Developers cover the Reliant's texturing phase, the stalled Drake Herald, and the base Starfarer coming before the Gemini. They also touch on the finished room system, Tevarin concept work, component system work, the 300 series, Cutlass and Freelancer rework, subscriber flair and merchandise. Hosts also promote the Star Traders board game.
TL;DRLadyman explains the ad is for Star Traders, a board game he's about to Kickstarter, which resembles Star Citizen only unintentionally, as it was originally developed about 30 years ago.
It's there for a reason. In addition to all the stuff that we're doing with Cloud Imperium and Jump Point and so forth, I'm about to actually kickstart a board game. And it has similarities to Star Citizen. They are unintentional. The original version of this game was developed almost 30 years ago. But it's called Star Traders. And in the game, I just happen to have a board handy. In the game, you travel from world to world, you pick up cargoes at, perhaps at Wells, you pick up time machines, you deliver it to Willis, you might pick up positronic robots on Asimov, deliver them to Bradbury, or you might go to Endor and pick up some snuggly fur belts and deliver those to Adams. But you go from world to world, you have contracts that you use to pick up and deliver things. For example, McDevitt there has stellar antiquities. And when you do it, you get paid in Starbucks. And the best of all, you get to use the little ships that we used in the economy game. This is how I happen to know about them. You get to use the little ships to go from world to world. But that's Star Traders. And as you say, there happens to be a location where you can sign up. We'll be kickstarting it in about a month to two months. If you're interested, go ahead and check us out.
As David said, this is a game he worked on many years ago, and they're bringing it back, along with the help of another one of the members of our family, Ryan Archer. And it's not Star Citizen, but check it out when it hits anyway. I got to sit down and play a demo game with you guys when we were in Austin and I had a lot of fun.
The goal of the game is to earn money, to gather prestige, to convince the Emperor that you are the one worthy to be the Star Czar in charge of all shipping and merchandise throughout the Galactic Empire.
TL;DRLadyman describes a career in tabletop and game publishing, including Car Wars, GURPS, Origin Systems' Wing Commander material, MMO game guides, and now Jump Points and manuals for Cloud Imperium.
Well, I'm sitting here. I got into gaming back in the early 80s with Steve Jackson Games. I worked on Car Wars. I worked on GURPS. I was the guru for those two systems for a little while. We did Star Traders at that time. After that, I worked with FASA on Renegade Legion and MechWarrior. I did some D&D work for TSR. And then I started with Origin Systems just after Wing Commander 1 released, but I was, is it Secret Missions 1, and what were the add-ons to Wing Commander 1?
Secret Missions 1 and 2. And everything from there on out, including the Wing Commander movie. We did the Wing Commander movie book for that product. And after that, we did game guides for EverQuest, EverQuest 2, Asheron's Call, Dark Age of Camelot, Star Wars Galaxies. And then most recently I've been doing the Jump Points, the manuals, the brochures for Cloud Imperium.
Well, you know the answer better than I, Ben. I don't know that we'll be doing any game guides, and the manuals are being decided on that end. But I would be happy to do them.
Yes to the manuals. Game guides usually are contracted through some outside publisher. We'll see if anybody wants to do one. And if they come to us, we'll point them at David.
Oh, my. Possibly Ultima 9, which isn't Wing Commander. I should say Wing Commander, shouldn't I? Ultima 9 was the climactic episode, nine of a game that went nine long. And we did several interesting things to bring that whole series to a climax. And that was fun. Other than that, Wing Commander was, I think, Wing Commander Armada. I got to write, I'm left-handed, I got to write with my right hand a note from a four-year-old to her daddy about why is he killing the kitties? Because kitties are nice.
Actually, Star Traders has five levels of play. The lowest level is for seven years and up. The next level is 10 years and up, then about 13 and up. And then there's a really cutthroat game that I wouldn't recommend many families try. But there's actually five different games and the simplest can be played by kids who can read simple words.
Two answers. One, maybe. This first one has to be successful, so everybody go to traderslock.com and sign up for the Kickstarter. That's one answer. The other answer is there is actually someone who owns the trademark for the electronic game Star Traders, which is an RPG game. It's like an MMO or something like that. So we'd have to name it something different if we went online with it.
It's not going to be until next week. I know this is technically the second Friday of the month, but the first was a holiday, so we're just kind of arranging based on that. So it'll be next week. And it's going to be a Pugliese collection item. I'm not entirely remembering what it is right now. This is only my second day back at work.
So it'll be something along those lines. Yeah, it's keeping in line with the rest of that. And then I think that might be our last piece of that. And then we'll start our new Subscriber Flair series in March and we'll have more information about that for you in the coming weeks.
The sneak peek in yesterday's Around the Verse was an image off of Elwin's own computer that I made him take of the Reliant. It is currently entering its texturing phase. So what you saw was the very, very beginnings of its texturing phase. No ETA at this point, but the modeling's built, they're working on the textures now. In fact, if you saw the very long December livestream at the very start before everything went terribly wrong, we actually walked you through the current state of the Reliant. So it's progressing. It looked that good, and that was before texturing. So I'm excited about it. It's a cool-looking ship.
The resource we had on the Herald was moved to another ship, so it's just been a holding pattern since then. It was one of those unexpected personnel reassignments. So we're hoping he'll be able to get back to the Herald very soon, and we'll keep you updated. We have quite a lot of people working on Star Citizen, but it is still a finite number. I would like to have twice as many people working on these ships. Our guys can only be in so many places.
Do you mean the hoodies, maybe? Track jackets are still available in the store. If you're asking about future hoodies, yes, that's on our to-do list for the year, keeping in line with the previous Drake hoodie that we did because everybody seemed to really like the fabric and everything about that. It will not say redacted on the back this time. We'll probably do a Star Citizen or an RSI, keeping it simple as opposed to Drake. But yes, that is on our merchandise to-do list for the year.
Well, I know the answer. We don't have an answer for that yet. We're still working on it. Unfortunately, even though it's been three weeks, not much has changed since we've been on break for most of that time.
TL;DRThe room system as a separate release no longer exists because it's finished and in use in places like Port Olisar and ArcCorp, though hangars will still be iterated and made more configurable.
The thing that you were thinking of as the room system no longer exists. The game has moved beyond that. As you walk around Port Olisar and ArcCorp, you can see it has rooms. That's the room system in action. So it's done. It works. Rooms are here.
Oh, no, but there will be changes to the hangars and there will be more configurability, if that's a word, in the future. But the system is in. The tech is done. It works. We stream stuff. We have a giant universe. It's great. Everybody's happy. So the system that was what we were talking about, the room system, that's in. That's what ArcCorp's built out of. It's what Port Olisar's built out of. The hangars will still continue to iterate and update. It's just there's no release called the room system anymore.
No, we're getting the base Starfarer first. And that's because we're working on all the base models first. Base ships and their variants afterwards. So that includes the Constellation Phoenix and the Aquila that we're going through and we're making all the bases. And then we'll go back and start iterating on the variants.
You'll have access to Starfarer, yeah. We might make an exception this time. I have to talk to DevOps to see if it's possible, but I believe in my heart that everyone who has paid for a Starfarer should get to explore one when it's hangar ready. So we will figure out how to do that. Or we'll at least try. We'll try very hard. We'll let you know if it's impossible. We've tried before. Convincing the hangar that one ship should be where another ship is is a lot harder than just giving you one to fly in other aspects of the game. But we all want it. I don't think there's anybody that would say, oh, we don't want that.
No, no update yet. It'll happen when it happens. And we'll show you how it works. But I think folks are working on the Vanguard, the Reliant, the Starfarer, our next hangar or flight-ready ships.
Well, I can tell you that we have a concept guy working on the Tevarin themselves right now with the aim of locking down them and their style guides so we can move on to starting the Prowler concept stuff. Because we want to have the Tevarin locked down for us. But we've actually been having some pretty big discussions this week. There was an idea that they'd be slightly Egyptian-style, and they're debating that. So we'll see where that goes. So basically, we're still figuring out what the Tevarin look like here.
So we get this question a lot. Subscription time is really all counted the same on the back end. If you're missing a month, it's not a big deal. Usually the best way to catch up is to buy a pass. If you've got a plan going, just buy a pass. And then you'll have that extra chunk of time on your account and it'll all be counted, the way we see it on the back end is it'll say Imperator time, 13 months. It doesn't break apart because you miss a month or something like that. So the easiest way to do that is to just buy a month pass if you miss a month. That's what the passes are for.
For those asking about the reworked Cutlass, check out the shipyard post that we posted around the same time as whenever this happened. It gives you the full rundown of the Cutlass history and explains why the Cutlass rework hasn't happened just yet. It's on the docket with many other things. So, it'll get there.
Basically the goal is we have all these things that govern the ships already, and the things that we want to do is it's presented in a way that you can actually influence those things individually and see the output. There's a ton of UI that goes into that. And we do still just have the one Zane. He has people that he's working with now, so that's cool. But it's so much work. Each time we do a station, it's a tremendous amount of work.
TL;DRFreelancer will get updates along with most ships, but it's not the worst on the list; ships are still being balanced, a mass-misreporting bug remains untracked, and a weapon revamp is scheduled.
The Freelancer is, most of the ships are receiving updates because it's existed long enough that we can start to understand how those drastic flight model changes have affected the game. I'm able to start making real plans for what to do about it. The Freelancer is one of the ones that's going to be affected by it. Always give feedback, but it's not the worst on my list. If that doesn't jive with what you've seen, definitely the Cutlass is higher up on that list. There's just a number of ships that aren't performing the way we want them to.
Well, and also the Freelancer, this is its first pass at being a flight-ready ship. We're also still seeing it with the Constellation: even though that's viable in the Crusader map right now, there's still, for any of our ships, a lot of ongoing balance tuning, still getting the component rework going, so every ship is still going to have changes and balances.
And that's not even to bring up the bugs. We're running into a lot of issues where mass is just being misreported, and we don't know why. But that basically means that, when the Freelancer was revealed to be a tenth of its mass, and that's why it was so insanely fast. The Freelancer racing was so funny to watch on YouTube. It wasn't actually an issue of a misplaced zero. It just wasn't actually reading that value for some reason. We shuffled it around, and then it worked, and we don't know why. My code doesn't work, and I don't know why. Now my code works, and I don't know why. So we still have to actually track down that problem. There's been a lot of percussive maintenance on the ships recently to get them to work properly. We've got John working overtime to really figure out what's going on. But not just the flight behaviors are being updated, but also I'm scheduled to be doing a full weapon revamp, going through all the DPS of every weapon on every size, bringing those in line with our design goals now that those are really explicitly defined. So that's going to affect all the balance again, so have fun.
First all the weapons will change, then all the shields will change. Oh, then armor will get implemented, and that'll change everything. So there's so many moving parts to these ships that it's completely impossible to get it razor's-edge perfect in a first pass. It's like, okay, put it out, sand down the rough edges, do some more work, keep refining, keep refining, keep iterating. And that's really the way you hit a good balance point with the game.
I've actually been cleaning up some of the implementation of some of the 300 series. So I've been kind of revisiting that lately, just kind of learning how complicated all the components and all the ship stuff is. I have Calix over all the time looking at stuff like, how does this work?
So still more work on the components. I had been doing some work on the Reliant, getting the hangar-ready set up for that, that we showed during the holiday livestream a bit. And then the bulk of the work is the component system. We're changing every part installed in a ship, so getting all that lined up, set up, knowing what ships will have what coolers, power plants, shields, top to bottom for everything. But then also planning out what these components are going to be in some of our bigger ships that we haven't gotten even into the hangar yet. Just so, this is a groundwork for every ship in the game. So just making sure it scales up and down as we need it to.
A monthly report is going to be early next week. We're still waiting for some of our leads, they're not back in yet. Not everybody rushed back to work on Monday. Some people needed a break from the break. I think we have one of them in now. We're going to go through the whole vetting process and we'll have them early next week.