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.
EM
Elliot MaltbyPrincipal Designer, Mission Feature Team
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.
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.