The developers introduce the Drake Vulture, an entry-level single-seat salvage ship. They cover its design history and concept iterations, salvage charges, 12 SCU storage, light defenses, the Prospector loaner, and how salvaged material gets processed and sold.
It's not the last ship I'm the principal designer on, but I don't foresee myself doing any more directly from this point onwards.
TL;DRPaul Jones says getting a ship look Chris approves is hard, with rising expectations, deadlines, many ships in parallel, and extra time planned for a concept artist new to ships.
I think I'm in my fifth year now, so the expectation is it would get easier. But I think every year the bar just gets higher and the expectations and the quality of what we have to provide just increases. And it's just one of those things. Sometimes you just get it. You knock it out of the park first time, like you say, and everyone's like, great. Sometimes everyone's like, great, and then Chris is like, I hate it. And that for me is, nobody likes that position because you've got it wrong essentially, but sometimes it happens because it is art and it's just not what Chris expected. And it's just how do you... because you've always got deadlines with these things. So basically we have this pretty down pat now in terms of how long we assign to each segment of the development process. Obviously, there's a sale date tied in. You do have these heavy demands of trying to hit these deadlines. Otherwise, there's a big knock-on effect. For me, of course, you've got the artistic pressure and you've got the, okay, how do we make this cool? Is this going to work for the game? Is John going to be happy with this? Is Nate going to be happy? Is Chris going to be happy? Is Todd going to be happy? And then you've got, are we going to hit our dates?
These are done so far in advance as well for some of them, like the designs. We had that RTV last year for the three Drake ships. So the design for this ship was done back then, really. So that was November? December. We're in June now, so that's seven months.
Yeah, and it's because this actually was scheduled in, in terms of extra time, because it was going to a concept artist who wasn't familiar with working on ships. So a lot of our timeline is sort of worked towards a senior artist. So for this one, we essentially doubled it, because I know there's going to be more back and forth. I need to give myself time to react, to think, to solve the problems, because at the time there were still five other ships going on at the same time. So it's not like I'm just working on one ship and we can noodle away and just craft this beautiful thing and solve every single problem. I've got five other ships, one FPS weapon, two other ship weapons going on at the same time.
So they're all in different stages. So it's not like they're either linear one after another, or they all start at the same time and finish at the same time.
And you're swapping, it's that changing of gears. So you're swapping from, let's say, the Origin style to Drake style to Aegis. And you're going from a small ship to a massive ship to a career starter ship. And the career starter ships are always interesting because they're trying to solve something very specific. And so it is quite important that you get the look right, but also the gameplay experience.
It was something we talked about early on, but ultimately didn't go with it, sort of. It's got those VTOL thrusters there so it can hover. It's got legs so it can land on the ground. It can salvage stuff on the ground. It's not as easy to do it whilst it's on the ground because it doesn't have as much movement. But if you find some wreckage there on the surface, you'll be able to pull it in with the tractor beams and grind it up.
They're just essentially ammunition that you stock up on before you go out somewhere. So they're just loaded in. It sort of gives you a fixed amount of stuff you can do. So you have to pick your battles, so to speak, but it's not such a small amount that it's one ship and that's your lot. You're not going to be able to go there and chop up 30 Idrises with a Vulture's worth. You'd probably need more salvage charges than could physically fit in the Vulture to do that.
TL;DRJohn Crewe says salvage charges are the clean way to break up a ship, whereas shooting it damages surfaces and interior, creating mini explosions and giving worse returns.
Salvage charges do it cleanly. The same as the claw on the Reclaimer. The claw does the salvage charges' job for the Reclaimer, but the Vulture doesn't have that. So it has this, and EVA salvage will use those as well, rather than you just, with a tiny little claw, chopping away at stuff. It's the clean way of doing it. So it cuts down those break points. If you're shooting it with your ship, you're going to be causing damage to the ship. You're going to be destroying the surface of the ship. So when you're scraping it, you're going to be getting much less returns. The penetration of the weapons probably will be damaging stuff on the inside. When bits break off because you've shot them, they're probably going to cause little mini explosions. You see all the squibs go down the wings. It's all just deteriorating your return. So yes, you can go along and shoot it with your ship, but it's not going to be as good a return as just doing it properly with salvage charges.
Yeah, so those break it down into the bite-sized chunks that the Vulture can manage.
No. That question's for me. No, entry level means this is the beginning of that profession, this profession. This is meant for when you're ready to dedicate your life, or at least a portion of your life, to the career of salvaging. I want to be a salvager. This is your entry level. You start here, and then you progress up to something like the Reclaimer. This is meant to be your stepping stone. You start here and then you move your way up, after you've built yourself a career and resources and capabilities, to the Reclaimer.
The promotion starts like it normally does later today, probably very soon after the conclusion of this show, and that'll have the stats page with all of the stats.
Length, the dimension stuff, I don't know off the top of my head. Cargo capacity is 12 SCU, so it can be used as a cargo transport, but that 12 SCU is really for salvage storing. But the stats on the webpage have all the dimensions, the mass and some proposed speeds as well.
There's no crab claw stuff. Basically, there are two poses, but it's really just for... You've got a landed pose and a flight pose, really. So there's no mystery behind it. It's just pure mechanics. The better-looking pose is when it's in the flight mode. So you get a sort of break of the silhouette, like the sort of dog leg, essentially. But when you put that on a surface, then suddenly you've got to have massive landing gear at the back. It's really tall. It just looks really geeky and ungainly.
Bigger ramp as well.
So it just made sense to just solve those two problems by just having the pivot of the arms.
Yeah, it was a difficult one for sure. Because originally when we started off, it was basically the equivalent of a space transit van. We did some initial sketches and it wasn't meant to be pretty. It was literally meant to be super functional. It was like a dude and his truck, and he's going out there and he's got a boom arm with the laser scraper on or whatever. And that's kind of the general theory. There was an idea that it would have a side opening. Again, it's kind of like those vans you get where people get bundled into the side, except this time putting your...
Chucking the components and bits in.
Yeah, so it was almost meant to be a little bit pig ugly.
Yeah. So it kind of went a little more slab-sided than it had intended at this point. But it was still getting across the overall feel of the ship that we were initially looking at: compact, industrial, mechanical.
Yeah, the feedback was, Chris hated it. And it was back to the drawing board. Sometimes I think Chris wants... this is Chris's game, Chris's vision. He wants something more interesting. And this was, I'm guessing here, I'm not Chris, but it was just too simple. It was a box.
Essentially, don't ever show that again, come up with something better.
TL;DRPaul Jones says the move to cylinders and softer shapes was a deliberate reset to break the artist out of boxy thinking, with no function in mind, and to bring back Drake's signature curves.
Yeah, so then I kind of didn't want to... because looking at these, they don't particularly fill the function that we wanted it to fill. It was just cool-looking shapes. It was really just a way of breaking the artist out of his thinking of like, okay, let's just mess around at the moment. We're going back to the start. Let's just look at some shapes. Rather than it just being a standard box shape at the back, maybe the stuff that you're reclaiming is going into these storage capsules at the back. I don't know how you'd get them out. There was none of that thinking really. It was just literally, let's look at some different shapes, something that's a little more interesting.
You can definitely see the course correction from the "it's too boxy" to now you've got cylinders and stuff like that. It's like a palette cleanser. Let's go 180 degrees in another direction to break from what we've been doing.
Yeah, and also Drake has a signature cross-section to some of its areas, and it's a very slight curve to some of the surfaces with a nice fillet, basically. And so it was just bringing more of those slightly softer shapes and more interesting forms back in.
TL;DRAfter the concept artist left, Paul Jones had a freelancer and a junior produce many quick ideas, and his own sketch, aimed at what a player wants to see from the cockpit, introduced the downward arms.
So what happened, we hit another road bump just before this, where the concept artist who was working with us decided he wanted to move on to work for a different studio, work in a different field. And of course, that's kind of a bit of a spoke in the wheels. Well, I wouldn't say it was a video game industry thing. It's just concept artists are in demand, and to find the high-quality staff that we need for this project, they're kind of like hen's teeth. When you find one, you just want to keep hold of them for as long as you can. But he'd worked with us for a couple of years and he wanted to move on. So basically, we were kind of stranded for a couple of weeks because we had nobody to work on it. And then I was just like, okay, well, I need to keep this rolling and we just need to keep moving forward. There's another chap that we work with. He's a freelancer. He used to work for us and he created the Dragonfly, basically. And he comes from an automotive industrial design background. He's very good at shotgunning ideas. And I'm kind of mean. I'm like, okay, you've got two days to give me as many ideas as you can, and that's it. All you've got is two days, and he's just like, oh, what? I can't do this. And I'm like, yeah, you can. And so he just crashed out a whole bunch, and this was just one of them. I think he did about six. And pretty much at the same time, one of the guys on the team who was a junior at the time, he was inspired. And so, right off his own bat, one day, because I was working at home, he was like, oh, I've done this this morning, and just sends me, and we'll see it a little bit later on. And so I'm sat there thinking, well, if he can do that, I'm going to have a crack too. Let's all have a go at this. But the one that we're looking at now is a little more off-the-wall thinking.
You can see some of the elements that started coming through to the final.
You see the introduction of the arms. This is a ship that has to manipulate physical objects outside the ship, but within close proximity. So you see the introduction of arms here. They're downward.
Yeah. And this is basically directly in response to that day. I sat at home. I was just thinking about, okay, how do we kick-start, how do we re-kick this off? What's interesting is, and I think I just said to myself, right, as a player, what do I want to see? Like when I'm in my cockpit, what do I want to see? And so I was talking to the team and we were bouncing ideas. And so a couple of us went off in this direction of, okay, we've got these two booms in front of us. Needs to keep it industrial. Let's just see what you come up with.
No, this is actually... it's kind of hard to see from this animation. Essentially, Alex had done the full ship, and basically he had got extending booms on it. I think that was the collector. And then also, basically, he'd put an arm on it and it was sort of collecting. It was wafting in the stuff that you'd chopped off your ship, basically. But it was a really good stab at it. At this point, all ideas are welcome. Very similar to the Vulcan. Ultimately, it worked out for Alex because he became the artist who took the ship to the final stages.
Yeah, so this was just that fateful day, sat at home. I'd actually got a couple of hours of, I wouldn't say free time, free headspace to actually think this thing through. I don't pretend to be a concept artist, but I can certainly help. My job is to push people and to break them out of their thinking. So mine was more of a functionality pass. What could we do? Maybe we don't have this mechanic just yet, but let's think about some cool things. And in a couple of hours just crashed out some shapes. And from there, that was basically our jumping-off point.
Yeah, we've got so many things that we have to solve. There's only so many routes you can really go without it looking wacky. Yeah, we could do some really crazy stuff, but it's Drake. We've got a certain ethos that we're trying to continue with. Obviously there's nods to the Dragonfly with the twin pontoons. And actually, my initial inspiration came from one of our junior guys who's joined us called Shang Lam. He's got some great work on his website. So I was just like, okay, let's have a look at some ideas. So he'd got a ship there, twin pontoons. I was like, okay. And it just broke me out of the thinking, and then off we go. But when it's an industrial kind of vehicle, you reference JCB, Caterpillar, road-laying vehicles.
Yeah, essentially, as I talked about in the ATV, there's multiple processes to salvaging. So you can go in and strip all the components out. If it's not destroyed, that's fine. It just makes it a little bit harder to get in, because there's probably going to be people in there. They're probably not too happy about you taking all this stuff out of their ship. If there's not people in there, it's probably going to be powered on. So you're going to need to do some breaching to get in to get all the bits out. And then the first step after that is scraping the hull. So it doesn't need to be destroyed.
It's unorthodox, but probably will work. Oops, I didn't quite align this salvage charge to the hull properly, and now it's on the door. What a shame.
TL;DRJohn Crewe says the Vulture can do well solo on small ships, while a fleet can take bigger targets, though they would need to agree on shares, and a really big ship cannot be fully stripped.
It can do well solo. There's plenty of ships that we're envisioning... Because I think we said the Reclaimer can take essentially a full Connie's worth of salvage. I think probably it can take a little bit more now; the back hold is quite large, it could probably fit a Connie in the hold, let alone crushed up. So for the Vulture, we're looking at something in the extra small ship range, M50, 85X, maybe a little bit larger, Gladius-wise, if you take everything out of it, and that's a lot of volume to grind and come back down. If you're in a fleet, you can obviously take bigger things, but then you've got to come up with some gentleman's agreement on how much of each you take. Oh, you take the left wing, I'll take the right wing, and we'll meet in the middle of the hull somewhere and then get into an argument.
It could be like a whole scene from The Matrix where you've just got a whole bunch of Vultures and they're all just basically stripping a ship.
On something really big, then, yeah, a pack of them is not going to be able to strip everything. So it's just going to be this sort of feeding hotspot. It should be great for other ships and players to come across. All these little, not defenseless, but not designed for combat, salvagers.
That's a Tony question. But it's not going to be a point-and-click, come-back-five-minutes-later job.
It's an important distinction. There's the ship systems and there's the game systems. And while they certainly interact, they are usually two different design principles. So when we get closer to actually implementing salvage in-game, you can be sure that we'll have a whole one of these with Tony and whoever's working on salvage to answer salvage-specific questions.
It's just a design detail. I guess it would be perceived as some sort of scanning equipment, essentially. But there's nothing as exciting as detaching and you flying it around and scouting, or having a mini Vulture, a baby Vulture, just detach. No, there's none of that, sorry.
No. There are some birds though. One of the key art images... we featured the vulture in there.
There is an image that has a parrot hidden in there that Paul and his team decided to just sneak in there.
I had thought maybe we'll make this a new thing and we'll just try and squeeze a bird into a piece of concept art. We've got some concepts starting pretty soon, so who knows?
Because if you do something every time, it's no longer special. It's just like with the Vulcan, where we did different skins, and some ships have costumes. We try to change things around, because one of the things you strive to avoid in any project management and development is stagnation, the idea that you're just doing the same thing over and over again. So sometimes a ship will have a special thing. Sometimes the ship won't have a special thing. Sometimes the special thing, if it does have it, will be vastly different things. And for this particular promotion, the advantage is the discount on the price, which is pretty good if you ask me.
TL;DRIn theory salvage charges let you strip ships and haul the pieces in a Freelancer, but unprocessed, damaged parts would sell for far less than processed cargo from a dedicated salvage ship.
In theory, yes. They obviously enable you to start splitting bits off ships, so there's nothing to stop you using them to do that. If you've got a way of getting those bits back into your hold, there's nothing to stop you doing that either. Where it all starts falling apart is when you come to go sell those bits. So in a salvage ship, it's all been nicely processed. Maybe it's been refined, depending on the ship. Maybe it hasn't. So that dictates the value and where you're going to sell it. If you rock up in your Freelancer, oh, hey, I've got the tail fin of a Hornet here, unprocessed, damaged. If we give you the ability to sell that, it's going to be nowhere near the effectiveness of turning up in your Vulture: hey, I've got 12 SCU of processed Hornets, give me all the money.
Yeah, because I don't know in the concept art, in the stuff that will be released today, if we actually... We don't really show the interior of the cargo hold, but we have basically figured it all out, and there's the nod to the Reclaimer where you can actually see inside all the processing equipment, and then basically it all gets processed and compacted into a box, and basically it pops out a box ready for you to just go and sell, essentially.
We're not quite sure how the Reclaimer is going to fill up its hold, whether it's going to use a similar bigger version of that or whether it's just going to be raw cubes of compressed metal. But there's the ability to have those two different states: here's processed metal in a box, easy, nice, ready to go, ready to sell, or the raw scrap compressed in a box. You take that to a manufacturing plant, or you can perhaps sell it to a refinery, or you can get your Reclaimer to even process it more into those boxes, so you have the options there to change the output.
It's stealthy by its size, not its components. It doesn't have any super Drake high-tech stealth stuff on it. It's a one-man band ship. Even though it's got those two booms out the front, it's still very compact compared to just turning up in your Reclaimer, which is going to be this huge signature. I think in the ATV where we talked about it, or you guys talked about it, it was: you can sneak into things that are happening, so battles that are going on. It's such a relatively small ship that you're not going to notice it against all these fighters whizzing around. So you'll be in there grabbing bits whilst you can, being the opportunistic scavenger.
It's not particularly great. It's two size ones. It's not a combat ship. It's got armor. It's got size one guns to annoy people that are attacking it and put them off. It's got countermeasures. If you're dogfighting in it, unless you're dogfighting another Vulture or something similarly armed like the Prospector, it's not designed for that at the end of the day.
I'm pleased to report that we anticipate the loaner for the Vulture to be the Prospector. Obviously, the Vulture is just being revealed as a concept, yesterday and today. It won't be implemented in game anytime soon. But if you do decide to pick up a Vulture, you will have access to a Prospector in the interim. So with mining coming in a couple of weeks, it's a pretty good deal there if you don't own a Prospector.
TL;DRThe Vulture crunches salvage into boxes to sell at outposts now and to manufacturing plants later, with onboard refining versus leaving it to refineries still undecided.
Yeah, so the Vulture really just crunches it, sticks it in a box, ready to sell. If it was in the game today, what you'd be able to do with it would be take it to the various outposts and sell it for various prices. Mid to long term, you'll be taking it to manufacturing plants. So they're obviously going to be in the universe. They need raw materials to create things. So you'll be able to go there and do trading. We want to look at, like I said, different options for onboard refining, sort of like how the Starfarer can refine fuel into different grades. This would be the same, whether the Vulture can do that or not. At a bare minimum, it will be chopping it up and presenting it for sale. But whether we let you smelt it down or leave that to the refineries is, again, a Tony thing. But it's the supply and demand. A system of manufacturers and refineries need these raw elements. You're the ones to get it for the price. You sell it to them. If you're able to refine things, you can probably go straight to the manufacturing plant. If not, you need to go to the refinery. You've got that onboard cargo capacity, so you could go to the other end of the refinery, pick up the same amount of refined ore or refined metal, and take it to the manufacturing plant. So you don't just have to do the scrapyard-to-refinery loop over and over again. You can be that intermediate person. You could even go to the manufacturing one at the other side of that, take out what they've manufactured, and take that somewhere to sell.
We do do a lot. But this was probably maybe 50% more than we'd normally do. What normally happens is we try... well, different artists work in different ways, right? So some are happy to work in 2D, so they do the thumbnail sketches; some are 3D only. So often we generally try and aim for three options to present to Chris, and they're all good, but they're all different. They're not just like a wing here or a wing here, because that's neither here nor there.
Three big style changes.
Yeah. And so, yes, this one, there was a lot. But we've got another one just in process where there's a lot more there too.
TL;DRDesign supplies a short brief and functional checklist, then artists freely explore many rough shapes over about two weeks, narrowing to three for the final choice.
We work together, but design basically works from a functionality point of view. Is the gun at the front, on the top or the bottom? Navigation, does this work well?
Over the years, we've changed the process quite a lot. It used to be designers would come up with a brief and we'd do white boxes of how we think it should be, and we'd be the ones sourcing reference. But that just ends up down a path where the people working on it felt very constrained by what it had to be. So we took a step back. We just do the brief. If we've got some really cool ideas on how we think it should work, then we just include that in the brief, but we don't do any more than that until they've had a good go at coming up with these shapes. If they want to confirm anything's risky in terms of, is this still going to fit the brief, then we work backwards and forwards on that. But by the time those three big shapes go to Chris, we know that they'll work with the design. Those three might have come out of 30 quick sketches. And quite often Chris will go, well, I want the front half of that one, the back half of that one, put the colors from that one. And then we go from there, and then design and art get much more hands-on as we build out from there. Because it's a waste of both departments' time if we spend a lot of time working on the details at those early stages, because two out of three are going to be completely thrown away at bare minimum. So we wait for the vision.
Generally we assign two weeks for that initial look dev, basically. So we've got two weeks, boom, let's go, let's see what we can... we know what it has to do, and then we try and think out of the box. And so by just having this spec list from design, it's just a wall of text and tick boxes, and...
Yeah, we changed the template quite recently. It used to be this huge long design document that was like six pages full of pictures and white boxes, and it's now one sheet of A4 paper with tick boxes of: it does this, it must have this, it must account for this many people.
So it's kind of like getting a recipe without the pictures, so then the artist doesn't have a preconceived image that can dictate how it starts. So basically, just by having this, they're free to come up with different ideas, and that's just part of the process. If you just look at any of the concept art that we do, there's always a large history of stuff that wasn't right, didn't work for X reason, didn't look quite right, but you start wide and then you just slowly narrow in and in. And at the start it's just rough and loose, and you know you're going to be throwing them away so you don't get attached, but you're just like boom, boom, boom, boom.
And then just keep polishing, keep polishing. Sometimes we look back at them when we're coming up with other ones. We go, actually, do you remember the early version of this ship that everyone hated for that manufacturer because it didn't look like that manufacturer? Oh, it actually looks... Now that we're doing this one, we could look back at that one.
TL;DRYou climb handholds up an arm to a sealed cab door, or enter from the cargo bay ramp via a sealed shaft with a lift and/or ladder.
Oh, the cab. So basically, there's handholds up one of the arms; climb up to the cab. And again, it's got that very industrial construction feel. The door actually swings open. And there is a sealed space, basically, so you're not venting the whole ship. And then you get in, and then the seat moves and you get in and you're all good, and all the instruments fold down. Not fall down, but fold down. If it fell down, that would be kind of bad, right?
But you can also get in through the ramp at the back from the cargo bay. There's a sealed shaft to get you up from the cargo bay to the living quarters.
We couldn't remember if we actually put a lift in, in the end, or actually had a ladder.
I think it's been both at various times throughout it. So it might have both in there, like a little lift with an emergency ladder in the side of it.
Because I think the lift actually makes a seal, doesn't it?
Yeah. So it is sealed, so the back can be open and you're not venting yourself in the cargo bay, in the living quarters. And the living quarters has a door to the...