Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse 2.5 - UK

Paul Jones · Squadron 42 Art Director

To be honest, I thought they were crazy. A lot of us were just like, what? But then we started getting the design brief. And it was quite interesting, actually, because we were working with this initially with, I guess, we kind of made a mistake right at the start. We were working with the smallest ship components because that was the brief we were working with, and I was working with Gary and we were putting this ship together and it was just getting larger and larger as we put all the components in that needed to be there, or ship items. And so we showed Chris and we were like, yeah, look at this, this is amazing, right? And Gary had done a good job on the initial sketch. And then Chris was like, well, it's too big. It's too big. What are you doing? And we're just like, well, these are the requirements we're working to. So it was like, well, just make a... what did we change it to? So we went from small ship to vehicle components, basically. And then basically the whole thing scaled down. Sounds super obvious, but it was just a simple mistake right at the start.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community Manager

You're going from the components that you would build a ship out of to the components you would build something like the Ursa out of.

Paul Jones · Squadron 42 Art Director

Yeah. We were just so in the mindset of ship, ship, ship, ship, ship.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community Manager

And that kind of thing happens because, I mean, yes, it's a virtual world, of course, but they are functional within that virtual world. So you have to have all the components where they're supposed to be, how they can interact with each other, because folks will be able to damage those components, have to repair those components, stuff like that. So it's very important that all those things have a very real and very physical place.

Paul Jones · Squadron 42 Art Director

Oh, yeah, totally. And it's always a challenge for the concept guys because they've got this big laundry list of things that need to go in it. So they have this idea in their head and then they have to massage it to basically fit all these pieces in. But one of the things I like about working with Gary is that he always gives... I don't think it's a problem. That would be a negative thing to say. He just gives me tons of options. You can tell the speed his head's going at and he just gives me like 50 options and I'm just like, I'll have a bit of this one, I'll have a bit of that and a bit of that and a bit of that. Change this, move these lines a little bit, make it a little more Drake.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community Manager

It's a good problem to have though.

Paul Jones · Squadron 42 Art Director

Yeah, it is. And we initially started off too sleek. It wasn't within the Drake manufacturer line. So I was having to bring him back, dare I say, make it a little more agricultural, a little heavier in places, a little more exposed tech, less expensive types of manufacturing, basically. Eventually, we got it into the right place and yeah, there you go.

Paul Jones · Squadron 42 Art Director

Yeah, so initially it was Squadron 42 focused and we were defining what Squadron 42 was, and it touches on a lot of things: ships, environments, weapons, VFX, you name it. Currently, the workload has shifted. That's mainly because we've got more art directors now. We've got Nathan in charge of ships, Ian in charge of environments. At the moment, I'm focusing a lot on ship concepts, sales, FPS weapons, ship weapons, VFX, ship items, and props.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community Manager

Just a couple things.

Paul Jones · Squadron 42 Art Director

Yeah. So just spin those plates, and each day is always a crazy ride because you know generally what you have to work with, but then things just come in, emergencies and stuff.

Paul Jones · Squadron 42 Art Director

Yeah, totally. And that's kind of how the grav-lev technology came around. We knew we wanted these pontoons so that, dare I say, it harks back a little bit to Star Wars maybe. It's a pod racer almost, isn't it? You're always looking for opportunities to add extra cool, basically. You don't just want a static vehicle. So I think as our first foray into this, it was a good start. And then we've already, just this week, been working on some high-level variants, manufacturer variants. Chris had been mentioning it to me. He didn't say start on it, but we had a bit of downtime. So I've had Gary on that doing a little secret Black Ops project.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community Manager

Really? Variants of the Dragonfly?

Paul Jones · Squadron 42 Art Director

No, no, no. Just other stuff we can't talk about yet. And it's completely like we weren't following any brief. There's nothing from design. We were just making cool stuff. So we're just going to give it to Chris and just see what he thinks.

Paul Jones · Squadron 42 Art Director

I think we do have a tendency to over-brand our products. We are in the process of reducing the manufacturer brand and then changing it out to be the actual logo. It's an easy thing to change anyway.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community Manager

When you're creating anything creative, it's easier to start big and reduce than it is to start small and try to build on that.

Paul Jones · Squadron 42 Art Director

It's classic, isn't it? Anything with Star Citizen, you have the first generation and then you tweak it and then we tweak it again. And then hopefully, she'll be pretty close to being done.

Paul Jones · Squadron 42 Art Director

So the Banu, that's a good one. So that one's already had its first round concept, hasn't it? It's been sold. And we're just in the process now of spooling up to do second round concept. Because we're aware that it's been out there for a long time. People haven't got it yet. It's not for sale. And so we're just in that process of lining up a concept artist, hopefully the same one who originally started on it, and going through the archetypes, so engineering, habitation.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community Manager

Because when the ship was originally concepted, there weren't Banu archetypes created yet. We weren't at that point in our overall development where we had archetypes for Anvil and Aegis and stuff like that. So part of the stage two concepting will be creating those Banu archetypes. What does a Banu engineering room look like? What does a Banu bridge look like and stuff? That'll go into the revised concept of the Banu.

Paul Jones · Squadron 42 Art Director

Yeah. Just a little more thinking about the technology, or what's the hook? Say with the Xi'an Scout, that's when we started to do the floating steps and, again, the grav-lev technology. And again, just stopping and pausing for a little bit, have a little chat about... and as a company, we've got a lot better about working together and just going, yeah, well, this would be cool. Or what's missing from our palette of races, what we'd like to see. And so that will all be part of this next round.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community Manager

And when we talk about a revised, a second wave concept, we're not talking about drastic changes, changes to the overall profile and stuff like that. We're talking about additive stuff, things to enhance what's there, to better define it, to make it work within the game world.

Paul Jones · Squadron 42 Art Director

I mean, the exterior, I think both me and Nate are happy with, and then it's pretty much the interior, just obviously making it flow better, working out materials, what are the Banu materials, what would we expect to see in this area, that area, and just working out essentially the style guide. So that for all the other ones, regardless of whether it goes out of house or stays in house, we have our rules that we stick to and it's like, okay, it's this, and it just makes it a lot faster.

Paul Jones · Squadron 42 Art Director

So the Carrack, that's actually in a similar position. Probably will be tackled in-house. So it's had first round concept, hasn't it? It's been sold. And we've done a lot of Anvil small ships and we pretty much have the style nailed for those. So we can bang them out. It's still like two months, three months work. It's not easy work. But it's now almost a production line, which is good. But for the larger ships, this will be the first one.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community Manager

Yeah, it'll be the very first large multi-crew Anvil ship that we'll have to build out.

Paul Jones · Squadron 42 Art Director

And it'll just be, again, second round concept, work out the archetypes. What is an Anvil interior? What makes it cool? What's going to be the visual hook? And like I said, I think that'll be internal. And I think Nathan will be handling most of that. So I passed that one off.

Paul Jones · Squadron 42 Art Director

Polaris. Yeah, that's in good shape. That one's looking really slick. We'd sort of, well, we thought we were finished. And then Chris requested a few more visuals for it. So a few more interior shots. Phil Mella wanted one extra action shot, so we'll provide that. And then we'll be moving on to the full marketing material.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community Manager

So the Polaris is the new corvette to replace the Idris corvette that evolved into a frigate. It's made by RSI. We're pretty far along and it's something we hope to share with folks soon.

Paul Jones · Squadron 42 Art Director

Yeah. Looking forward to it. I mean, it's one of the new ships. There's a lot of people internally who are like, yeah, I want that ship. So hopefully we're doing something right.

Nathan Dearsley · Vehicle Art Director

No, it was always, when we discussed the Idris stuff, it was always a plan to start these passes on every ship. We'd done the Gamescom derelict, which was really like the first step of that. And then from there, it was: we've got these assets. We've got this cool ship that the guys have made. And it's really about taking those elements and getting creative with what we can do with those on terrain surfaces. So for sure, there's been inspiration from the Episode 7 stuff, which is very cool. LV-426 with the alien downed ship. There's these call-outs that you can... The most successful ones for me are always the ones that have got the emotion and the human aspect in there. With the Starfarer, anyone can go along and plow something into the sand and call it a day. I'm not saying that we're not going to do that, but there's also that emotional drive behind everything. Hence, someone's made it their home. There's a little chimney there. There might be a little boiler. All these little touches, we've got that stuff ready to go. So yeah, just a little bit of ambient storytelling, which on the ship team we don't get to do too much of, as it's more environment driven. So it's a nice break from that stuff. Obviously production on the ships continues. But it's nice to jump around a bit. And like I say, just get creative and tell a story without any dialogue. And if you can do that, you're winning.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community Manager

So big surprise that LV-426, Alien influence on something you worked on, really?

Nathan Dearsley · Vehicle Art Director

No, not this one. Not this one at all. I've not looked at anything Alien related. Not for this one, no. I wanted to do it for ages, and the planetary stuff, when it's come on board and we got the proper scattering system for the light, so we can totally drive a proper desert feel or sunset or sunrise. So it's just, yeah, go for it. It's by no means final. It'll probably end up looking a bit better than that. But yeah, that was put together fairly rapidly. So the overall approach for it all is to essentially have loads of these made with different compositions, different stories, different layouts that design can populate with NPCs and create missions. Yeah, create missions, but it also feeds into the procedural system then. So yeah, I'm excited. There's a really good scene in Oblivion, the Tom Cruise movie, where he's just walking along this terrain and he just falls through the glass. There's nothing there. And even that excites me. So he falls through and then all of a sudden he's in some sky... I think it's the Empire State. I'm not sure. But that's super cool. So you could be walking along and you could hear the sound of the terrain change. Okay, what's under there? And down you go. So visually, it could be interesting, but also visually, it could be nothing until you're on top of it. So yeah, stuff like that.

Nathan Dearsley · Vehicle Art Director

Yes, 100%. You can actually just run around the map now. It's all real time. That's the best thing about our engine: everything that you see is what you play. So at any time, like I found myself today with that scene, because I'm just polishing up a little bit more. Press Control-G, you're in the game. And thinking about gunplay, so vantage points, view distances, all these... I've done a lot of multiplayer map design at Crytek. So that never leaves you. So it's like, okay, when I come out the door here, where are the weak spots, where are the vantage points, and every area should have, should we say, a cause and effect, or an equal. Does that make sense? So high risk, high reward kind of thing. It's that typical Quake thing where it's like, okay, there's a turret on top of that ship. If I get there, it's going to be great, but it has to be risky to get there. So there's all these things that I'm already thinking about with design as well. So it could be quite cool.

Nathan Dearsley · Vehicle Art Director

They're artist created, they're handcrafted. You have to do that to get that quality. But then the plan is to have them procedurally distributed.

Nathan Dearsley · Vehicle Art Director

Yeah, that whole scene in that video took me one day. One day. It's just, like I say, all these things are coming on board now. And obviously, I didn't make all the assets in one day. It's all the editor work where you've got your library of goodies. And you're just like, okay, go. The environment guys are creating all these cool terrain things. So you just get creative with what you've got. And that was very much the methodology at Crytek. That's stuck with me as well. Where we'd have these libraries of just awesome stuff. And there comes a point where you just have to work with what you've got, right? And that's what we've done here. And it's very much early days.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community Manager

That's game development though. The improvements are exponential. The first year on a project is not equal to the second year on a project. It's not equal to the fourth year on a project. The improvements and the speed at which you can create things just increase exponentially once you've got that foundation of systems in place.

Nathan Dearsley · Vehicle Art Director

You have to speculate to accumulate with game development. Like you say, the development curve is very flat for quite a while. Then it accelerates and accelerates until you're pretty much on autopilot. And we're approaching that crest now. In my opinion, we are. And I've got quite a bit of experience and I've seen several games go out the door, AAA games. Yeah, it's all shiny from the outside and all the trailers are great when you see that stuff, but when you're actually involved in the project, it's really interesting to see. Yes, it's all there and it's working, but the real push comes in the last six months of development. Because that's when all the systems are working in harmony, all the visuals are there, all the assets are there, and everyone's in tune. So it's a very human thing, developing games. It's what fascinates me the most about it. And it's why I... because I used to work for myself, it's why I came back into working in the studio, because I missed it. And yeah, that one-day thing is the result of all that, where you speculate to accumulate: you invest and then the reward pays off later on.

Nathan Dearsley · Vehicle Art Director

It's really a case of, when you go up in scale, the construction techniques slightly change for everything. Even the base, without even talking about shaders, the base modeling and everything has to be different because you have to render it all in memory, right? But when it comes to shaders, it's really a case of authoring these shaders and being clever with things like detail maps. We have the facility to bake info into a second UV channel, so we can use that as a mask to bleed through. So every ship, when you hit it at the moment, you get all this beautiful, we call it gubbins. This beautiful mechanical detail starts coming through. With the capital ships, it's very much that, but like times 10 because it's the scale, right? So you will still dissolve meshes away, which we're doing at the moment, but what's underneath that with the capital ship is just generally far deeper. It's got far more lighting information in it. And again, you can look at so many successful IPs that have done this stuff in cinema. The Star Destroyer has got what we call the sandwich design approach, of a cavity down the side. And for me, if you took that top skin off, you took that bottom skin off, it's going to be all that. It's like R2-D2, C-3PO, he's got all that stuff exposed. So it's like that, but on a magnitude of scale, and you need to think about that. Not for the flying of the ships, that's easy to do, because you're flying past things relatively fast, but what if someone gets out? And that's the really difficult thing about this project: at any time anyone can stop their ship, EVA out and study. So that's challenging. That's a word for it. But it's more shader-based. It's more shader-driven. And lighting and effects are key. It can't be understated, the importance of lighting and creating a system. You can take the most beautiful asset in the world and put it in a bad lighting rig and it'll look bad. You can take the most subpar asset in the world, put it on a beautiful lighting rig and it'll look okay. It's like people can make hairdryers look decent in catalogs. I want to buy one, right? And when you get it, it's like, oh, it doesn't quite look like the pictures did. It's that kind of approach. Light is everything.

Nathan Dearsley · Vehicle Art Director

No.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community Manager

Different planet? Okay.

Nathan Dearsley · Vehicle Art Director

No, every planet, much like the original engine... The original engine has what we call an environment tab. And in the environment tab, you could change gravity, you could change the wind direction, the wind velocity, what we call events. So they're like pulses and then it cools down. We're transferring all that info to a sphere, essentially, which is a planet, right? Originally, it was just on a flat plane, like a 4K terrain. Now, we're doing it on a whole planet. I'm not going to speak for the VFX guys, but every VFX asset that is created directly ties into our wind system. So if there's wind on the planet, it will blow. If there isn't, it will just rise or sit there, right? And that's how that's all driven. So you just increase the wind and then you get this beautiful directional thing going across, the movement. And then obviously we're also already thinking about, okay, these beautiful... and you see a field full of grass and you get these waves going through the fields. So there's all those kinds of things. I don't want to speak for the environment guys, but obviously I'm thinking about, I want to put these things in these environments and I want to play these systems to the advantage of the ships. So yeah, that's all 100% driven by literally one setting.

Nathan Dearsley · Vehicle Art Director

No. Well, kind of. The new system with the planets, and obviously I don't want to speak for the environment guys too much...

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community Manager

Well, you went in and you created an environment, Nathan.

Nathan Dearsley · Vehicle Art Director

No, I made a thing. And we have a sea level, a sea level that essentially you can change the radius of, and then you can change the radius of the planet itself. So that's how that is driven. Again, the old system in the basic terrain editor had exactly the same thing, but it was just on a plane. So yeah, that's how the water will be dealt with. That's being looked at at the moment.