team uses the Raastar tool to build derelict settlements much faster than hand-placing, with a batch of them in white box and tentatively scheduled for a coming patch.
Yeah. So before I jumped on the UGFs, I did a few settlements, I believe Sean as well. So that was in between things: as the UGFs were getting prepared, before we jumped on that, we were helping out the settlement team. The 600i and the Star Runner on Daymar. But there's still a team right now working, progressing on that, testing out the Raastar tool, as Nemanja was talking about before. So they're using what we built and just adding on to it and trying new variations, new setups.
Yeah. And now we're going to have a variety of those ranging from small, medium to large. I think we're aiming to ship 15 of them. We just passed the white box today. So that shows you the difference in the scale and the speed at which we can work with the Raastar tool compared to doing it by hand, where we did one in three months. Now we're doing 15 in three months.
And the Reclaimer was about six months. So the Reclaimer and the Daymar crash were both mostly hand placed. And once we got the Raastar tool, they've been doing settlements, like you were saying. We have two new Reclaimer ones coming in that are bigger. It also helps that last year we worked a lot on building the library, which they're now using. We really started putting together a formula for that.
Because there was nothing quite like that at the moment, and we started taking things and destroying them. And once you guys finally figured out what you wanted to do with them, now it's going way faster.
We showed a bit of the derelict sandbox, the various degrees, in ISC towards the beginning of this quarter. So the other team, I don't want to speak for the work of other teams, but that team is currently putting together a bunch of settlements and such that's currently scheduled for 3.20, if I'm not mistaken. And we'll actually be filming with them in Montreal for next season of ISC in a couple weeks.
TL;DRStreet-level ArcCorp is something they discuss constantly, but with finite resources they must triage, and for now Lorville only gets ships low rather than letting players walk the whole city.
That's the reason I wanted to call it out, because it's representative of a conversation that continuously happens. We talk about that constantly. There's always lots of things we want to do and lots of things where it's "wouldn't it be cool to do that," but you have to balance them with everything else that would be cool to do and we want to do. And then think about them within the scope of an entire universe that we're trying to build. It's like, do we need to go down to that micro or should we go further out? Because even going back to what I said earlier in the show about multiple teams all working on different things, and approaching 1,000 people if we haven't crossed it over already, counting our friends at Turbulent, there's still a finite number of resources. It seems like a lot, but you can only work on X number of things at any given time. Then tomorrow, you'll only be able to work on X number of things, next week, next month, next year. So there's always this triage of ideas. There's always this internal battle of, yes, that would be cool, and yes, that would be cool, and yes, that would be cool. We can do two. And how do we determine which two? It goes back to that question from before, like you've got your interior and your exterior, and how do you determine what goes on? These debates, I'm going off on a little bit of a thing here, these debates that we see in the community, in YouTube channels and Twitch streams, heck, just in text on Spectrum, often mirror the same discussions we've had internally. The number of times I've been sent a link to a Spectrum post or whatever, and it's like, yep, just what I said. They're saying just what I said. The same conversations happen internally that happen externally. It's always a fun reminder of the obvious and open synergies between us and the community. And then there's the ones where it's like, I wanted that too. And unfortunately, this was deemed more important, and this was deemed more important, so I'm going to have to wait.
Yeah, you've said it pretty well, as I wanted to. We constantly discuss on Lorville that we want to get the players as close as possible to the ground. Unfortunately, you can't just walk around the city anywhere you want. But that wasn't our goal from the beginning, nor was it the goal towards the end. But there were many parts of the city where we're like, okay, we can get your ship very low. And that's the way we want it to be right now. Because otherwise, Lorville would take forever to make.
I mean, heck, you see how long a small space takes to make. Like Night City for Cyberpunk is half that game. Obviously, that's a rabbit hole that you can get trapped in. So we're constantly having to balance how far...
So Night City is one city, but if you had multiple planets with multiple cities, at some point there's a point of diminishing return where every city is not as unique. So for me, Night City is a cool idea, but with the size of Lorville, if we built Night City that size, to me, that would be too big. It would just be overwhelming for the players, for the devs also. But it is constantly something we talk about. And Area18 for me is one of the coolest places, where you feel like you're in Night City and you feel like you're on the ground in the city. So eventually if we get to expand, add more neighborhoods, add onto that, that will be great. But for the moment, that's not our plan.
That's a good question. We should ask that one to Todd because he took us by surprise too when he asked us to do that. But our goal is always to add more gameplay that's fun, and quickly, for the players. This was a good onboarding task also for one of our new level designers. It was a good first step toward implementing more racing into the universe. It's definitely a step in the right direction. So I'm excited to see what's going to be coming in the future for racing, but for now, six racetracks, I think this was a pretty easy win for all the teams that worked on this. And it was just fun to make, and hopefully it's going to be fun to play.
TL;DRIt's a brand new racetrack near the garden on Daymar, built in natural canyons and reminiscent of Snake Pit but with added verticality, underpasses, better landmarks and more detail.
So this is going to be a brand new racetrack. So this is not one of the community racetracks that we picked up. This is a new one. It's right next to the garden on Daymar. They have a pretty cool range of mountains and canyons that are one next to another. And we decided to make a racetrack there for multiple reasons. One, because it's close to a QT point. Two, because we already have these natural canyon formations for players to race in. It also reminds us a lot of the Snake Pit racetrack, so in that regard it's going to be very familiar to the players. There's very similar turns and curves, the atmosphere is the same. So it's going to be familiar for the racers, but there's also some new parts that are closer to mountains where we added a little bit of verticality, we added those underpasses under the rocks, which are very memorable. So we just took Snake Pit and basically brought it to the next level. So this is the evolution of racing. It looks better. It feels better. It's beautiful. We had a lot of artists work on this. Louis Max, he did a great job art-wise and it really shows in the minor details. When you get closer to the ground on the human scale, there's a lot more detail. We have better landmarks. It's just a great fun track to race in.
Yeah, we've actually added the missions on Snake Pit too. So the time trials are going to be available on Snake Pit. We had to update the visuals of Snake Pit a little bit also to accommodate for the checkpoints. But the golden path of Snake Pit is still the same. We just had to add some visuals for a few extra checkpoints to make sure that people can't skip above the canyons.
Yeah, so they're going to have to grind some reputation in order to unlock all the tracks. Obviously, the first tracks are supposed to be a little bit easier, so the player is going to open up the mobiGlas. There's going to be a new racing career. And they're going to be able to pay an entry fee to race. And we have multiple brackets. I'm not too familiar with how many brackets we have, but we definitely have bronze, silver, gold, platinum. And then depending on how fast the player finishes the race, he's going to get a time and some credits depending on where he ranked on the bracket. And there's also going to be a world record to beat that's going to be based on whoever has the fastest record on that track.
It's very similar to the Snake Pit, so I think this one's about 10 kilometers more or less. We have other ones that are bigger, that are about 30 kilometers. This one goes in a loop, so we're going to try to have in the future races that are loops, some that are linear, so we're going to play with that.
Exactly. So we have visual checkpoint markers right now. We see one right there. So once you go through, it's going to show you the next checkpoint that you need to go to. These are going to be very helpful. I would suggest that players, the first few times they do the races, they do them slowly just to be sure that they don't crash. Learn the race, and then after a few laps on the race, you'll be able to do them pretty easily, I think. And I currently hold the world record on this race. It's one minute, 22 seconds. So it will be the world record until everybody else in the PU gets in there and just destroys me.
TL;DRGraham Philipson says it looks beautiful and he can't wait to tune audio for it, while Nemanja Panic adds the tracks can be raced at night and hide one to three podium Easter eggs each.
Yeah, well, we'll talk a little bit later about how Corentin's going to be looking at the flight experience from an audio perspective, and this is another angle on that, and we have to make the ships work in a way that sounds good in all circumstances, and this is a very unique circumstance, but it looks absolutely beautiful, and I certainly can't wait till we get our hands on it and start tuning the audio experience to it as well.
What's important to mention also is these tracks, you'll be able to race them at night also. We have amazing lighting artists that did some amazing work on these tracks. So whether you're racing at daytime or nighttime, the experience is going to be different, but I love to see these tracks, the way they're lit up at night, especially the landmark on this one with the fire on top, it looks great. One other thing to know is we did hide some Easter eggs. Some are going to be easy to find, others are going to be harder to find because the tracks are so big. We did place a few podiums around the tracks in key locations where we have some nice shots for print screens. So it's going to be up to the players to find those podiums. There's between one and three podiums hidden per track. So good luck finding them.
This one has, I'm not sure if I remember correctly, I think it's a medium landing pad where we saw the landmark location with the fire on top. There is a landing pad there, but I'm not sure the size of the landing pad. And I think we would need to put in a large one so that maybe a Caterpillar can land there with a couple of spectators. So we do want to have nice places where people can land and watch the race.
TL;DRJared Huckaby says racing work is often suited to newer team members and fitting available schedules across a huge project, and Nemanja Panic notes only two of the Montreal level designers worked on the tracks.
You make a good point about this being a starter task for a brand new member of the team. Not everybody that works on Star Citizen is at the same level of involvement, is at the same level of experience, is at the same level of commitment. And a lot of these times when you see these outward things like, oh, why are they on this and also this and also this? It's because you're looking for tasks to fit schedules. You're looking for tasks to fit openings in availabilities. You're looking for tasks that are suitable for the talent and capabilities of folks that you're trying out. You'll get all kinds of things. You'll get the major things, and you'll get the medium things, and you'll get the little tiny, fun, fluffy things, and all the stuff in between, especially when you're a project that's five studios wide and 800-some-odd people strong.
On the Montreal team, I think we're five or six level designers right now. And out of the five or six level designers, only two worked on those tracks, so myself and Dane. So we have other level designers working constantly on other things which are not racing specific. But everybody has their own opinion on what we should be working on.
Oh, man, that would be a question for Dane. I don't know the exact size of this track, but we're also hovering, I think, around the 18 to 20 checkpoints. So these are, I'd say, our small to medium-sized tracks. We're going to explore larger tracks. When we have more power from level art, we're going to dabble into larger tracks here.
Well, whoever raced the Lorville Gateways track before, which was renamed to Lorville Outskirts now, it's the same exact start position. So it's behind the CBD building. We can see it right there. So the start point is right behind the CBD building. It's a very straightforward track. There's a few turns and then there's a couple of straight lines. It looks good. It feels good. Checkpoints help a lot. Right now, we're at the phase where we're just polishing the checkpoints, where we want the checkpoints to lead the players a little bit better into the turns.
TL;DRThe developers say they joined for a playable, frequently patched game with visible player reactions, a feeling of working for players rather than investors, good-looking art, and the chance to build for future hardware.
I mean, a project of that magnitude is... it's hard not to be flabbergasted by whatever you're seeing. And the fact that it's already playable and out there in the world is something that most of us really haven't experienced. It's all hush-hush for years, usually. And now we're building it, and we can see people reacting to it as we're building it. We can see how it resonates with people. And I think that's something that not a lot of us have experienced in the past, developing those super long productions that we have to keep secret for three, four, five years sometimes. So I think it's an interesting way of developing games.
And sometimes forever. There are some games that we've worked on that got scrapped. So it's kind of sad to work on something that looks amazing, and then, sorry, can't show it. It's gone. So to work on something that has frequent patches, playable in alpha, it's very encouraging, motivating as well.
It feels like we're working for the players and not investors. It's a team effort. We're not the big money pocket guys. We're just working for everybody that loves the game and the whole community. So it's a very different feel; that's what attracted me the most.
And as artists, it's also just a really good looking game. It's a passionate thing for us too. It's kind of funny that we'll be able to update our ArtStations before our previous games get to ship. So that's how quick it moves.
But also, when we work on different projects, you're always asking yourself as a developer, imagine if this game was actually coming out on the next gen or on the next CPUs and GPUs. And currently, that's pretty much what we're doing here. It's hard to run this game even on high-end PCs. Being able to work on a game that's built for the future but that currently is in a little bit of a shaky state is very exciting as a developer, because you get to just constantly try to push those limits as much as you can, because you're expecting that eventually hardware is going to catch up. So it's exciting to not have those limitations already put in place on day one, and then you work on a game for four years, and when you release it, it's been four years of new releases of hardware. As opposed to right now, we're just constantly trying to push the limits, even if the hardware can't necessarily always keep up.
I liked also, to your point, Rainer, just before that, the hospitals were the first full levels that the team has put out in the patch, which is very nice, really cool. But it's the fact that you can actually read the feedback from players when they see them. Even though they're not completely available right now in 3.14, even just having the lobbies, I know you went in and you guys were taking selfies in game, like, look, we're in the game. And that's really invigorating, to be able to ship often.
And see positive comments, too. And just to see praise on your work so quickly, because I joined last December and already I get to see what I've worked on in the past six months is already getting better. It's nice to see comments already.
I can talk. I think it's already on the timeline that we're working on it. We're working on the puzzle derelicts. So we're working on the crash ship, the Caterpillar crash ship, because it gives us a lot of room to add in puzzles inside of the Caterpillars. And we're also trying to develop them in a way that we don't depend on art or missions or other teams in Turbulent. We obviously need help from all other teams, but we're trying to be as self-sufficient as we can to ship them, to bring in gameplay, to bring in puzzles, to bring in exploration, whether it's on planets or in space. So currently we're working on the derelict puzzles, and we'll see what doors that opens and where it leads.
TL;DRYes, the team is working out where to place derelicts, some easy and some hard to find, with puzzles and loot crates of varying rarity to give explorers gameplay.
Yeah, so we're looking right now at where we're going to place those derelicts so that some are easy to find and some are hard to find. We're also trying to maximize the use of the new tech that you guys are bringing in, so the scanning and the loot crates. So basically, the way we're trying to build them is you have a crash site that's in three or four pieces, so you might have a crash site with one puzzle and three, four loot crates, or you might have a crash site with three puzzles inside and multiple loot crates with varying rarity. So our goal is to give those players who like to explore, gather, loot... it's always fun to open a chest and you get an epic or a legendary item and things like that. So I think we're trying to go in that direction for the explorers and add more gameplay puzzles and such things.
Actually, we stumbled upon this cool little gadget. I think it was a mine that was prototyped. So we're going to try to add dangers. Eventually, we're also planning on revisiting those puzzles when we have things like fire in the game that's propagating and things like that. And as soon as we get planetary nav mesh and other things like that, sky's the limit in Star Citizen. Actually, sky isn't the limit in Star Citizen.
TL;DRThe team says the year went well, with level design, environment art and tools working well together and strong hires, though a star system proved far bigger than expected and gameplay still needs more hires.
I think we're doing really good. Essentially, what we want to create is a team that's somewhat autonomous but not working as a lone wolf inside the company. So we are connected with other teams. We have reviews with other teams. And just this morning, we had a biweekly art review in which all the teams were showing absolutely amazing content. But when we work on the day-to-day, that's when we want to have more proximity with the team so that, for example, when the people in the UK are leaving work, if we have questions, it's much more simple if we have someone here to answer them. So I think so far, the combination between level design and environment art was absolutely successful. Then adding the tools team, who not only are helping us sometimes to understand things better, but also doing quality of life improvements for the artists and the designers, was also super helpful. And it's essentially our base of growth, where we want to grow the entire studio by adding teams that are relevant to each other so that we support each other even more in that area. And to be honest, when we first joined one year ago, we thought it would be quicker to ramp up and, let's say, do a star system. And that was probably very naive of us. Now we see the absolutely gigantic amount of work a star system takes to develop. So that's in terms of the scope, but in terms of the team we have assembled, the luck we had of having so many talented people... the 37 people that we signed and are working with us are top, top, top in their craft. So in terms of creating an autonomous team that can work together, we're so, so lucky.
We're autonomous, but it's important to know that we still ask for a lot of help from other teams in CIG, in Europe and everywhere. In no way could we have ever shipped hospitals or even anything without the help of the level design team in Europe, and everybody from VFX artists to environment teams to lighting artists everywhere. I think on a daily basis we chat with the level design team in Europe, and all the time we're asking, what's this bug? How do I fix this? Because they have years and years of experience under their belt. So for them, the problem resolution is five times quicker than it is for us, because they've seen all these bugs 100 times and we're seeing them for the first time and we're a little bit clueless. So we try to be autonomous, but at the same time, the support we're getting from every other team in CIG is what's helping us ship these things.
The people were so welcoming. It was pretty amazing to see that. And to echo on your question, Jared, I think we're doing great environment-wise. It's been super nice. I think that the ramp-up's been great. On the gameplay side, we're still looking for more hires to be able to totally dive into complete gameplay loops. Though on the design side, like Neno was talking about, we're moving forward with puzzles and what we're able to action today. I feel like we still have ways to go to dive fully into new gameplay features, but we know which ones we're looking at. I can't talk about that. And as Guillaume was saying, the strategy is going to be to have a team that can complement the group here to basically iterate together gameplay, level design, design tools, art, concept, everything into one giant loop.
[These] are all things that are in the works, but again, as we discussed earlier, the game development side of Turbulent has been on for a year. Anyone who has worked in this industry knows that a year is nothing; it's a very short amount of time. So just to have been able to give to the community what we have so far, like the hospitals, and put all these processes in place, that takes time. It's insane the amount of stuff we have achieved in such a short time. And Guillaume can correct me, but about half of that year was just ramping up and finding the right people for the job. So all in all, it's six months of development. So it's very inspiring what we're able to achieve with these amazing talents across the board.
And going back to the gameplay side that Ben mentioned, can we do a shameless plug? If one of you is a lead gameplay programmer, drop us a line. We're looking for one. We've got some really great topics for you. Contact us and we'll talk.