Narrative Director Dave Haddock and Associate Narrative Director Will Weissbaum describe how they joined CIG and wrote Squadron 42, including its drafts and the Ealing performance-capture shoot. They also cover the lore timeline, short stories, and Pyro's history, factions and retcons.
Hi, I'm Will Weissbaum. I am the Associate Narrative Director here for Squadron 42 and Star Citizen projects. I've been with the company and just celebrated my 10 year anniversary. So it's been a clear decade developing narrative, lore, stories, writing dialogue, writing backstory pieces, writing design guides to help branding and art and the mission team create what they can create. Yeah, it's a heck of a lot of fun. I feel really honored to be part of the project and hopefully making stuff that you all out there are excited about.
TL;DRDave Haddock is narrative director working on story, characters, dialogue and scripts for Squadron 42 and Star Citizen, and was among the company's first five or six people.
I'm Dave Haddock. I'm the narrative director here at Cloud Imperium. So yeah, I work on Squadron 42, Star Citizen. Basically what Will does as well. But yeah, just been working on basically building the fictional universe, writing the scripts. Obviously, both of us were very heavily involved with the Squadron 42 production when we actually shot in London. We were down there for that. But yeah, otherwise helping to build out SC and the PU. Content for the planets, and we're starting to tackle some of the social dynamics now in the Persistent Universe and the social areas and stuff like that. But yeah, it's basically neck deep in story and character and dialogue and scripts.
Ben was on. Forrest was doing some stuff. And then there were some people who were kind of helping on the side. Hannes was doing stuff. Paul was doing stuff.
TL;DRDave Haddock describes working as an intern and then on a film Chris Roberts produced, later brainstorming a story with him, and eventually being invited to join and build the lore ahead of the Star Citizen announcement.
So yeah, it was sort of a weird path. My background was in film, so I worked in production and I did sound, I did some editing, I did a bunch of writing on the side trying to get something off the ground with very, very little success. But I actually was an intern at Chris's production company in LA. So Adam Wieser, who's also on the narrative team, was there as well. That's how I know him. John Schimmel. So basically I kind of met Chris through that. I ended up working on a movie he was producing called Outlander and worked on that for about two years, two and a half years, and got to go up while they were filming it up in Nova Scotia and shoot behind the scenes stuff, and basically was kind of just hovering around. I was kind of a good gopher dude to do a bunch of stuff. So it was PA, director's assistant, VFX coordinator, whatever needed to be done basically. But that's how I got to know Chris. And so in the aftermath of that, we ended up kind of collaborating. He had an idea that he was thinking of developing that I ended up helping kind of flesh out, and we would just sort of work every day for a couple months and try to build a story and an outline and stuff like that. And then, it's kind of what happens with a lot of film projects. He got busy, other things took priority and stuff like that, and it sort of kind of fizzled. But it was a really fun dynamic. It was very open and free-flowing ideas and kind of throw stuff out. And no one was precious about anything. It was always a very collaborative kind of creative environment. And then I kind of kept in sporadic touch, but I was off doing other stuff and also slash unemployed for a really long time, but still trying to get writing off the ground with very little success. And then Chris basically reached out to me and asked, hey, I've got this thing I'm putting together, would you be willing to talk about it? And so I went over to his house and he showed me kind of the early prototype of what ended up being the GDC demo. And I got to fly a Hornet and I crashed into the Bengal a couple of times and stuff like that. And so he basically kind of pitched what he was sort of conceiving and thinking about trying to put together. And interestingly enough, we went out and had lunch and kind of talked about it a bit, and I had a job interview literally right after that. So I left there and went to a job interview at a VFX house that I did not get. But basically he asked if I wanted to come on board. And I was like, are you sure? Because I don't know games. So we started building the lore and the fiction in the build-up to the GDC announcement, and we started doing the framework for the fictional history of the game, which became what became known as the time capsules, which were the 30 days leading up to his announcement of what would be Star Citizen. We would do a drop every day basically to kind of flash forward through key historical moments in the game's fiction. And it ended with, the final post was just 'today'. And then Chris gave his presentation.
TL;DRThe time capsules are still available and still foundational to the lore; they can be found in the Comm-Link series list, and sorting old to new is recommended as a crash course.
They still are, and they're still a foundational part of the lore we do. I still reference them to this day when writing historical things, to get grounded in, okay, where in our history is this taking place? Or when we've been fleshing in more and more of that timeline. It's impressive.
Yeah, they hold up. Because again, it was that thing of, it was 900 years of history, so it was like, what are the main kind of landmarks? And thankfully, they've still kind of held up, and we're able to still kind of point to them.
And if you're interested in checking out those time capsules, you can go to robertsspaceindustries.com, then go to Comm-Link, and then there's a series pull-down, and it's not alphabetical. But somewhere in the middle there, you'll see Time Capsule and you can find all those comics.
And then I would sort it by old to new. So you start basically with present day and then it'll take you all the way up to... But it's a great crash course. We had to do kind of an onboarding lore primer thing, and that's my first recommendation: if you want a real high-level overview of what the kind of crux of the universe is, start with the old and go to the modern day and you'll be kind of conversational.
Well, the irony was that I played Wing Commander growing up and actually sold Wing Commander 2 and 3 when I worked at Babbage's in high school. So that was why, when I saw the job posting at his production company, I was like, oh, cool. So I knew his games going into it. But it was cool. Again, it was an office, so I was working front desk and reading scripts and getting coffee and doing the usual stuff. But yeah, it was a cool dynamic. Like I said, Adam Wieser was there at the time, and John Schimmel was the president of production there and stuff like that. So it was a really fun group of people.
TL;DRDave Haddock recalls the early days as sparse, with the announcement overwhelming the site, him writing several weekly fiction and news pieces, and starting to flesh out the Vanduul and Squadron 42 story.
That is true. Yeah, I'm a very lazy eater. It's more about just needing sustenance, so I found, that place is good, I'll just go there. And so I just went to literally the same place.
No, it was Tender Greens. Which you could do a lot worse, but... It was a lot sparser. The reaction to the initial announcement was kind of overwhelming. It crashed the site while Chris was giving the presentation. But yeah, a lot of it, once it was like, oh, okay, so this is happening, it became... I was doing three dispatches a week. I had the Cal Mason story, the Kid Crimson story, and a news dispatch. So Monday was Cal Mason, Wednesday was news dispatch, and Friday was Kid Crimson installments. And then we started doing Jump Point on top of that, so I was doing short stories for that and fiction. But it was kind of solidifying, like, oh, okay, so we need to figure out all the things that we sort of glazed over in our initial conversations of, well, what's the Vanduul really like and stuff like that. Starting to dive into that, starting to test out storylines and outlines for Squadron 42, what's the story going to be, talking with Chris about that and kind of getting his download of where he'd like to see the story go, and starting to sketch out ideas for that, characters. Yeah, it was an interesting time, because it was very like, oh, wow, we're doing this thing. And again, at the time, I was hoping it was going to do well as I was working on it. I was getting excited about the project. But again, you have projects that start up, especially working in films, where it's like, oh, there's a lot of interest, and then it wanes, or something comes together, it seems like it's going to happen, then it falls apart. So you get kind of guarded about getting too excited about stuff so you don't get too crestfallen. When it actually starts to kind of kick off, it's like, oh, okay, well, where do we start? What do I do now?
Yeah, it's been an ongoing discussion over the years. People have consistently sort of asked, are these actual events that are happening? Are they fictionalized events? And we always kind of skirt the line of, they're sort of fictionalized accounts of real people who do exist.
Yeah, I think for the most part, it shakes out that those story series are stories in Star Citizen. So some of them are maybe based on true things, but the way they're told and the details, you can imagine someone in SC reading a book called Cassandra's Tears.
Yeah. Well, and I think the early comparisons too were always, we want to ultimately do the Skyrim books that you can find and stuff like that. And it was like, oh, well, maybe we take these and they can just be those stories that you find throughout the universe.
TL;DRWill Weissbaum met the team at a job fair after layoffs at his previous studio, clicked with Dave and John, and fell in love with the project through the quick feedback on his early writing.
It was an unannounced project that ended up not going forward, and so there was a bit of a reduction in workforce that caught up a whole bunch of people, and...
No. I mean, previously I'd been working on the God of War titles, but they were trying to develop a new IP and it didn't end up happening. And so Sony, as kind of a consolation prize, held a job fair with all the local game studios and invited them out to be like, hey, unfortunately we're letting a bunch of talented people go, come and meet them, which was a really nice thing. And I had done all my research before about who was hiring narrative and blah, blah, blah. I hadn't even planned to go to the Cloud Imperium booth because they weren't hiring narrative, and I was just having a soda at a table and I started chatting with someone, and they were like, oh, we might be looking for writers soon, you should give me your information. I ended up talking to Dave and John and we ended up clicking really well. Started working on the project. And it was funny, at the time, in our smaller office in Santa Monica, I would be sitting on a little chair like this with my laptop on my keyboard with Dave and John in the office.
Yeah, I think something like that. They also gave me a desk, and then the next week when I came in, it was gone. And I was like, what happened? And apparently they had moved all my stuff without telling me, and I was like, I just got fired.
Well, because they put you across the office, and we were in this sort of icebox corner office thing, which is the coldest place on earth. But yeah, they for some reason put Will across the office, and then we were like, move him.
I mean, it was great. One of the first things that I got a chance to write on was the commercial for the M50. It was coming out. And before that, Dave had done a bunch of really cool commercials that were all very much like car commercials in vibe. So it was kind of a challenge at that point of, okay, could we do one of the ship commercials that wasn't in that tone? And that's kind of how the idea of Jax came about.
Yeah. So totally original idea, not based on anything. Legally distinct. So it was kind of mind-blowing too, because I was used to working on video game projects where you did something and then worked on it for four or five years in secret and then it came out. But I wrote that script, and I think within two months or something like that they had produced this amazing cinematic and it was out there and people were reacting to it. And that's kind of how I fell in love with the project, for the immediacy of writing a lore post and going and reading what people were saying about it and being like, oh, they're right about that. Or, oh, they didn't understand what I was going for, I've got to get better at doing that. And it was a really interesting way to write. I've never had that experience before.
TL;DRAhead of the shoot, Squadron 42's first chapter went through many drafts, and the writers spent about two months starting work very early to overlap with the UK team, which backfired because of traffic.
Yeah, we had... I mean, drafts is putting it mildly. Chapter 1 of Squadron 42 had 82 drafts. Again, some of those are minor changes, some were heavier changes. But it was a lot of rewriting. But we ended up doing, just to better overlap with the UK, it was what, like two months, where we were going into the office in Santa Monica at like four o'clock in the morning? Basically, we would work from four. And LA, as you know, the traffic there is awful. And so we ended up kind of screwing ourselves, because the idea was, all right, we'll go super early so that gives us more time to be online at the same time as the SQ42 design team, so we can ask questions on the fly as we're churning out this content and working with them on what's the latest flow and all this stuff. But yeah, we ended up kind of screwing ourselves, because the idea was, well, if we start at four in the morning, we knock off at like two in the afternoon, but LA traffic is so bad that it would take two and a half hours for me to get home. So I would just end up staying till six anyway. So yeah, it was a dumb idea. But yeah, so we did that, and we were kicking out a lot of drafts and just basically hammering out scripts for a couple months leading up to the shoot.
It was a lot of divide and conquer. Usually it would just be like, hey, you grab this chapter, I'll grab this chapter, whatever, and then do a draft, swap, give notes and rewrite it.
TL;DRThey did not assign characters to individual writers; they read earlier drafts to pick up each character's voice, asked each other questions, and did joint readings and polishing near the final version.
No, I don't think so. There would be types of moments where, because Will did a lot of the interstitial stuff, that's mostly his stuff, a lot of the inter-character dynamic stuff with the crew. I think he took kind of an initial pass on a lot of that stuff. But if I ended up having to do one, if I had questions, I would sort of ask, what's your hook into this character, what's their voice? But a lot of times, I mean, again...
Absolutely schizophrenic. But again, as you start reading stuff, I think we were kind of working sequentially. So if I read an earlier draft, I could kind of get a sense of how he was writing the character and then just kind of pick that up and go with it.
And when we got close to final, we were doing readings together and making notes, because I think a lot of things got smoothed out. We did our final reads and polishing, and we'd be talking about, oh, we're going to shoot these 10 pages tomorrow...
TL;DRThe question about casting goes mostly unanswered; they instead discuss Chris Roberts wanting small, optional character moments that reveal people gradually rather than dumping their backstory on the player.
But I guess just to go back about writing Squadron and coming on the project, and I cannot wait for everyone to get to experience this, but as far as the direction from Chris, allowing us to give these hopefully meaningful small moments that, I think, it's not completely unique in games, but I think it is still special when you can come across it, where it's just people kind of being people, and these small little things for the player to discover, and that he was excited about that and wanted more of that.
Well, and also, one of the big kind of rules that we were given when approaching this stuff was that he intentionally did not want, and again, I understand the methodology behind it, what kind of falls into sort of a general video game trope of, you walk up to a character, you poke the button, and they just kind of vomit their life story out to you, so you understand why you need to go get those 20 wolf hearts or whatever. Like, my family's dead, and oh, I'm so sad.
But he was like, I don't want that. I want this to kind of onion-skin it. So the players need to kind of spend time around these people if they want to learn what's going on. So it opened up a lot of fun doors, and again, the fact that we had to accommodate for a full functioning crew, that you could just place these little vignettes and moments scattered around the ship of just people being people.
And we don't force it on... hopefully the players, if they're not interested in diving deeper into the narrative, then they can just run past it, and it's fine.
You know there are going to be those streamers when the time comes who just go in a straight line, don't interact with them, just go from one mission to the next mission, just fight, finish.
That you'll still have a deep, hopefully meaningful experience, even if you're like, screw all these NPCs, I don't care about them, I'm here to shoot stuff.
TL;DRThe shoot ran just over four months with only one day off, and Dave Haddock describes it as chaotic but wonderful, thanks to a great crew who pulled together.
It was April through July, mid-July. So I think it was just over four months. We had one day off. Yeah, that was it. One day off in four months. Literally seven days a week. I mean, I loved it. It was wonderful. It was chaotic. With any production, movie or this game, there's an energy of, we've got to do this, we've got to do this, which is kind of adrenaline-fueled, but it was a really great crew that was down there, among Imaginarium, among the production team there. Shout out Philippa and Iona and that team. The Imaginarium crew was awesome. They had this amazing workshop where they were fabricating props for us on the fly. And the team down there, as well as the team up here who was supporting everybody. Everybody really pulled together, because we had to shoot it, we had to get it done. So it was kind of a nice focus.
TL;DRWill Weissbaum says they cast a wide net and refine later, keeping lore flexible, though retcons are sometimes needed, with Pyro changed from a harsh, inhospitable place to one with more explorable areas.
I think, like with a lot of Star Citizen, because it's such an expansive game experience and there's so much going on, we've talked about this before, we tend to cast a wide net and then we hone the parts that need honing and polishing. Not only does that save our sanity and allow us to accomplish the work we need to do, it also gives the project the breathing room it needs to change and grow, because every patch we're learning and things are changing. And a lot of our lore has been written in a way that makes it flexible enough that it can grow and accommodate with the project. And then sometimes, unfortunately, we have to do retcons. We have to change stuff. Pyro has been the first big example of that. I'm totally not answering your question. Pyro was a really big learning experience when we brought it to life, because we had this idea of, I think some people remember from the original Galactic Guides, a much harsher, inhospitable world. And that was also coming back from a lot of our early nuggets of planning, where there weren't going to be that many planets to touch down on. We wanted reasons to make stuff no-go zones because we didn't think we could handle it. So it was all blocked off. But then coming in, it's like, no, we want players to be able to explore more of these planets. We're building these planets. Let's get them down there. And then it's like, well, if everything is super uncomfortable and inhospitable, then it doesn't make sense to have outposts there, and then we don't have the gameplay that we want. So it's like, all right, maybe some of the continents are inhospitable. Maybe one of the planets is closed off, but then let's open up the other ones and have them be much bigger play spaces. And I think that's the Pyro that you're seeing today, which makes a lot more sense for the gameplay loops and experience that we want to have.
TL;DRThey say they rarely resist changes; there was some back-and-forth over Pyro, but Dave Haddock voices concerns and then accepts the game director's decision and finds a way to reconcile it.
No, I mean, with Pyro, I think there was a lot of that back and forth, conversations about, okay, yeah, we're adding in more places for the player to explore, but how do we hold on to those core elements of what Pyro is all about? I guess it's not as drastic. It's never as drastic, because I pride ourselves on being part of the team.
Well, a lot of the stuff is pretty malleable. Again, it's a creative endeavor. That's part of the thing of working in any creative industry. I always kind of have a general approach to things. If a change gets presented and I'm like, eh, I'm not quite sure if that's really gonna line up with what we've been saying in the past, I'll voice that. And then if a game director says, well, we really need it, okay, well, we'll figure out how to make it work. It's ultimately not up to me. I'm here to help support the project. So if I think something's really important, I'll voice that. But if it gets shot down, then I don't take it personally. I just go, okay, well, we'll figure out a way to make it happen. And in my own head, go, all right, I'll have to figure out a way to reconcile this and find a solution to it that I think is okay and that I'm okay with. But it's a collaborative medium, you have to be able to do that. I think if you kind of dig in your feet and stomp your feet and go, no, no, no...
TL;DRPyro's original story is a system with a fluctuating flare star that made it poor for habitation, so mining rights were sold, and later shield technology led to a resource grab that depleted it industrially.
The original story behind it was that basically the solar system was discovered in, I think it's the end of the 25th century. But the idea was that basically, at the core of it, the origin of the name, which was also, I think, Pyrotechnic Amalgamated, but it was also the fact that the central star of it was kind of a fluctuating, pulsating solar flare. So it wasn't ideal for habitation. So basically the government was like, well, we might as well just grab what we can from here. It's not going to be that great for development on a mass scale. So we'll just kind of sell mining rights to it and they can just kind of grab resources and call it a day.
And then kind of an adjustment: while the planets may have been more habitable, traveling there was really dangerous at the time because of the flare star, and we have it in lore that human shield technology really took off post the Tevarin War. We learned a lot of things from them. So all of a sudden you see in lore another resurgence of exploiting the resources in the system.
And there was a big resource grab, and it depleted a lot of the stuff. Now, on a player scale, there's still a lot there. A lot of times when we say depleted, we mean on a massive industrial scale that can't support thousands of workers in a unified way. But someone who's out there with their pickaxe in a tunnel can still hit the mother lode.
TL;DRRepeated gold rushes came and went because the flare star makes Pyro a bad place to live long term, leaving an unmonitored system where squatters and outlaws moved in.
There have been repeated gold rushes throughout its history, as new jump points have been discovered, as new technology has allowed them to access more of the system's resources. But then those money rushes keep falling away, and there's never been any kind of permanent infrastructure. For a lot of reasons, because it's still a dangerous system with the flare star at the heart of it, it just kind of makes it not a nice place to live long term. So you have people come, take what they can, and then get out.
And then, in those lapsed periods in between, you have other elements moving into the system and setting up, because, again, it's sort of an unmonitored area. So you have the proliferation of these squatters and these outlaws and whatever who are sort of using the system, which again is kind of increasing the danger to people who are just trying to fly through or trying to earn a living or whatever.
A lot of the times when it's become, oh, should we claim and expand our resources on settling the system, it's come at a bad time for the UEE. There's been wars, there's been adjustments, the fall of the Messer Empire, and so the government has just kind of chosen not to take it on and take on that burden. And this is a question that's still going on right now, and players get to be a part of that conversation of, should the UEE take over the system and make it safer? Because it's having consequences in the form of XenoThreat coming into Stanton and really messing stuff up.
TL;DRThey list several outlined Pyro factions without giving a count, and Will Weissbaum says they are exploring gangs from neighboring systems moving in, with XenoThreat standing out as politically driven.
Yeah, again, this is just fictionally, we had outlined XenoThreat, Fire Rats, Dark Side Rovers, Hollow Boys, the... who are the vigilantes? Overlords. Gravola, I think. And then there was, I think it was like the Lost Ones or something like that. It was like a human trafficking or sentient trafficking group that everyone hated.
And to foreshadow a little bit, right now we're exploring the idea that some of the gangs from neighboring systems are now pouring in and putting resources into Pyro. So that's hopefully something that'll be...
XenoThreat had a unique place in the outlaws because they weren't financially driven, they're politically driven, and that makes them take risks that I think a lot of the other outlaw groups in Pyro aren't happy about, because there's been renewed attention on the system.
They're terrorists, basically. They're trying to influence political change through violence, the textbook thing. But again, like Will said, Headhunters hate the fact that they're attracting so much attention, because now security forces are focused back on Pyro, and they're like, eh, just let us do our thing.
Oh, my goodness. Jared, if you knew the amount of research that we have to do before every change, because our lore is a wicked web. You pull on one strand... Have you seen the hit film Madame Web? It's a lot like that.