Randy Vazquez

Not really. I was thinking about this recently. The first time you kind of encounter the experience of trolling, it's like, oh my god, why are you thinking of me so much, what's wrong? Sometimes when I'm stressed at work, I read the Reddit cats forum, and I clicked on new instead of top recently, and I noticed there are people who dedicate their lives to trolling the people who post pictures of their cats. There's like a guy who every day posts a picture of a cat with poop photoshopped onto it with the comment, 'I pooped on this cat.' That's this man's entire life. It's not us. It's not the people who have a problem with us. We're just jerks.

I think it took a lot of getting used to, working here, because you do have a lot of people and you have to find a way to not take it personally, because people can be vicious.

It's a learning lesson. Especially different parts. When I was still doing art, people would just trash your art, and people could do it in a nice way, or they could do it in a mean way, and half the time you're just in the corner crying in a little fetal position. But you're like, I'm not taking it seriously, I'm not doing this. And then other times, design the same way, just poking holes in designs. Some of my favorite times working with some of the lead designers was you give them a design, and then the whole entire paper is just one big red mark. But it's really good feedback, and that's the thing. Some of the forum, even the trolls, they still have points. So you just have to push past the trolliness and just look at the points. Okay, this is the point they're making. And then once you start collating all that feedback, it's no longer about troll this person or troll this, whatever. It's just like, okay, these are the points they're trying to make. It's just looking past that.

In fact, I think the one really negative thing about people who are dedicated trolls is it makes it a little bit harder to say, here's the serious concern. Because there are lots of people with actual concerns, and sometimes they are passionate to the extent that they seem like trolls. They're not. We know they're not. But it's just kind of filtering that is, I think, the most difficult thing about it.

We're just getting into the really big ships, so something like the Starfarer, we're still sorting out how that'll work both with the hangar and with Port Olisar. It's just one of the many pieces that we're slowly getting sorted out. We're just trying to get the medium-sized ships in the game now with the Connie and the Freelancer, so it's just iterating and building things out and finding out what actually is going to work long-term.

We've got some time. The Starfarer is going to go into the hangar, then it'll be in the hangar for a while before it becomes flight ready. So we have some time to figure that stuff out. Prioritization is probably one of the most important aspects of game development, and the hardest. We all want the Banu Merchantman to be done, but it just doesn't make sense yet.

Well, and that's also the same, because I see a lot of questions about, will this variant be ready when the ship is hangar ready? And across the board, realistically, no. We're going to get a baseline of the ship set up, hangar ready, flight ready, and then we'll start getting all those variants built out, set up, and get those flyable when it's the appropriate time. We can't do everything all at once now. There's only so many people, so many days.

The shields and the hull issue is definitely something we're looking into. It's a little squishy at the moment. Even with that, the Vanguard is really one of our first ships that was built from the ground up with the new component refit system that's coming out soon in mind. The unfortunate side effect of that is not everything it needed for the shields to work as intended is fully set up. So once that's all set up, it should pick right back up and get closer to where it should be. It has its six shield generators installed, it's just they're not all playing nice together. But that should definitely be getting cleaned up, hopefully in the near future as more of this component stuff rolls out.

So basically it exists in a different way than the other ships.

A little bit, yeah. So once we convert everything over, once we get the Hornet and everything else to the new system, it'll even out some more. Once all that rolls out, there's that whole first month or so of this new component system, I'm expecting a lot of balance threads to pop up from it. There's the typical balance threads, and then every ship will have two or three different balance threads about it when all this stuff happens. So it's a giant set of sweeping changes. Well, if people want to get heard, we've got our Let's Talk About Spaceships section on the forums. We've got a whole bunch of threads set up to get specific feedback on specific ships.

Issue Council.

Issue Council as well. But let us know on the boards. So give me a shout.

So, I have actually stopped working on the Cat since I switched over to production, but I'm still definitely talking with Elwin, I'm talking with Kirk, and I'm making sure that all the designs and everything are situated and pushed over.

We're going to be able to start running with that once we get it to a point where it's, let's start building this for the hangar. It's planned out really well.

All the Caterpillar threads I've been just pouring through for the past couple of weeks and making sure that those are all in the design documents, so that way whoever takes it over from me, from Kirk, they're basically going to know exactly what modules need to be done, how the modules need to be set, all the metrics are set up. I've been talking with everybody from the FPS guys over to Bender, because Bender's working on some of the FPS metrics, and he's working on the animations, as well as Elwin and his team, what they need to have to build the ship out, to make sure that it is the modular Caterpillar that it needs to be. Because that ship is awesome. I love that ship.

So as of right now, all SCU that we're giving for ships that haven't been done yet are still in flux. And that's something that we've been working on, talking with, where every single ship has its uses, its purposes. But basically every ship will go through an interior design pass. Then we'll be working with the artists. We'll be working with the designers and making sure that everything actually fits that we need to be inside the hull. And then we'll worry about making sure that the cargo and everything is situated where it needs to be. Other than that, it's us just working together and trying to push what we want for the designs lately.

Yeah, I mean, it's just an ongoing thing with building out these ships. They're such huge and detailed things to even get off the ground that we can't really lock into a rigid number right now. We can give our best guess, our ideal scenario, but an exact hard metric really isn't something we can do until it's like, hey, now the ship's flying, now the ship's in game. We can really start exploring this stuff. Things like modules, other kit for the ships, that's something we also have to sort of wait until we have a baseline version of the ship flyable before we can really start evaluating, OK, what is going to be a good module choice for this ship? What is something cool that we can swap out, make a meaningful give and take for?

To jump on that, with modules, it's different because in some ships, we knew exactly what modules we wanted. In other ships, we were like, we have no clue what module we're going to go with on this one. So then that's when we pore over the forums and look at your guys' ideas and be like, all right, what does the community want? What do they expect from this ship? And that's where we're playing that balance game between us having some crazy ideas and then the community having some really great ideas that fuel our own creativity.

Go ahead. The one you cut.

OK, so it's not cut. Grabby hands. We had to evaluate how we were going to approach it. Because with one of Randy's recent designs for the Caterpillar, a really cool thing that he had as a baseline idea is we'll need a way to move salvagers at a good pace of speed from point A to point B. Now Randy's initial idea was a human catapult. And so some of the issues with some of these really cool ideas is we also have to build these out, we have to visualize these, we have to make proper animations for getting in and out of these devices. So the actual raw notion of a physicalized human catapult probably won't be happening on the Caterpillar, but some form of high-speed pilot mobility where you can send people from point A to point B with some speed and some urgency to get the job done, as a core gameplay aspect, that's definitely something that we're going to keep. Just how we'll present that to you is going to go through some iteration.

So, yeah, there's an example of one module, they were like, oh, we can do this, and everybody was like, eh, I don't know about that, but it's awesome.

Well, the gameplay purpose it can serve, totally awesome. How we get to that purpose is always the fun roundabout aspect.

So I think almost every designer here does something a little bit different. I've been focusing lately on just gameplay systems, mechanics, and ship interiors, and then the mechanics that are going to be going with that, and then working with artists. I think you've been working on components and everything?

Yeah, I've been doing a lot of focus on our component system, retrofitting that into our new four-size class system I've talked about a few times, and then also, similar to Randy, core ship designs, ship systems. The LA guys, we really handle a lot of ship-centric things, so if you guys have questions about, oh, how does this FPS gun measure up, we may not really be able to handle that as well, but if you're asking about, hey, what kind of mounts may be available in the future on a ship, what kind of functions could different ships have on a ship scale, that'd be the kind of stuff we can totally field.

And absolutely under no circumstance should they be asking when a ship will be coming out.

Yeah, we don't do release stuff. Sorry, guys.

So this is a two-part in that, yes, people will have roles. It'll be more of a designated role either by the crew itself and what the person's good at, what screens they're going to be using on the ship, and then also on the multi-crew side, what station they're going to be using and stuff. So some stations they're talking about where everything is set up to be specific roles, and then other ones are going to be more generic stations where they can actually pull in multiple screens. So it really depends on what the crew wants to do, and then where the multi-crew design ends. So right now, that is the best answer we can give on that part, unless you have something to add.

Well, something that we had also talked about when we were planning out some of these seat stations is overall, for a ship owner, we do want you to have some level of control to say, okay, I'm hiring you on board as crew, be it another player or an NPC, and I'm going to give you access to the engineering station, I'm going to give you access to shield management, and you'll flag your crew for the different permissions that you want. That way it'll be a bit trickier for someone to just run up to the pilot seat of your own ship, try and get in and use it, and it'll be more, well, you didn't flag him for permission, so he's going to just rip you out of the seat, get in his own pilot seat, and start flying.

One thing with permissions actually we could probably mention is that because the permissions are set by the owner of the ship, looking at all the different functions, I created a spreadsheet that we all worked on, and basically every single ship, we wanted to have one person do all the entire functions. It was over 60-something, 70-something tasks that needed to be done. It is really ridiculous. And then with multi-crew ships, controlling the different aspects of the shields, controlling different aspects of radar, sensors, communications, everything, this could be a lot for just one person to handle. And then we started actually narrowing down what we want people to do per role and then break it down to classify everything else. So it was actually a really big task that took a bit, but it was just all exploring just what people want to do within a ship and then breaking it down from movies like Star Trek, Star Wars, and just watching all the sci-fi movies. What roles are these guys doing?

Okay, so since it's salvage, I've got to be careful how I answer this so I don't give too much of salvage away before we release the post. But we're still working on the design, and ideally what we would want as the design team is that when debris like that breaks away, we should be able to get it, then break it down, as well as take the component off. So we're treating weapons, hardpoints, all those things as components. So then working with Sherman, we were looking at it like, all right, so if these components are not damaged or at least damaged a little bit, then we can still use them and we can work with them. And then a player would be able to grab them and repair it and make it better later.

So yes, that gameplay is definitely intended. It's definitely something that we want, because that's going to sort of be the cool thing where instead of just getting a loot bag when you kill a target, it's more going to be how did you kill them. Are you really precise? Did you manage to shear the wings off this one ship that has some really mean guns on it? Well, if you do that cleanly, you'll have a better chance of trying to collect that gun as opposed to just laying into them all across the whole ship and possibly blowing up every component.

Now this does not mean, I want to just put it out there, it does not mean that you can just take that wing and put that wing onto something else. No, you're basically going to be scrapping stuff, whether you're taking stuff from the hull or you're going to be taking the component and scrapping the component entirely. It's not scotch-taping a wing onto wherever you want.

Well, some of that actually plays into what we were talking about a few minutes ago with some of the ship permissions. So it's definitely a long-term goal. We don't want people to just freely and without any restriction be able to just jack anything at any time. So once we do get some of those permission setups in place, hey, that guy's not on your approved crew. He just can't pilot your ship, so he's not going to steal it off the landing pad.

We've even gone so far as locking the outside of your ship, just like how you'd do with a car, and be like, okay, it's locked or it's open, so that way people can go in and out of it and stuff. So again, permissions, and that's all coming on board hopefully sometime in the future.

Yeah, I mean, some of this stuff, it's a bit longer term. We have to get a few other systems in place. A lot of the really cool stuff, especially into the PU, is going to be layering systems on top of systems. So it's definitely something that we're hearing from you guys. We know it's not the most ideal situation right now, but enjoy it while you can. And really more just keep in mind, 2.0 is more, holy crap, we've got multi-crew and large world in, and you're going around this massive system now. So this is also really step one of that big picture. So now we're in that place where we can start layering all these other cool functionalities on, some of the protections, the extra systems.