I got here first. I was working with Robbie going back to TT, when we were doing the Lego games and things. I thought, right, why have a dog and bark yourself? I'll bring him across here.
Well, I remember there was no hope for me. When I think I was four, you got me a Sega Mega Drive. It's like, "Here, here's X-Men, here's Street Fighter, get good." No hope from there onwards; I got hooked on games and it's all I want to do.
TL;DRNick Elms got into games through drawing pixels on the BBC Micro with Chris, then training companies on 3D Studio, and joined the games industry when a studio was set up for EA.
Well, I started off working with Chris. We were just finishing school and just playing around with graphics on the BBC Micro. And he was doing his games, Stryker's Run and Match Day, and kind of said to Phil and I, because we all liked doing art, we all did art at school, "Come draw some pixels, let's do some stuff on here." So we did that, and all of a sudden he's driving around in a really flashy car, and Phil and I are looking at each other going, "What's happened here?" And he's like, "Sold this game," and he's minted. So then we cottoned on to this, and Chris hung around for a bit, and then he went to Origin, and obviously the rest is history.
Yeah, well, I went into training. I was on the tech side and I was training companies. I was one of the only authorized Autodesk trainers of 3D Studio. So I was going around to games companies in the area, training their staff how to use 3D Studio. One of them was a company called Rowan Software, which did a lot of flight simulator games, so I was teaching them how to build planes. And I kind of got, "Well, I can do this. I can do this for a living." So Erin came back to the UK, set up a studio for EA and pulled a load of us in, and that was me in the games industry from there on.
TL;DRNick Elms has known Chris since primary school and tells how, as teenagers, Chris ran D&D with scripted voices and sound effects, which lasted only about three sessions because it was too much work.
We went to primary school together. It goes back a long way. But yeah, I'm glad you gave me a heads up on that, because being put on the spot with "Tell me a story about Chris" I think could have ended with career suicide for me.
One that hopefully won't get me fired, and I think anyone who's seen Chris will probably attest it's fairly accurate. Go back to when we were like 15 or 16 and we just played D&D. Chris kind of got bored with the wooden delivery from the DMs. Somebody would be droning on, and he's like, "This needs more emotion, needs spicing up." So he got this idea to bring his friends in to do voices for the creatures, writing a script, getting sounds like rain sounds or wind sounds in the background. And he's having us all doing these crazy orc voices or dragon voices and things like that to play on a tape recorder while he's DMing. Probably about 40 years back, nearly.
It was fantastic. But the thing is, I think it only went for about three sessions, because it was so work intensive. Like I said before, we were all quite good artists at school, so we were even drawing concept art for environments, just to have the maximum amount of immersion for this game. But I think we got about three sessions in and everyone was like, "Jesus, this is too much work. It's like a job. We're only 15." But yeah, it was an experience. I think everyone who played those campaigns, even for three sessions, would remember it. Certainly Erin and my younger brother Simon, who's the financial director.
I think for me, because we have essentially built it from the ground up near enough, it's when we first got, and this is not just even Squadron related, when we first got quantum travel working, and it's like, "Oh my God, we can achieve this," that kind of moment of, oh, the scale of what we're going for. That was when the penny dropped for me: we can do this, it's going to be great. That's probably my story.
Yeah, I'd go back to when we first started to get some of the rushes in from the actors, and the team that Chris assembled was just mind-blowing. Seeing that coming in, and then seeing the amount of it that was coming in and going, "Oh my God, this is going to be huge." It's like hours and hours of it. It's so impressive.
The Squadron 42 design team is split into three, actually. It's three teams that work very closely with each other. First being Ross's team, the FPS team, which works predominantly on the ground and gravity-based areas where combat and exploration are a focus.
Yes, all the pew-pew stuff is down to Ross. The flight team work on the space sections of the game, as you might expect. That includes dogfighting, exploration, landing, takeoff, all that kind of stuff, obviously working very closely with the various AI feature teams as well. And then finally, we've got the social team, and they're kind of the glue for all the narrative elements of the game, building the interactive experience, presenting it to the player cinematically with a focus on maximum immersion, as Chris has called out.
TL;DRYes, the habitation section can be extended quickly if more personnel are needed, and the team wants Squadron 42 locations to feel fully realised and explorable rather than just corridors to an objective.
Yeah, it is. And again, that's the kind of idea of just drilling down into the functionality of these spaces, is that this is interchangeable, and if this space suddenly needed more personnel to come and work there, they could basically extend the size of this quite easily.
Yeah, and this is one of the things that we're driving at, is that a lot of what we want to do in Squadron is have a lot of exploration and feel like you're basically behaving how you would behave in these locations, as opposed to just, this is a game, I'm obviously going to go in, kill some guys and get to the objective, I'm just going down a corridor, I'm looking for where the objective marker is taking me. We really wanted it so players can start to explore these spaces and see how people were living.
TL;DRThey say it is planned that AI reacts to stimuli like lights switching on, and that environments should be as interactive as possible, with physicalized objects usable to distract enemies or as cover.
Yeah, absolutely. And we've also got the stimulus that the AI here are going to react to as well. If you're in an area where there's no lights and you suddenly switch the lights on, then you could draw the attention of the AI. And all that kind of stuff is planned at this stage as well.
Yeah, and that's something we can dig into in a little bit, where we basically talk about how we want as much of these environments to be interactive as possible. So we're basically going through them, and you see terminals and consoles. You should be able to interact with them and read the stuff in there, and a lot of the things are going to be physicalized in there, so you can pick them up, throw them around, move them about, do that sort of thing. And all those, again, will feed back into the sandbox environment. So if there's enemies in these spaces, you can actually use them to distract enemies or even use them as cover and that sort of thing.
TL;DRChanges to blockout spaces are driven partly by gameplay not working as hoped and partly by art reference showing a shape isn't believable, and the narrative reacts to how aggressively the player plays.
Yeah, basically. I mean, that's a large combination of it. And in some cases, as I said, it's gameplay driven, and the fact that it's like, oh, well, this doesn't actually work for what we hoped, in which case we'll go in and we'll change it. And in other cases, it's just we've blocked something out, and again, when we're doing it very early on, the art guys have gone in there, and they've obviously got a lot more reference material and stuff. So there'll be some cases where a shape just doesn't quite work for a believable space. And in those cases, we basically say, OK, well, we need to change the layout a little bit to accommodate.
Narratively, we pretty much cater for what the player does as well. So if the player goes in there all guns blazing, then the whole base is going to be on alert. Maybe you get to pick up some bits of information here and there, especially if you're in a crawl space or something like that.
Yeah, so right now, this is just as it's intended from a visual and artistic standpoint. Obviously, the level is fully traversable and doors all work and everything. But one of the things is that AI is obviously an ongoing process, and obviously, live demoing at this point, anything could happen. So we're just trying to save ourselves a little bit of pain right now from showing too much stuff, basically.
TL;DRStill experimenting: a struggling enemy might radio nearby zones for help, and some locations may have dropship reinforcements, though this is undecided for this location, and players will get systems to gain advantages.
So that's something we're still experimenting with at the moment. But what might be nice, for example, is if, say, again, you're in here, you fight these guys, and they're down to the last man, and he's on his own, and he's struggling. Maybe he radios for support. And then in that case, we could say the nearest next zone, he's basically requesting help. And then something else, which we've not decided yet for this location, but something we may do in other locations, is if an enemy or a group of enemies are struggling, perhaps they call in dropship support, and then an extra wave of enemies could actually come to the location. And in that case, we can obviously make things more difficult for the player.
Exactly. And again, we're working on some of the systems at the moment, but there will be systems that also allow players to give themselves a little bit more of an advantage in tackling some of these situations as well.
TL;DRRoss Wilding says the team is getting excited because they are past the early unknowns of blockout, the spaces are known, mechanics are coming online, and the art looks great.
To be honest, at the moment, I feel like everyone's starting to get quite excited about everything, because in the past, when you're in blockout, especially when you're developing a new game, the tech is moving along with it at the same time. There's a lot of unknowns, and you're planning and setting things up with the assumption of how something's going to work. But we're past that first hurdle, and we're getting into the stage now where we know what the spaces are. We've obviously been developing them for a while. Now we know what the mechanics are, and they're starting to come online.
I mean, the art is obviously stunning. And the thing I'm most grateful for in this video is I can take all the credit for the artwork that's been shown.
Yes. Well, interrupt tech, that's a part of it. So then, for example, say you interrupt the conversation, then during that conversation you have break points. And that's points throughout the conversation where you can potentially back off. You can 180, just break off from the conversation, and they have to adapt to that. So then that's when the wild lines kick in, you know, oh, you've got somewhere to be.
Yeah, there's all sorts. But then the player's given an opportunity to rejoin or abandon. And if you rejoin, the NPC's got to pick up the conversation. And if you abandon, the NPC's got to go back to pretty much, they gesticulate and go, oh, what the hell? I guess you don't want to talk. Then they go back to what they were doing.
Yeah. So that was all done in first person, and it was all range-based. So you were backing off when you were doing the interrupts. This shows off the player in these examples. Here, I'll show you the video. So that was his focus trigger, realizing he'd seen you, and this is the player, can you see? Being fairly obnoxious.
Yeah, he's got an interaction trigger around him, and that's dynamically scaling depending on what the player's doing. So when the player 180s, it shrinks. When the player 180s again, here you can see it now, it goes back into it, increases, and then he actually picks up the conversation again.
As creative director on Squadron 42, I guess I'm steward for Chris's vision of the game. I work across the whole company to ensure that we're aligned on what is required across all teams to deliver this engaging cinematic experience that Chris has promised for Squadron.
TL;DRSquadron 42 and Star Citizen are developed in tandem, so the current flight model, AI and first-person gameplay reflect Squadron 42, though both speakers admit it isn't yet where they want it to be.
Like you said, both Squadron 42 and Star Citizen are completely developed in tandem. So what you're seeing in the flight model right now is what we have in Squadron. What you're seeing in the AI and the FPS side is what we have in Squadron. Again, that's something that we've actually seen as a big benefit for Squadron, because we can refine that experience with the help of the backers. We can take the feedback of what people like and don't like and put it into Squadron, and make sure that we're closer to the bullseye when the game comes out, without spoiling anything, which is cool. We're not exactly where we want to be right now, but we're pretty close. We're getting closer by the day.
I think it's fair to say that many people will share the sentiment that it is not where we want it to be. But as we review, as we re-examine at the top of every year, find new ways to improve stuff, we've done things like create the Vehicle Experience team to help refine the flight model. We're going to talk to Francesco Roccucci about advances in AI that we've made a little bit later. I think we're really poised to make some terrific progress this year.
TL;DRThe team recently worked on a new female player character, integrating a full, different performance into each scene rather than just swapping head and voice, with pickup filming already done and more planned.
I guess, if I'm looking for a non-spoiler, which is always quite difficult on Squadron, we've recently been working on the new female player PCAP. As with everything in Star Citizen and Squadron 42, it's more than just a head and voice replacement. We're integrating a full performance into each scene to enhance the experience of a gender choice in the game. So if you choose the female character, you will have a different performance within the game. Chris has been vocal in the past about almost presenting the cinematic and story elements of the game as a director's cut kind of thing. But we've always said we're going to allow the player to wiggle out of that and experience it the way they want to. You will see the nuances of a female performance within the same scenes if you choose that gender now in the game.
Yes. You've got a lot of slightly different interactions as well in there. So it's going to be interesting. We shot quite a lot of scenes. So it's a lot of work, but it makes a big difference.
And I suppose it adds to the replay value, too, because you can go through playing with one gender and then go through and play with the other gender and see the differences. And of course, the recent filming we just did was not the first time. They were pickups. It was additional filming with our female player character.
Yeah, absolutely. And we know in the future, obviously, we are going to be doing pickups here and there for a lot of the story elements as they develop.
So in Squadron, we've split the design team into three principal groups. You've got the FPS team, you've got the flight dogfighting team, and you've got the social team. They're all sat together here in the Wilmslow office, so they all work seamlessly across the various game chapters. It's just that we have experts in various fields that drive elements of the game forward, maintaining consistency and quality across the game.
And folks who follow Star Citizen's development will notice that the ship combat, the FPS combat and the social aspects are the same divisions we use for our AI as well.
TL;DRSquadron 42's heavily narrative scenes are cinematically driven and immersive, letting players leave, rejoin or time out of conversations, with rudeness carrying consequences that can affect how characters treat them later.
That is obviously one of the pillars of Squadron 42. It's very cinematically driven, and that's how Chris has wanted it to be. We've got the addition of these heavily narrative scenes that drive the story forward. We're shooting for a level of immersion that I guess you weren't seeing in most games previously. You're not just a disembodied ghost spectator on conversations. When you go there, you can break out, you can abandon, you can rejoin conversations, they'll time out. You actually feel like you're part of the scene completely. And that's quite engaging. Obviously, rudeness will carry a negative marker, so if I wander off in the middle of a conversation with you... but we have that even filter into the story as well, so if you upset someone, then later on they might be rude to you.