Developers cover hardpoint classes versus weapon sizes, ship part wear and maintenance, salvaging, space-bus taxis, hangar fees and loans, decoys and countermeasures, trade missions and cargo insurance, and the Cutlass's centerline thruster. Guests from CG Bot describe their ship, character and 2D art work on the game.
His skin is not going to cause you to be stopped.
No, no, they're not going to just look at you and go, oh, he must be a pirate because he's wearing his skull and crossbones.
Classes, one, two, three, four, basically just tell what the weapon can do on that hardpoint. So for instance, a one is just fixed forward, a two can move side to side or up and down and sometimes in every direction. Threes are missiles, so they're different, no other weapons can go on those. And then fours are turrets, and you can slap smaller guns into turrets. So that's all the classes are for. The sizes are what really matter, because each hardpoint on a ship has a size, a maximum size and a minimum size for what weapons can fit on it.
Absolutely. There will be wear and tear. That's going to be normal behavior. So, yes, you need to take care of your ship. If you don't take care of your car, it falls apart, too.
Well, don't think of it as a character class. We don't do that. So if you want to do some salvaging, you can. It's not a job on or off thing. It's when you feel like doing some salvaging or you happen to have an opportunity, maybe even salvaging something that's not quite ready for salvaging yet. It happens. But yeah, you'll be able to find interesting things. You might be able to pick up weapons for cheaper because, hey, they're free. Or you might even find some unusual items. We still have a lot of work to do on the full design of that. But I'm sure there will be lots of interesting things to find. It's just how much you want to explore.
Absolutely.
So, space bus.
Space bus. Space limo.
So why would you ever need to have that?
Well, let's say you left one of your ships in your hangar way over on Terra. And then you got on a buddy's ship and flew to Earth, for instance. And you're like, I need to get back to my ship. And your buddy's not on to take you back, so catch a taxi.
Yeah, we're working on that. I actually think there's a ticket open for that already and we're trying to slow him down a little bit. He's a little too jazzed up.
Now that ticket means, we use JIRA, which is a process which allows people, we ticket things. Anybody can assign anybody a ticket or a task and you can watch it or people can assign watchers. It's a pretty efficient way of tracking all the elements we need to do to make this game.
Not no matter where they are. If they're not in the hangar with you, remember, communication is not instantaneous. So you'll have to allow for communication. But if he's flying his ship, once he has the information, he can take it, it'll be like in his little log.
I'm not sure why you want to send it to all the ships anyway, because you personally would know it, and you're the pilot.
Well, yeah, but it's a navigation computer thing to get you to the jump point.
But you can enter that in your nav. You just assume that's in, right?
It'll be in your mobiGlas.
If you're broke, maybe they'll put a boot on your ship.
But what happens is if you are completely out of money for some reason, which I don't think will ever happen, what will happen is you can either go get a loan and pay it back by flying missions. Or you could even go pick up missions on other people's ships to make a little scratch so you can get out.
But you're not going to be evicted into space.
No, no. We're not going to leave you floating in space. That would be rude.
Well, we will have decoys of some sort. There will be all kinds of countermeasures.
Yes. Yes, you will. We're working on it right now.
And we're going to be polling, again, the flare items at least to find out what people want to see. And we're working on that. We're culling the list. What we don't want to do is give you a list of something that's six months away, because everybody's like, where the heck is that? So we want to see what we have on the schedule or what we think we can get done. And then we want to give it to you and let you tell us what you want to see. And we'll go from there.
Well, I guess they saw on the website just this week.
Right, we just showed our first female player, so yeah. Absolutely.
Of course. That's a big thing that Chris has talked about: some people have 88, 90 hours a week to play and other people don't. And he wants to make it to where you can still compete with those people.
Absolutely. And we've done things like the mechanic for saving in space for people who want to be explorers but don't have much time. So we're thinking about those people all the time. It's very important. Not everybody can live in the universe.
The tech readout is correct. It has one TR4 centerline thruster. If you notice the poster in the Voyager Direct store, it actually has the thrust coming from the middle of it. So I'm not sure what art you might have seen that showed it using the pods on the sides, but the thruster is in the center of the ship. It sort of seems to be their thing, and that company happens to have two ships, Drake makes the Cutlass and the Caterpillar, and they both have little extra pods that look like, hey, those could be engines, and I think they're decoys.
Actually, both of the examples he gave were very good. You can either get hired by somebody who's paying for the cargo and just pays you for the service of carrying it, or you can pick up the cargo yourself and pay for it, at which point you're responsible for the insurance, and take it somewhere and sell it to people. So either way, either contract would be valid.
CG Bot is an art outsourcing company. We do video game art for all sorts of different video games, and currently we're working on y'alls. Very excited to be doing so.
For you guys, we're doing a lot of ships, a little bit of characters, a little bit of 2D stuff, a little bit of universe maps or whatever. Just kind of a little bit of everything, but mostly the spaceships.
Well, pretty much, I think we did most of the modeling on the first trailer. We did a couple of the characters.
Did you do the Vanduul fighter?
We did.
Yes, that was the first time we did CryEngine. We did lots of Unreal stuff before, lots of next-gen stuff all over, but CryEngine was the first time to work with it this extensively.
So I started working with Chris at Digital Anvil. Back in the day, I used to work at Origin Systems where Chris was on a different team. And then he went away to start a new company. And then maybe like a year later, I started doing contract work for him and then became art director on Conquest: Frontier Wars.
I think currently we have about 15 people. It's based on what we're working on at the time, but we're looking to expand that role and go quite a bit bigger. We are definitely working on getting that team bigger and bigger for you guys.
We have 70 people all together. On the art side, we have a programming team of 10 with administrators and stuff. We have another 10 kind of admins, and then everybody else is an artist.