CitizenCon 2948 - Reverse the Verse Live From CitizenCon
Developers present the Drake Kraken and Anvil Valkyrie. They cover the Kraken's carrier concept, hangars, landing pads, cargo and Idris comparison, then the Valkyrie's 20-person dropship interior, turrets and 3.3 flyability, plus the Redeemer gunship plan and Carrack status.
Yeah. So back then it was sort of, let's go for a piratey mobile base carrier thing. Technical brief. For that talk we did, I think we wrote one sentence for those three options.
TL;DRDesign briefs are now condensed to a minimal spreadsheet because detailed briefs and blockouts constrained concept artists too much, though a brief still helps as a jumping-off point.
Yeah, we do design briefs now, we've condensed them down onto a single big page, because we used to do really quite in-depth things and do white box blockouts, but it was sort of constraining the briefs too much, so we dialled it right back to the bare minimum spreadsheet and let you guys go wild.
Yeah, sometimes, I mean, I like them. If the design team gives us an idea of what they're thinking about, then it's a bit of a jumping point for us. Sometimes, though, concept artists will see that and it'll lock them in straight away. We've had it in the past. We've had a couple of car crashes. We've talked about the births of these ships and some of them have been tricky.
TL;DRThe brief was to hold two medium ships in internal hangars, which made a huge block, so after exploring many variants and Chris's feedback they moved toward an aircraft-carrier style.
The original brief was just to hold two medium ships in internal hangars. You do still have those two internal hangars in there. But when we tried to fit medium ships in there, it just made this huge block.
We did try to work with a metric. Obviously, the environment team were busy building the hangars you saw earlier. And then we put that metric in the ship and then suddenly it just looked ridiculous. And then Chris was like, yeah, just kind of ignore it. Just work with, not the rule of cool, but make sure it does work, but works in terms of proportions of the ship. But I guess, we'll see this a little bit later on, we did the usual process of, I wouldn't call it shotgunning it, but you throw stuff out there and you see what sticks. You don't want to come in with any preconceptions for this. I prefer not to. Originally I had to use a different concept artist just to do some 2D work. We looked at lots of different variants, even the two prong that's become popular with Drake vehicles and ships. And then we send it in front of Chris and we get his feedback. And of course, he was like, no, no, no, I don't like these. I don't like these. It's more like this. Think of an aircraft carrier. And that's pretty much where...
It's kind of funny because these are based off, I had done a little thumbnail sketch, I haven't included it because it was so cruddy and crappy, but basically that was kind of the DNA of a lot of these ships. You can see on those top ones where there's four prongs, if you go back one slide. There's a very small nod basically to the eight tentacles of a kraken. That's as simple as it gets basically. We looked at different flying sort of orientations.
TL;DRThe three versions were loose freestyle explorations built from a kit of parts from other Drake ships to cut development time rather than designing new meshes.
You've got three on this page and I think we have two on the next page. You can obviously see where we ended up. These were all, again, just that sort of freestyling it. Put in a big aircraft carrier style landing pad takeoff. Just following the design requirements. Pretty loosey-goosey. You're just smashing meshes together. We've got a kit of parts at this point from other Drake ships. You don't want to waste time building lots of original meshes. We're looking for ways to cut down the development time. There's no use in redesigning the wheel on this stuff.
It's the same in production as well. We have these really sweet concept ships, but it's all 100% new meshes. It takes the full... We've talked on Calling All Devs about how long ships take and how we're going to get through them. If every one's bespoke, they will take the maximum amount of time, the schedule, and everything just knocks onto each other. So we do have this kit now, so Aegis, tons of stuff. Drake, we've got tons of stuff now. MISC, we've got tons of stuff. RSI's got quite a few.
And that's how we start building these ships faster and faster as we go along. So much of the work in those early years is building our catalog, building our style guides, and then building our catalog of reusable, shareable assets. And now we can make far more ships this year than we could last year, and we could make more ships last year than we could the year before, and next year we'll be able to make more ships than we did this year. So our development pipeline is exponential in its growth. It gets faster, it gets better.
TL;DRThe Kraken is a light attack carrier carrying two ships in internal bays, with landing pads and cargo bays, plus a hatch and mechanism for Dragonflies.
It has got two big facets really. There is obviously the ship transport. It is this light attack carrier. It can carry two ships in its internal bays so it can repair them as well. It has got four small landing pads. Those small landing pads are the same size small or extra small pads that are on Olisar and all the other stations. Then it has got the two larger pads, again to a metric, so it will fit a wide range of ships. But the other aspect of it, because Drake is never overtly 'we're all in it for the illegal means'. They're trying to be straight legit.
If people want to use their stuff for that, that's not their problem. It's got these cargo bays as well. So it's got a big cargo bay in the middle. There's a big cargo bay and that can be accessed from the bottom. It's got a second one at the back. In this shot here, it's got this nice little Dragonfly, I always call it a sunroof. It's got a hatch on top where the Dragonflies can come out and drop back in again. It carries around all these little ships.
Yeah, and of course there'll be people who will be thinking, well, I'm going to fly my Dragonfly in, how do I get it out without having to reverse it and sort of bounce off the sides? Gavin Rothery, the concept artist, has worked out a sweet little mechanism where it pops up and rotates the Dragonfly around for you, so it's ready to fly out. I'm probably sort of writing some checks here, but...
Like everything, there's swings and roundabouts. The Idris has got much more armor. It's got the capacity. It's a military ship, so its components are better out of the box. Drake's stuff is a bit paper thin in terms of survivability. So the Kraken has all these ships it can help it with. But you need to have someone to do all that stuff with it.
We put a camera in, correct FOV, check left, right, up, down, just check for visibility. It's just all part of our process now that we generally 99% of the time incorporate.
TL;DRThe Valkyrie was designed from the ground up as a dropship for planetary assault carrying twenty people, grew from a smaller original brief, and has side door guns Chris wanted.
It's a dropship. It was designed from the ground up as a dropship. The original brief was for quite a small dropship, but as people got wind of it, they were, oh, we can use this. We can put a bit more in.
Yeah, but at the end of the day, 20 people, one vehicle. It's designed for going from a big carrier like the Bengal or a planet down to the ground. It's not designed for space boarding or anything like that. There's plenty of people who have already come up to me and have gone, if I open the door, it's going to vent everything. Yes, it's designed for planetary assault.
No, I mean it cuts a little bit of time out actually. For me you don't get that same payoff right at the end because I really love all the promotion art that we do at the end. So it's a little more bare bones in terms of, okay, so we deliver a front three-quarter, back three-quarter and underside and make sure that all the lines are there, everything is detailed out so that when it goes to the dev team and we just hand it over, they know what they are doing basically. It is nice because it is relatively quick but again, like I said, you just do not quite get that payoff.
Yeah, so unlike other ships, we didn't have a huge amount of interior kits to pull from. This obviously helps larger Anvil ships that might be coming in the future. I don't know what that could be.
TL;DRThe Valkyrie went from concept to flight-ready in a couple of months, and its lower turret seat pitches inside a gyro so the gunner keeps an unrestricted downward view, playable when 3.3 reaches PTU.
Yes, so there were two complicated things with the development of the ship. One was that lower turret and two was it was going straight to flight ready. So we turned this around in a very short space of time. I think it was two months, two and a half months from you finishing the concept to today where everyone's hopefully going to be playing it. So we had five artists on this, two designers just getting it going and in game, and the hardest bit was trying to get it in the builds but not to have people find it in the builds. That was a real challenge. But the bottom turret, we didn't show it off in the demo. A lot of our turrets, the bottom facing ones, you flip 180. And that gives you great visibility. But it is a little weird that you flip 180. Or the Connie owners out there will know you don't flip 180 in that turret, but you don't have the best view. You're sort of looking down at your legs most of the time. So for this one, we've gone back to basics with it. You stay facing the right way up. But your seat actually pitches inside the turret. So as you pitch down with your guns, your body moves with it. So you still have a completely unrestricted view looking down. Your guns are moving with you. You're moving in this gyro inside the turret frame. And it's really nice.
TL;DRThe early Valkyrie interior was a basic dropship layout built from the original brief, but after review it was reworked to add beds and crew quarters, making a more versatile ship that can stay on the surface.
So this is an early development of the interiors and this was partly based off the initial design brief. We had those two remote gunners for the turrets that are on the wings. We had the remote stations upstairs and it was quite a basic interior. It was a dropship so we really didn't put too much into it. But it was after our first review and Mr. Roberts got a good old look at it and he was like, no, it needs some beds and it needs some quarters for the crew. So that was when we did a bit of a shift. We jigged some shapes. But I think it makes a much more versatile ship.
Yeah, this thing can come down. It's got a huge amount of guns on it. So it's got five, one top, one bottom, two remotes on the wings, two door guns, plus a pair of guns for the pilot to use. So this thing can put out a huge amount of fire. We've got this crew manning this stuff, so we might as well, if they've come to drop 20 guys off in a vehicle, they might not want to go straight back up to orbit. So let's give them some ability to stay down on the surface for a while.
So this is from our concept art phase. So we'll just provide multiple variants. The Space Kitten version isn't on here. We did do one, but I didn't show it. And so, yeah, this is more your sort of classic military, if we were going to do that. Yeah, this is used in Squadron for that.
This is what we ended up with for our final concept art pass, which was then handed off to the dev team. It's very close. It's had some changes. The back wall basically has been opened out, so you can now see out onto your vehicle.
So that's the area for loading the vehicle. That's purely a vehicle area. There's no secret cargo grids in the bottom there. This is a dropship, and it's for dropping stuff.
But it's been built with sort of modularity in mind. So further down the line, if a company wants to change the function of the ship, then it's going to be relatively easy.
The Carrack is not currently in active development. When it is, I promise you, I will walk right out into the middle of an ATV. Like Chris or Sandi will be talking, I'll just cut right into it. And I will walk right on the screen and say, the Carrack is there. From then on, we'll start updating on the Carrack, but until it's in open development or active development, there are no updates for it. Its time will come.
TL;DRThe Valkyrie carries no cargo as it stands, while the Kraken carries a large amount in segregated blocks, sized with the Economy team to be sizable but not game-breaking.
Even in that big room. As it stands, zero. Kraken, it's a lot. I can't remember the exact amount, but it's a thousand plus. It's a big cargo. That room is huge. The Economy guys started really sweating when this came along and they saw that room in the middle. So we worked with them on a way to... So there's some blue cubes at the lower deck at the back. A nice way we have of giving it a lot of cargo but without absolutely blowing the economy wide open is we segregate these cargoes into very distinct blocks in the bays. So there's eight on one side, eight on the other, so two rows of four. They are quite big things.
TL;DRThe Kraken is not flyable in 3.3; the demo showed its near-final game-mesh exterior, built in production style, with no interior done yet and work on it paused for other ships.
It's not flyable. We just took the concept mesh and put it in there as a fun treat for folks watching the playthrough earlier today. It was an updated version of the mesh for the commercial.
What we're trying to do with these big ships now, and we did it last year with the Hammerhead commercial, is we try and put these ships somewhat into production. We might not go fully into production, but we put them into production. Years ago we would just throw the concept mesh in for the trailer and that was great, that got the job done, but when it came to production we would have to start from scratch, it was too expensive. So for the Hammerhead, and the reason why that has come along so quickly, is we actually made that properly for that trailer. And it is the same for the Kraken. The exterior we saw in the demo, with the exception of the landing gear, is the full game mesh for that. We had five weeks, I think, worth of time doing it.
Yeah, they absolutely worked themselves to the bone getting that out. And for the trailer and for the demo, they are both using the proper game asset. We have not done any of the interior yet. We are probably going to take a break from the Kraken and work on some other ships. The team that did this exterior was the 890 Jump team. If everyone is wondering why we stopped showing 890 Jump images and then suddenly stopped talking about everything, this was the reason. That was the proper asset because the concept mesh was quite expensive. Ian was having a heart attack if we were going to try and put that in Lorville.
Ideally, everyone goes down the back ramp, but those two side doors allow you to go out the sides, and if you want to get back in, there is a little ledge that deploys out that you can vault and mantle up onto and then back in the ship.
So long term, we want to have the g-force actually applied to people inside the ship. So if your pilot does a hard turn, you are going to start staggering around. So for ships like this, you're probably not going to be a smooth ride, a smooth, gentle descent down to the planet. You're going to be coming in hot, people are going to be shooting you, your pilots are going to be doing maneuvers. You want to be locked into that seat, so you're not thrown around. You're trying to pick up your gun out of the other thing and it's throwing you everywhere.
If they're docked on it, they go with it. They become part of the ship. I'm sure Will, when he comes back, can talk about the lore of quantum travel and how it all works. But it sort of makes this bubble and takes it all with you.
Obviously everyone's like, oh, my poor Redeemer, everyone's ignoring it. We're still gonna do it, but it was sort of in this weird, it's a dropship, it's a gunship, it's not great at either of those two things. The Valkyrie is great at being a dropship. So the Redeemer, we're going to be making a full-on gunship. So it's going to be bristling with guns. It's there for close air support, hovering around, think AC-130 style. A Redeemer is going to be a great support ship to the Valkyrie. So the Valkyrie can come in, drop all the people. Redeemer's there, circling around, annihilating everything.
It's this really nice burnt copper. Coppery brass metallic feel to it. We had to tone it down quite a lot because we were doing it in Hurston and that's quite orange. It was very orange at one point so it's all brass copper. And then the default one for outside of CitizenCon is this sort of navy blue-gray color and the top shell has this large camo pattern over it.
It fits in the Bengal, I can tell you that. We had to make the Bengal a little bit bigger to fit it in. But yeah, it doesn't really fit in many things. It's sort of base to base.
Kraken is slightly longer. 270 long, whereas the Idris is 230. They are both big, but they are both big in different ways. This is quite tall, whereas the Idris is quite wide.
I think we've covered it. We haven't talked about docking. Have we got a little docking bay? On essentially the wings. On the Kraken, you can see it in that image. So you can park a ship in space, I guess. Have a little docking arm come out to it.
Yes. Five stations in there. Yeah, there's the five manned turrets and then there's five stations on the bridge because there's a couple of remote turrets. You've got your pilot, captain, engineer.