Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Two-in-One Special

I actually think it's great. I think it's great putting it out there and everyone can see it. I think the process of us sharing exactly what we would like to do on the development side compared to actually what gets achieved is one of those things. But I kind of like the fact that people see that, because what's happening is basically what happens in every company, just behind closed doors. And so you set up a very aggressive schedule. You basically work very hard to hit it. Things come along that change stuff in the way and process, you evaluate, you change stuff around because basically you want to go a different direction. And then that, of course, reassesses the roadmap. So in terms of that kind of stuff, the roadmap's changed because you might say, well, actually, we want to go do this. We're going to make this feature. And then, as we did at the beginning of last year, we looked at this and we sort of said, okay, actually we want to do these features, but I actually want to put focus back in on making the game a bit more fun now, because we're trying to get through a bunch of features to deliver to the community, but we knew we needed to, obviously, improve the frame rate. We knew we needed to go and make features we created, and maybe go back and spend some more time on them to make them enjoyable and fun, to get the better user experience. And so that's some of the stuff we then changed around, and we made a change to do that, which meant that we pushed out some feature work to basically make the experience better. And I actually do feel it was completely the right decision, because if you look at the play experience now compared to a year ago, it's fundamentally different. And because of that, that's absolutely the trajectory that we're continuing on: we are still focusing on improving the frame rate, on improving and focusing on the gameplay of the features we put in when we didn't finish, stability, all that kind of stuff, to really make sure what we have and what's working now, and there's so much stuff you can do already, that that is a great experience, while at the same time plugging in the features as they come along to basically fit within that.

We do plan very aggressively, and a lot of times some features... The biggest part of that is it comes down to: when we make a plan at the beginning of the year, we also include when we believe we're going to get new headcount on and when we can build teams to make that plan work. And so we basically create this roadmap and say, okay, well, right now we have these resources. And then, of course, you have to take into account... you think, well, I think we can manage this. But then, of course, we're trying to deliver, and then it takes some people off to fix bugs and so forth, and so you don't actually get some work. But on top of that, if we don't hire the people we need to create the features we thought we could later on, then obviously that feature's not going to be worked on. And so that's when I say aggressive: yes, we try and be sensible about, okay, how long will this feature take, and does it feel like there's some period of time. But if resources get reassigned because of something that becomes more important, or we just don't hire the resources we thought we were going to, then those features will get pushed back or drop out. And then sometimes, as I said, we'll just look at where we are. And I think that's one thing I'm actually really proud of in Cloud Imperium: we actually don't just march relentlessly in one direction. We go back, we look at the feedback we get from the community. We look at what's fun, what's working. The whole team really spends a lot of time checking out all the cool videos, looking at what people are really enjoying doing. And then we reassess, and we sit down, and we like to be really agile about this and say, okay, no, actually we're going to change direction here, because doing this and this and this is going to get us to a situation where people are really enjoying the game a lot quicker than if we just carried on. What you would sometimes do in a traditional thing is you try and get a bunch of features in and then you try and pull it all together. Then you'd really spend some time trying to polish it and just fix stuff and so forth.

I think that ability to reevaluate our progress every quarter, every half year, every year is one of the hallmarks of Star Citizen's development. Famously, when the PU development first started, we were pursuing the Terra system, for instance. And then we realized that the Stanton system would actually give us the vertical slice for everything we need in Star Citizen. So when we had that realization, a lot of people might have been too timid to switch gears at that point, but not us. We switched gears, and the results have yielded themselves.

We make the right decisions for this kind of stuff. Is it painful sometimes? Because no one likes letting people down. But then I do feel like, because of what we're doing, we actually are going to get to where everybody wants to be much faster, because we're at our end goal of having this incredible experience in this huge persistent universe, as well as actually really helping Squadron really become an amazing game.

So as I mentioned on the resource side, the one thing we're, as a company, really focusing on is making sure we push Squadron and get Squadron out as soon as possible. You see the roadmap, working very hard towards that. It does mean, however, that resources that we would have used on the PU now plug areas in Squadron where either there's a shortage of resources, or let's say one or two people leave; then basically we use resources from the PU on Squadron to make sure that we are going full speed ahead with that. In terms of what it means to Star Citizen, one thing we wanted to do is, we obviously have this focus on making it fun and we want to keep on doing that, so we're keeping up the polish on the user experience and that kind of stuff. But it means that a few of the features that we may have planned to do on the PU get pushed back slightly, some slightly, some a little bit more, while we then focus our PU resources on making sure that it's a fun experience, it's fast, and so forth. And then we look at what Squadron's working on, and as the features come online with Squadron, we then take those features and move them into the PU. So then we sort of get led slightly by cool features in Squadron. They come on, we use them in the PU where we can. And then the other side of it is, we do have a lot of people still working on the PU, but a lot of those people are working on stuff like making sure persistence is really getting there, because that's the big thing: we want to get to the stage where people load into the game and they start and then that's it. And then they're playing their characters and there's no resetting. So persistence, getting the economy working properly, really getting this proper economic system working there, so when you go to places, it's on supply and demand. That's work that's going on right now. And also, with that, the side of the degradation, all that kind of stuff that goes with it, as well as obviously the big one for us, which is when I feel the game's going to be ready for prime time, which is when we get the server meshing in, when we can put a bunch of people in one system.

It's one of those things, I think, that gets lost sometimes. Even with 500-plus employees spread around five studios around the world, and you mentioned hiring and still upscaling those teams, there's still a finite amount of resources. You can only work on so many things at any given time. And there's this constant juggle between priorities, working on this, and this thing is a prerequisite for this thing, all these dependencies. It's quite a juggling act.

It's huge. And also, the quality level that we require to work on this game, and that we expect: we won't hire people unless that level is very high. And so finding those special people around the world to come and work at a studio takes a lot of time to bring them in, get them in, and then get them used to the engine and then also get them working productively as well. So sometimes you set, like, oh, I think we can find a couple of these people a month and so forth. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes a busload comes through in one load. Not very often, unfortunately. But the point is, this sort of happens. And so in terms of what we're doing, we've got lots of work to do. We've got a large amount of open headcount to try and fill to get this stuff. And so every day we're making decisions, calling priorities and how we're going to use that.

I answer this question a lot. Basically, the scale of what we were trying to do at the beginning, what Chris was trying to do, is very different. And the main driver of that was actually the amount of backing support we got from the community, and the amount of people who really wanted to have not only the Squadron single-player experience they had with Wing Commander, but also the big universe they could live in. As it became very evident quickly that there was a massive amount of support in that, and also a huge amount of money came in to support that, it just became very obvious that we weren't going to be building the game that I think Chris thought of originally, where he was going to do something which would be much more like the old-school stuff. Obviously nice story and so forth, but not the full first-person dynamic universe. We didn't even talk about the planets and the procedural techniques, all that kind of stuff. Now it's in the game and people are loving it. And it's a matter of trust. Because we believe that every single penny that comes in is going to be spent on development, and that's what we want to do. We'll build this incredible experience. And it just became obvious that we need to build something to support something that's going to be groundbreaking and change games in a way, not only how we funded it, but how we built it and everything like that. So it just came to a realization that we had to basically go and make something better. What comes with that is you can't just suddenly go, oh, okay, well, we'll build a few more ships, we'll do this over here. You actually structurally have to change the way that all the tools and tech work. And that was what happened very early on: we said, right, well, if we're going to support doing this, we're going to make this incredible first-person universe in which you can do all these different things, you need to then go in and really spend a bunch of time doing all the work, which the community sat through with us. People know we went through and changed the physics system. We got the local physics grids working, which is a big, huge deal. We changed to 64-bit. You probably forget, but there's been so many huge things. And then, of course, the object container streaming came in last year as well. And you've got all this work that goes on behind the scenes that you need to do, because you can't just do something and say, okay, it's kind of ready. And then when you want to get more dynamic and make it better, it just won't work. It won't scale. The only way you can make it scale is by having the underlying technology and the tools to support that. And so we basically said, all right, screw it. We're going to go and invest in the tools, in the tech. We're going to do this work. And the beautiful thing for me now: it's paying off. And as you said, it's been a few years; people have stuck with us. But the beautiful thing is, because of all that work, now we actually move pretty quickly, and I think people can see it now with the quarterly releases: we're getting more content out, we're going to get the feature stuff, and you can see how the game moves along. And it's not just a normal experience. It isn't like a cool old-school space combat simulator. It's something which is completely immersive. It's a huge world. You can see how it's all going to come together.

I think it was very easy to see somewhere around mid-2016, quarter three 2016, we definitely hit content phase. We weren't done building tools by any means. We're still building tools to help us make the game. But we got to a point where we could really start cranking out an actual tangible game that people play, and the experience that you see on YouTube, on Twitch, at Mixer, is vastly different today than you saw.

Yeah, and it goes for Squadron as well. It's the same thing. When you make those choices, the same technologies are in Squadron as in the Persistent Universe, and so I'm sure there's the same discussions about, well, Squadron has been delayed as well. It's the same deal: you've got to get the technology, you've got to get the tools and stuff to make that work. So even though early on we actually had a bunch of the missions working, once we went and changed up a lot of the tools and tech, we actually went and revisited those things and remade them.

No, it's going really well. We've got their roadmap. We're focusing the resources on it. There's always going to be the odd issue and stuff we go through. But basically, as a group, we meet two times a week. We look at the progress. And then it's just about really working through all the issues: obviously there's artwork coming in, and getting that artwork through, working through the AI issues we have and so forth to make it look better. And the great thing is, like we talked about before, as we're following what Squadron does, as the AI gets better with Squadron, people then start seeing that in the PU as well, in different missions and so forth, because that's one of the main features we take across. I'm not trying to change the subject here, but in the PU, when we have green zones, I want it to be a green zone because there's a bunch of security there who'll shoot you if you do wrong things, not just that you can't use your weapon and so forth. And that's the sort of thing that'll start coming in over the next few quarters.

Those diegetic solutions, not a fancy zone that you can't play in.

Exactly, not just that you can't have your gun and so forth. It's got to be: if you do a criminal act, okay, these guys will come after you. And that's part of the law system that's going to start coming in as well over the next few quarters.

We went back in and redesigned them, simply. We had better tech. We had other things we wanted to do. The procedural planet system came online. There's so many different things and so forth. And we didn't feel like the levels were where we wanted them to be. And so we went back through so much of the stuff. Some of them were changed, some of them were moved around and so forth. But it was basically just a decision, because Squadron is not coming out until it's literally the perfect game. This for me is... I'm getting long in the tooth here, and this is probably the last thing I will work on. And I know people like Chris and other people feel the same: when we do this, it's going to be absolutely amazing. And so if it's not right, then we're going to make sure it's right.

One of the things that I really enjoy in educating our backer community is that game development is not a linear line. It's not A to B to C to D to E all the way to Z and you're done. There are review gates. There are points where you go back. Most famously, I think one of the Metroid games just recently announced that they're going all the way back to the beginning, starting over. We're not doing that by any means, but it's a good analogy to the type of review and step back and reevaluation that happens in all game development. And so when Squadron was in greybox in 2015, that was the expectation.

It was a different game. That's what I'm saying. We went back. We looked at tech with the support we had and so forth. And we knew we were pushing it. And so we really looked at what we wanted to do. We changed up a lot in terms of just the tools and the shaders and stuff, the way we do the art. There's a lot of different things we could do, so we wanted to change that up in terms of the characters, the way we do them, the way they live and all that kind of stuff. How we want to make certain events play out. All those things have a big effect on stuff. We're not here to make something average. If it's not amazing, then it's not coming out of the studio.

Well, obviously we're going to have new locations coming through. We have some this quarter. I think also we're going to spend a lot of time on creating more detail on the planets we already have. We have cool stuff like tunnel systems coming along. We're going to have more locations in space, places to visit, sort of way stations and so forth. And also in terms of the gameplay side and feature side, we've obviously got a new flight model coming very soon, which is really exciting. It's going to be really cool. It's not only cool because it's just better in terms of flight in the atmosphere and flight in space and so forth, but another cool thing is it's a lot faster. It's very quick, which means that actually it's a big performance win as well. So people should see that when they start looking at stuff, because when you've got a bunch of ships and they're all using a system and that system's expensive, it all multiplies up. And this system's a much quicker and much simpler system. And the great thing about it is it's simpler to use for design as well, to get the work and the changes they want to do out of it. We have the female characters coming. We have the ability for characters to actually create their look in the game. And then once again, we'll be taking a bunch of features through from Squadron, so the improved AI will be coming through. There's a lot. With this release of the roadmap, I have very much made sure and asked the team that what we put in there is what we can achieve with what we have right now, specifically also with the fact that people may be pulled onto Squadron, and we know that there's basically this work. So although there's a really good set of stuff in there, my hope is we'll be able to add some stuff to the roadmap. But what I've done this time, rather than last time: last time we said we think we can do this, and we had it in the roadmap. This time we put in what we are pretty damn sure we can do. Okay, so now I'm signing up for this. And then, hopefully, if we do build a team and get more people, then we'll actually be able to add stuff to the roadmap. So with a bit of luck, towards the end of the year we'll be able to actually start adding stuff to the roadmap rather than taking it out.

We try and learn, believe it or not. We got aggressive, we did the stuff, and we said, well, this time, let's just put in the roadmap what people feel is completely doable with what we have right now, rather than sort of saying, okay, yeah, but we should have another team built by this time, so we'll be able to get this in. And so my hope is we will get some of the teams going, and that will actually mean that we can push some of the stuff in.

So when the roadmap is updated for quarter three and quarter four of 2019, it may seem less aggressive than it has in the past.

Yes, but I think there's loads in there. I'm not worried in terms of lots of cool stuff for people to do, but my feeling is this is something that people should be able to get. Unless we get to the end of Q2 and we take a look at it and go, you know what, actually we need to change direction, do this or change stuff around. I feel very comfortable with that roadmap because I explicitly wanted to say, let's just get it there. And then, like I said, I'd rather surprise people with some new stuff than disappoint them by taking stuff out.

Yes. There is some stuff we keep off on purpose because we want to surprise people. We like to have one or two little things that go in there. There is a lot of work that's going on behind the scenes, exactly as you said. Like right now, server meshing: a lot of the prelim work is starting and we'll be working on it through the rest of this year, although it's not showing on the schedule right now. It doesn't mean work isn't going on, and it doesn't mean that there might not be some early versions we may be able to get out. There's a lot of longer-term features that we're working on. In terms of optimizations as well, that kind of stuff is going on all the time, which may not show there. And then once we get comfortable that they're coming to fruition, at that point we will plug them into the roadmap.

We did this roadmap two years ago and we've evolved it and iterated on it the last few years. And now we've seen many game projects out there doing similar things. If I can have an opinion, I think it's a great idea. But it's very easy to look at it and think that that's all that you're working on. And that's absolutely not the case. There's so much more.

It's just that's what we think is going to release. Typically, it's the more rounded features that we feel people understand. Like, oh, this is a feature release here, this is a piece of content here and so forth. But there's a huge amount of other work that's going on behind the scenes also, which sometimes we don't put on because we're not sure it's going to make it, and then we'll make the decision to put it on later. And like I said, some of it we're just going to keep because we'd like to keep it as a surprise. So yes, it's really important that people understand there is a huge amount of other work going on there.

The main reason is the difference between single player and multiplayer. Having a system which works for Squadron, which is a single-player game (and we'll have a multiplayer element of it that people will be able to play, but basically it's one big story, which is single player), getting that working is usually much faster. And also the specific needs that Squadron has: it's a military game, so it may be a piece of technology which is military technology that we may not make available in the PU straight away, and so forth. So that's the main one. Stuff like AI: when AI works for Squadron, then you can get it into the PU, but you need to make sure that all the network calls are in there and so forth. And so that's the kind of stuff where you have to make sure the proper stuff's going on. Basically, in single player, you know the AI's standing over there because it's on your client. If I'm playing multiplayer, do me and you see the same AI? If the callbacks aren't going to the server and back to us and so forth, then you don't know. So that's the main reason.

Well, to be honest, it's a blessing, because we have actually quite a large internal test department, but not as big as some, and they cannot manage the amount of tests we need to do. And not just the Evocati are fantastic, but also when everybody joins the PTU and we get that massive surge on the servers. And I tell you, sometimes we think the game's stable and we've gone through Evocati, it feels pretty good, and then we just go to a big open PTU and everything just falls flat. And I know some of the guys have seen that. Having that is an amazing resource to work with. So having people there who are willing to come in and help us do that is brilliant. And Evocati especially. What's really great on the Evocati side is that they're actually willing to get in when the game's, let's say, slightly more broken than usual, or test some feature stuff. Which, interestingly, is one of the things we're actually going to do this time around as well: with the flight model, we're going to basically open up to Evocati probably a number of weeks before we even go into proper testing, just so they can go and fly and give us feedback on that. Because the new flight model is going in, we want more time on it and we want more feedback. If we put it in for the last four weeks and stuff like that... we want to make sure it's balanced well, because it's a big new thing. So that'd be kind of cool. And that's the great thing that Evocati does as well. They're going to go in there. We're going to give them a drop with a bunch of the flight stuff. They're going to go fly, and we can get their feedback, and we'll be able to tweak on that. So by the time it gets to the mass of people in the PTU, it should have had a good number of changes with suggestions from Evocati. But without that group, it would make our jobs very, very difficult. Close to impossible, because you don't release a game this size, with this many people, with about 60 internal QA guys spread over these regions and so forth. And so, no, we're just incredibly lucky to have the support we have.

And I'm going to add, for those who may be hearing the term Evocati for the first time and wondering how you can join it: it's through use of our Issue Council, which is our big QA platform where our backers can find bugs, submit bugs, verify the bugs submitted by other backers, and help us narrow down the sources of bugs that crop up during the course of development.

Basically, in a nutshell, server meshing is going to give us the ability to put everybody in one instance. Right now we have a server which basically controls... we have about 50 people in one area. And that's about as high as we can go. We'll be able to get a bit higher once we do some optimizations, but otherwise you get into problems with, not so much latency, but the servers get so slow that it causes problems to get everything out. So the server meshing means that we will be able to dynamically have servers control anything from a room to a system, depending on how many people are in there. So you can imagine, once we optimize it and a server can actually control a few hundred people, and we know that a few hundred people have all decided to go to a bar, then we can have one server where all it cares about is the few hundred people in the bar. That's it. And that means that you suddenly get this big feeling of, oh, we're all pushed in here, but the server's controlling that. As soon as you walk out of the bar, it transfers to another server, which is controlling the alleyway outside or whatever. And that's the way we basically get everybody in one place. And then they talk up to a system server, which then talks up to a big old database server and so forth, which then scales back. And so they go, oh, there's 200 people over here, let's put like five servers on that. Oh, there's only one person out here, just one server for the whole system. And then it dynamically just scales how many servers control things depending on how many people are in there, and they basically use the power jointly to try and get people in there. So that's kind of how the server meshing stuff works. And obviously there's levels of this. So that's where you want to go to. It's this beautiful dynamic system. It basically brings servers on and offline depending on how many people there are. It's very neat. It's very efficient. But at first, the first iteration will be... at the moment we're in the planning phase right now, and the work will start soon afterwards, and we'll be working on it this year. And obviously, like I said before, this is one of the things that we're not going to talk about a date for until we're closer. But the idea would be that once we have the first iteration, we now have the servers talking to each other. They're not dynamic, but we have, oh, a server is going to manage this area of space, a server will manage this area of space, a server will do this planet, a server will do this location. And then all of a sudden, when you've done that, you can get a bunch more people in. And so the first test for me, and we'll be involving a lot of people, Evocati and PTU, is you start with that stuff. So the first one is more rigid. It's servers passing people to each other when they go through zones. That way we get loads more into an instance. That will be the first one we play. And at that point, I think people start having a pretty damn good experience, because we're not talking 50 people, you're going to be talking hundreds of people playing together in areas, or in one instance, and systems passing back and forth. And then the dynamic side will be built on top of that as well.

All the work that people talk about has all been done to make sure this works. Without this, it doesn't work. So if you want to say when server meshing work started, it started three years ago. This has been planned for a long time. And so you have to do all these optimizations and make all these changes to code. And then, as you said, object container streaming is a big one, because the server has to tie in with that, because we have to know what's been loaded and when, depending on where you are, and all that kind of stuff as well. So all that works up. And what's happening now is we're at that stage where finally we're doing the last assessment so we can actually start the implementation of the servers talking together for all this stuff. And that is the process which is going to start very soon, and which we'll be working on this year.

Are you sure I can't convince you to give me a date?

Unfortunately, no dates. Obviously, we'll push on it, but on that one, once again, it'll be nice to have a surprise.

Historically, we have the Oretani jump point collapse, which is technically kind of a natural event, a disaster too, because there are trapped people back there. I have to double-check the history. I think we had talked about, in the early days before we terraformed Mars, that there were a couple of natural disasters that happened on Earth during the overpopulation era, where it was really starting to get dangerous.

Yeah, we've had massive clay dust storms affecting whole planets. Insects, like the cicada-like ones, which I'm forgetting the specifics of.

It's on Oberon. They were brought there because a lot of the residents of Oberon lived in the passages underneath, and it was brought there as a food source, but it ended up turning into an invasive species that has kind of wrecked that planet.

Tale as old as time. And we do want certain planets to be riskier to travel on, and these kinds of natural phenomena would be a big part of that.

Disease too: we actually called out a couple of diseases, I think, in the sort of threats of pandemic in some of the news updates. I think it was like Lynch fever or something like that.

Yeah, we were talking to the character team. This isn't to say this is in the works right now, but about the potential, down the road in the future, of doing shaders for when people have the space measles or whatever it is that we want to push forward, being able to turn that on your character so you can get sick that way, which is a fun potential for way down the road. And then we had the dust storms on Leir III, the sandworm demo. So that was our first kind of blush at playing around with that as something that we want to include and have as gameplay.

I think it's very easy to say that we would like to have dynamic events like these. Everybody remembers the plague that swept through World of Warcraft back when. We'd love to have those dynamic events. It may be too early in our development still to commit to them.

And there's always that thing too, where we have that distinction between what's happened historically, which doesn't affect the game, to set up the background of the universe in which a lot of things can happen. But we always run that weird gambit of not wanting to imply that some of the historical stuff could be in-game, so we have to kind of ride that line.

Yeah, because we have a couple of worlds that have had bad terraforming, where the terraforming hasn't quite stuck all the way and they're having problems, so it would be kind of cool to figure out how we can show that ongoing, rather than just having the planet itself looking kind of messed up. microTech had some terraforming issues. That's why it ended up so cold.

Yeah, and there's other ways too. There are certain planets also that may have suffered from drought, or just not have an abundance of water, which may be reflected in not seeing massive lakes or oceans on the planet, but also in being able to haul stuff in. So it might affect the economy in that way, where this planet just doesn't naturally have a lot of water, so you won't necessarily see it directly in game, but it'll affect gameplay, or how you maybe want to run your routes, or certain things like that.

Yeah, doing those kinds of relief missions and stuff like that would be really cool.

The biggest threat right now is me trying to land a plane.

It's a very dangerous concept. It feeds right into humans being a huge threat in the game, because everyone's flying around with massive weapons on their ship, willing to mess people up.

When we showcased the vertical slice for Squadron 42, I think one of the most surprising aspects of that was that there wasn't a Vanduul in sight. The antagonists of that level, at least, were other humans. People, the danger of people.

We're definitely focused a lot, when we're talking about what you're going to come up against, on this idea of factions, a much smaller kind of plane. We have the Vanduul as this big imperial-level threat, and there aren't many things that come at that blanket level of scale. But there are the much smaller, more faction threats that you're going to encounter system to system and stuff like that. On the micro level, you have the Nine Tails operating out of GrimHEX, and they're a major threat when you're in that area. And we're working on developing them more, and how it's going to go and how you interact with the other gangs that you might run into while flying around Stanton. So as far as the introduction of another big group that's just going to swarm and cover everything, we're not necessarily gearing up for that per se on a day-to-day mission scale. It's going to be more about getting your reputation and how you interact with these local factions. I think it's going to be a big thing.

Are you building connective tissue between the two?

Well, the Coil is a thing that exists in the Odin system, so it's a locale, it's an environment, if you will.

So when you go to the Odin system in the PU, the Coil should be there?

Yeah. As we kind of did at CitizenCon a few years ago, there's the attack on Vega II. There will probably be remnants of that attack reflected: rebuilding, memorials, that type of thing.

It definitely is going to have an impact on the PU, and we have some fun ways, on a smaller personal level, of how that's going to be reflected in your travels in the PU if you finish Squadron 42 and go through the campaign, how that will change you, as well as more of these universe, empire-wide scale things: are the people in the game changed by the story in Squadron 42?

Yeah, like REC. We've had that conversation before. The tricky thing is, right now we're trying to build the economy for the human economy first. And then you're talking about a completely separate economy on top of that. So we've talked about it. Obviously, it seems like it would make the most sense, but it's just a question of...

Lore-wise, the Xi'an have their own currency they use. They don't use UEC outside of UEE space, but it's more of a further design discussion, because it impacts things greatly whether you as a player are going to be able to operate using the Xi'an currency. And the same thing with the Banu: the Banu have their own currency. And who knows what the Vanduul do.

It's a good distinction between lore and game design. I'm sure if it were up to storytellers, realistically speaking, there'd be a hundred different currencies out there in the galaxy. But from the perspective of making a game and game design, that would be something for our economy team.

The Banu are a trading species, so of course they have to have some kind of... unless it's purely barter, they have to have some kind of currency.

Yeah, lore-wise we've talked a bit too about how the Banu currency might be preferred on the fringes, as being a little more flexible and having a little more options to it, versus the UEC, which is tightly controlled and regulated, with every transaction traced.

Yes. Well, there have been certain pieces appearing in Jump Point, so there are little deep dives.

Yeah, it was a new feature that we introduced last year when we started doing it. It was a 2018 new addition. We started switching between Galactapedia entries and Whitley's Guide entries. So those have been really fun, and hats off to Cherie for her work on those, as well as Ben, who's running all of the...

But yeah, we've been working on building up our entries and trying to figure out how we want to tackle it. Again, it's one of those things that involves decisions outside of our department. So we're trying to get our ducks in a row and get people and resources allocated for it. So it's just a question of...

Yeah, we meet up with Turbulent a bunch on it, but they keep having bigger, higher-priority projects, and it's all about balancing that backlog of tasks. So it's still ticking away in the background.

Yeah, and it's something we can slowly chip away at and just start working on, and when it's ready...

Yeah, we're building it. We're actively building it on the back side; when it's going to be accessible is the bigger question mark at this moment.

Lore Builders was another feature we did, where we were more sourcing stuff with the community. SataBall was a big thing that came out of that.

The Writer's Guide, we have to do a pass, and it's been one of those tasks that I've been shuffling around for a year now, of having to just sit down and finally go through and bring it up to speed.

It's mostly still there. The flavor of it has really still been the core guiding principle. I still refer back to the Writer's Guide in my weekly writing, and it's really impressive how well it's maintained, but there's a couple more detailed little facts that...

It hits the broad strokes. So if you're looking for a resource, it's probably a good place to go. The Banu stuff, the alien culture stuff, we've dove a lot deeper into, but the broad-stroke things, and even how to approach them, writing them as characters, still kind of hold true.

If someone wants to be nice and include a link to the Writer's Guide in the chat, go for it. Or we could throw it in the description.

Yeah, they're fast builders. Aggressive development. What can you say?

I'm trying to think of when. Actually, we got into the nitty-gritty of when the system was discovered. Yeah, it's definitely a weirdness factor, how quickly they've done it. The one thing we've kind of been saying, justifying it, at least to myself as I cry myself to sleep at night, is that a lot of it's factory and production facilities, so it can be very expansive but not require a lot of people. Presumably at this point, because we're settling a lot of worlds, hopefully they've upped their game as far as building, dropping outposts down and dropping factories down. Yeah, the timeline's a little funky, but...

Yeah, the expansion of it was a very hard, aggressive push by ArcCorp to cover it, to build out and build these things. We've talked with Art about the development of this world and how we're going to see it. And as you've seen with the other moons, it's really awesome how much things keep improving and changing. So I'm looking forward to the release of the rest of the system and to seeing how it grows.

And also, to be fair, Hurston hasn't completely destroyed their environment; they've really screwed it up.

And another point to add is that these planets are owned by the corporations themselves, not technically the UEE, so there are no environmental regulations where you need to make sure there's planning and you have a few years; you can just go and do whatever you want, because that's their property. If you want to lean into that, we can lean into that.

It kind of fits with ArcCorp's personality that they're super aggressive about getting people to move in there and set up their production facilities and their corporate headquarters and all this stuff. So they're really actively going out to try and get more people so they can make more money.

Oh, it's fun. I love it. I tried to find it. I think last week I crashed into a mountain. I was super close and then I crashed. But no, I think it's awesome. It's one of the most exciting things, to see people using the systems to build their stories.

Yeah, because part of it is we're providing this narrative backdrop for this stuff to happen on top of. So it's really cool to see the interplay between what we do and what the players do, and how that all comes together to create this awesome drug war.

Yeah, and it adds that little bit of extra resonance too. Everyone's going there for the WiDoW. So it deepens the connection to WiDoW as a part of the game, versus just being some random supply or commodity. It's nice to see that be able to tie back through, and to have people ganging up on both sides to make it happen.

I saw somebody selling escort services to get there: I'll be your personal bodyguard to get there. It's really fun stuff.