Sean Giampietro

Working on a city from the start is quite an enormous task for, I guess, the smaller crew that we have working on it. Maybe five or six, up to about eight that we got to along the way. And we had quite a lot of fun with it. It's changed, not so dramatically, and dramatically in other places. I think the last time we saw it, we were doing flybys through the city. And we read a lot of the feedback that people were talking about and what they were saying about it, like, "Oh, the window scaling was weird here," or "buildings are larger and smaller in this place." So we really tried to look at some of that off the early, midway point. And we kept going with player feedback from there. And now we're at the tail end. So we're just pretty much wrapping up, just doing our polishing touches, doing our collision passes and doing LODs and stuff like that. We're close to about maybe the last two weeks.

Lorville 2.0 is scheduled to come out with Alpha 3.19, which is currently scheduled for May or something like that. Don't quote me on that. The next major patch anyway. I know most of the focus is on 3.18.1 and the bug fixes and stuff like that. So it's hard for us to speak definitively about 3.19 dates and stuff, because obviously a lot of the focus, as it should be, is on 3.18.1 and 3.18.2, those fixes and stuff like that that are going in.

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.

Because if we're all on Pyro, there would have been no Ghost Hollow, no 600i crash site.

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.

Best case scenario.

I actually gave you the worst case scenario, because the Raastar tool is a pretty cool tool. It works well. So two weeks for one settlement.

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.

At Turbulent, yeah, but the team is back home.

Oh, even a different team than that?

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.

So a good example is the 600i derelict settlement took us about a couple of months to do, two or three months.

The big one on Daymar?

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.

There are some refreshing elements, that's not a good phrase, to ArcCorp coming as part of the new player experience. I think it was recently added to the public roadmap. We'll be talking again more about that next quarter when we come back from hiatus on ISC. The first version of the new player experience is centered around ArcCorp. So that has required some new signage and some updates and stuff. I think folks actually saw a sneak peek in the weekly newsletter a week or two or three ago. That's what that was, with the cool new signage and everything that's being added around ArcCorp. So not the full scale of what's happening with Lorville at the moment. But if there's one thing I've learned about this project in, I hit eight years in like a week, it's never say never. So not today, not tomorrow, but it's possible.

I mean, there are things on ArcCorp that could be touched up, but for the most part, I think ArcCorp's in a pretty great condition. We looked a lot through ArcCorp for Lorville and how they built their formula from a modern, more built city in the game. But for the most part, I think ArcCorp's in great condition.

And the building interiors part was also a big factor in why Lorville had to be redone, just so they could take in those interiors. Some buildings were, like you said before, too small.

Yeah, we had to resize them, scale them up, build them for building interiors.

Yeah, so it's like future-proofing the 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.

It's always part of the process to constantly battle and discuss and revise internally how far we're going to push the thing and how far we can.