Producers Jason Hutchins and Jake Ross cover persistence not yet being player-facing, plans to build out the Stanton system's four landing zones (Area 18, Hurston, Microtech, Crusader), and how Star Marine serves as a test bed. They also discuss feature prioritization, restructuring and status updates.
TL;DRChris and Tony set priorities, with features for each release ranked critical, high or moderate; unfinished ones move to the next release or a backlog, and the focus is on features serving both the PU and Squadron 42.
Yeah I'd say first and foremost, the priorities come from Chris and Tony. Those are the guys directing the project so they pave the way for how we are supposed to prioritise our features. So they decide "Okay we have an upcoming release, what do we want to show?" And then once they decide what we want to show we'll break those features down into critical priority, high priority and moderate priority. And what that really means is that a critical feature is something that is an absolute must-have for that release; a high priority feature is a nice-to-have, it's something that's not essential but it's something that we would like to have in the release; and then a moderate is a wishlist item, so it's something if we get to it "great" if not "no sweat".So for example, for the first Social Module release we had ArcCorp, the environment itself, it was a pretty critical, must-have feature. Without ArcCorp there you wouldn't have had an environment to run around in: so it had to be there. That's a critical feature. We also had emote text descriptions, it was like a high feature. We wanted everyone to know when you did your emotes what was happening as you did them so the text would show up in the chat box. So that was a nice to have. And then moderate would be the critical, er, moderate would be the chat ...
Oh so critical! Moderate would be the chat, additional extraneous chat features like the ability to minimise windows, customise chat just a little bit and that didn't end up making it in.
Exactly, and then those features that don't make it into that release they'll either waterfall into the next release, sometimes at higher priority, sometimes not at higher priority depending on what Tony and Chris want to focus on; or they'll go into a backlog for later review.
A little peak behind the curtain too, we're trying to standardise what we are doing on the Production side, as far as using the same kind of nomenclature for features that we do for bugs, so we have critical bugs; high priority bugs; and moderate bugs. If it is a critical bug we're not going to ship a patch with it.
Just like if it is a critical feature, or how that relates to task, we're not going to ship the patch without that being done. Also there is a focus shift to try and prioritise features going forward that are needed for both Persistent Universe and Squadron 42 and Star Citizen as a whole. So we're trying to look at it holistically rather than being split up across various modules.
That's a really interesting question. The PU is first and foremost an open world style first person universe and it's a sandbox really. There will be story yes, but it's the same kind of story you have for settings, like world settings. Rather than a story arc, missions will have stories, characters you run into will have stories. But for big sweeping story arcs, you'll get those with Squadron 42. The PU will support and can live around that story and that dovetails nicely with what you've got. [referring to next question on the show]
TL;DRSquadron 42 will have FPS gameplay, while Star Marine is a simulation and test bed for new features and modes whose stories are only settings, not big story arcs like Squadron 42's.
There will be FPS in Squadron 42. The thing I want to talk about here though is; Star Marine is a simulation within the first person universe. Much like Arena Commander is a simulation within the first person universe. It's a game within a game. Star Marine is going to be a test bed for new features, new game types, new mission objectives and maps. We even plan on rolling out a way to do white box testing in the environments that you expect to use in the PU or even a part of a level for Squadron 42. Perhaps maybe we'll even roll out new enemy AI behaviour for certain monsters or other NPCs out there so we can test within that environment and get that working right and tweaked, get feedback from backers and get that into the game itself proper.The other questions will there be a story? Yes. Some modes will have a story and again it's like the setting, rather than the story. So it's like pirates are attacking the station. Fight them off. That's a story but it's not a big story. So it's not a story like you see in Squadron 42 that's where the big story arcs are going to come from.
And Star Marine is also used like Arena Commander is used like a simulation to practice your dog fighting skills. This is a simulation to practice your first person shooter skills if you don't want to jump right into the game.
Yeah. Not only that not only first person shooter skills. Your first person maneuvering skills. Say a place to learn how the character interacts with the environment.
TL;DRThe hardest part of restructuring is keeping team morale up, which producers address by supporting and communicating with developers, though they are still adjusting to their own new roles.
The most challenging part of any kind of restructuring is just keeping team morale up. Nobody likes to see friends leave the company or moved to other parts of the project; They like to kind of keep the status quo so to speak so when that shifts the team morale sort of takes a hit. Part of the job of a producer is the momma bear factor that you like to call it. It's that support and encouragement that the producer can provide. When team morale is high, productivity is high and so it's really crucial to our job to make sure that happens.Communicating what the new structure is to the entire team, making sure there are no questions if and there are questions, make ourselves available for those developers who have questions about the new structure. Just being aware of the feel of the team and interacting with them whenever we need to update them on everything that's going on.
Jake and I were also adjusting to our roles here. There's a bit of a learning curve that we're in the middle of so really, ask us again once when we know what the new normal is.
TL;DRJake Ross is proudest of the Social Module release, which hit its deadline, the partnership with the Austin studio shown in ArcCorp, and the motion-captured emotes; Jason Hutchins jokingly declines to answer.
It's a tough one. There's a couple of things that stand out. Namely the Social Module release in general. The first release was just a huge success story for our team. It was one of if not the only Star Citizen release that actually hit the deadline that we set out to hit. Partnership with Behaviour in Austin has been really great so far, and that I think has shown with the release of ArcCorp. The community can now see evidence of that partnership. The ArcCorp environment is amazing it's really beautiful to look at even though it's supposed to be a super grungy environment. It went through several design iterations over the past..I don't know how long but they've been working on it for a while. We tried to get it just right to suit what our gameplay needs were and as those needs evolved we had to switch things up so Tony (Zurovec) and Mark Skelton went back and forth with Behaviour to make sure all those needs were taken of and iterating and polishing and that kind of thing.The emotes were a fun addition as well getting to see. Some of our animators here in Austin actually captured a lot of those emotes with motion capture. So seeing them work on those, get those in the game, to tag team with the designers and stuff. It was cool to see those in the communities hands as wellJason Hutchins: You know we've done so much in the past year, since I've been here, that it's hard to choose just one. So I'm not going to answer this. This is a Rosemary's Baby kind of question and I'll have no part of this!
TL;DRDevelopers aren't on holiday when updates pause; producers write the reports to limit the burden on their teams, and Jason Hutchins says it averages under four hours a week for him.
No, they don't. They do, in fact, get back to work on their respective pipelines. It certainly can be a big distraction. Not that we don't love spending a lot of time with Thomas here, or writing letters for the community. It's an important thing though. So the community updates that we do, they're written as a partnership between the senior production staff, the developer leads that they work with closely, and the Community team.The senior producers are in a position to have a big picture view of the project. Which makes them uniquely suited to write this kind of report. One mantra of Production is "protect your team" and that's protect your team from distractions; protect your team from things that keep them doing their job. So a good producer will take this to heart and keep the impact of these kind of reports to a minimum. Try to keep it to no more than a few minutes per developer per week on these kind of reports.It's the collating of the report, and the gathering of the necessary materials, the writing it down and editing it that really takes the time. I've personally spent: the worst was probably a day and a half total, spread out over a few days, writing some of the bigger Star Marine reports that I was working on. But I would say that the average time for me has worked out at less than four hours a week. That's a chunk of time but if I worked a forty hour week, which would be awesome, it's less than ten percent of my time. So I would say the average time is not that great.
And it's important for a producer to know what his or her team is working on at any given point. So we have weekly scrums here, we have leads meetings, we have just the day-to-day interaction with developers. At any point I know what my team is working on at any given time. So making these reports, I know you do the Star Marine reports, and I'll chip in on the monthly report you guys see; but with any of these reports it's easy for the producer to take that information from his head and put it on paper because he already just knows what his team is working on. In some instances it's not the case and you actually have to reach out and get detailed updates for things you don't have the information on. But for the most part you should be able to pull a lot of that information from your head already. So the important thing is, like you said, to protect your team from that time and a good way to do that is just to pull it from your own head.
I should point out we're not doing the Star Marine reports any more. Our focus has shifted so that it's specifically a report on the progress of 2.0 and ultimately that will be a report on our Star Citizen releases in general. I've been partnering with Tom Johnson in Manchester on those reports now, so we're splitting the burden which makes it both easier and harder for both of us.The other thing I wanted to point out is that developers like Zane Bien working on the User Interface or Mark Abent who does the Bugsmasher, those guys obviously spend more time but I think those are important updates. The communication with our backers, with you guys, and getting that feedback from the community really keeps the team going and allows us to make course corrections where we need to. It's great and it's almost a unique situation in the industry.
TL;DRTony only looks about 12 months ahead, so anything outside that goes into a documented backlog, while producers break the nearer features into tasks with leads in JIRA, prioritizing what benefits both the PU and Squadron 42.
Yeah, there are a lot of requests that come in from Chris and Tony for all kinds of things and speaking for Tony...Tony's general philosophy he's told me several times is that he really only has a 12 month horizon meaning that he only really cares at any given moment about what's on the horizon for the next 12 months, what's on the schedule for that time. It makes things a little easier to manage on my side since the amount of content in the game planned right now takes us well beyond 12 months from now. Things that don't fall in the next 12 months usually fall into a backlog for later review, things aren't falling through the cracks or anything, we document everything and make sure it goes into a backlog. That backlog grows, grows and grows but 12 months everytime something gets finished or completed we pull something else out. That's kinda how a backlog works.
No, never and a lot of those good ideas come from the community so thanks. As far as keeping track of the features goes...usually it's a matter of just pulling features from the backlog, producers gathering estimates and dependencies for those features from the lead. A lot of times it's a relationship between the producer and the lead talking about a feature figuring out what's required, how we break this down into individual tasks and then taking those tasks and documenting them in our task tracking software. We use JIRA here. That's kind of how that whole process works for me at least.
Also, as I mentioned earlier, our new focus will be looking at the backlog to see what features are needed for the Persistent Universe and Squadron 42 so we can focus on Star Citizen as a holistic product. If something is Persistent Universe only, it'll probably go back to the backlog for the year for the next time we review the backlog. We'll build those features for the Persistent Universe as we get closer to rolling those features out and rolling out different patches for the Persistent Universe.So basically, if Squadron 42 needs something that is also beneficial for the PU, those things will get prioritized higher than something that's only beneficial for the PU.
TL;DRThe plan is to build one Stanton system to a gold standard with its four landing zones first, using the measured effort to estimate how long other systems will take.
Our midterm plan is to flesh out an entire system so almost like a vertical slice of what a system in the PU entails. I think we'll be focusing mostly on the Stanton system for the foreseeable future getting it to a gold standard quality we're focusing on the four landing zones in Stanton; ArcCorp's Area 18, Hurston, Microtech and Crusader. So getting all those landing zones fleshed out getting it so you can actually visit those landing zones, so we'll be working with other teams across the project who are fleshing out the space portion, the spaces in-between the landing zones starting with Crusader in 2.0. Basically getting a gold standard system is going to be our near to mid term priority.
When I first joined the team over a year ago now the idea was to be designing the first five star systems. What we did not know at that point was how long did it take us to make a single star system or even a single landing zone. Over the course of the year we really fleshed out a single landing zone and we've done most of the work needed for our second landing zone and just recently added points of interest around the Stanton star system itself. This is teaching us how long it's going to take us to do it. Even though I would say we are not one hundred percent complete with the landing zone yet once we have that, it will give us an idea how much more we need to do. So we shifted our focus from instead of the first five complete star systems to the first five landing zones.So we currently have four landing zones in Stanton. Those are landing zones, not like i'm going out to a space station to make a quick repair and getting back on. That's not a landing zone that's more like a mission. We're adding those as well. This tell us what we need to do. Then from here we'll move on to the next one which is Nyx, the Levski landing zone. A much less populated system. That's going to need a lot of activity in it as well, cause you don't want a single star system with one landing zone and that's it, how are those going to work out? This will tell us what a medium sized system takes to build, what a very small size system takes to build. Then we can look at our processes and see how we need to tweak those processes and see how we can go forward making a lot of content.
It will give us actual metrics which is something we don't have for some of the areas of our project. So once we get those metrics we can actually calculate ok this takes this long. If we want twenty systems by this time we know it will take this long to make. That will give us information like do we need to ramp up more resources or outsource a little bit moreJH: And how we can make changes to the system to make it better or faster or more procedural or what have you.
TL;DRJake Ross says the art team is excited about the upcoming Stanton landing zones and character customization, while Jason Hutchins is most excited about non-combat game systems like mining and playing a pacifist space trucker.
This is kind of already in the pipelines and pre-production phase but I know Mark Skelton is super excited to get his hands on the additional landing zones for Stanton.... So Hurston, Microtech and Crusader. We've got one landing zone out there and we've got another one almost finished and Nyx and so moving onto these next three there's lots of opportunities to create new things and new aesthetics that we haven't seen yet in Star Citizen. Microtech is kind of a cold snowy planet and crusader is kind of a vespen, kind of cloud city.
Cloud city. Hurston's a refinery type atmosphere. I know as an art director that's a lot of things to look forward to. We're already in pre-production phases there and as we enter white box phase we'll get some of those white boxes back which is basically just the designer taking these 3D objects and building out a space, rudimentary kind of space. We'll get that back and then Mark Skelton will put our concept artists to work and do paintovers so it's actually what is this space actually going to look like and that's really exciting for him I know.I myself am excited to see the first iteration of the character customization because I'm one of those guys who spends hours just customizing my character and making them just perfect before I even start the game so I'm excited about that.
I don't even want to talk about how much time I spent trying to make my Fallout 4 character look like Pam Poovy last night... It's a little embarrassing. What's also embarrassing is I failed, I didn't really get it...
Awww man that's a bummerJH: I just want to mention that this may seem out of character for me because I'm one of the leads of kind of the first person gameplay but let me just put this out there. I'm most excited for the opportunity to work on game systems that don't involve combat. The way you interact with mining or the way you can be as Todd Pappy said:" A space trucker". Where you don't need to shoot anybody at all and to kind of make it around the universe and earn a living like, that's interesting to me.When I see people play some of the other games, especially the MMO's and try to do it as a complete pacifist and the lengths that they have to go to kind of earn that as an achievement for themselves... we're making a sandbox and that just really geeks me out the fact that we're making a sandbox for people to play in. You don't have to kill anybody if you don't want to. I'm really look forward to seeing how that shakes outJR: Not a lot of games reward the pacifist lifestyle so it's kind of nice.
TL;DRPersistence in the traditional sense is not in the live or upcoming release in any meaningful player-facing way; back-end work continues, character customization will be faked for now, and real persistence is promised only as "soon" and added iteratively.
Persistence in the traditional sense of the word is not folded into 1.3 which is live or 2.0 in any kind of meaningful player face anyway. Though we are working as we speak on the back end required to support player persistence. That being said our partners at Behaviour and Turbulent are working on some really clever things that allow us to be able to customise our character and have that state stick when you're going from one map type to another map type. We're a ways off from having traditional persistence and by that I mean an inventory system that allows you to pick up an item, drop an item, sell an item, trade an item with a friend have that thing and have it persist between play sessions like if you logout of the session and log back in. We're going to fake it, right now and then we're going to have real persistence coming in. I'm going with soonâ"¢Jake Ross: Last thing i'm going to add to that. The persistence as with everything will be put out. We have iterations, we'll have the first iteration go out to you guys and then as we release 2.1, 2.2, we'll put in more functionality surrounding persistence. We'll have hangar storage somewhere in there, being able to buy something and send it back to your hangar. Potentially even as you have clothing in Casaba outlet picking clothing and being able to persist that across places as you will. It's an iterative process as it is with everything. Be patient and you'll get it.