Edward Fuller · Senior Principal Systems Designer, Mission Feature Team

Well, for me, I think principals are people who specialize in the subject matters that they focus on. And they really know that; they're also very dependable. Hear that, Luke? No, but they can also see complex features through and also guide more junior designers and even senior designers, and show the juniors the ropes and show them the systems and talk them through the whole process of developing Star Citizen and stuff like that. Maybe Elliot has something he'd like to add.

Elliot Maltby · Principal Designer, Mission Feature Team

Yeah, we're kind of like an information well. We need to know a lot about all of the systems we own in case anyone needs to know something about, say, "Oh, how do I set up jurisdictions?" And then they know to come to MFT and they can talk to the principals, even though we might not work every day with them. We're like a sponge. We have to remember that information and not let any of it go, so we can go, "Oh, right, okay, this is how that worked." But for a lot of the time, we've been writing a lot of documentation, so we don't have to answer.

Edward Fuller · Senior Principal Systems Designer, Mission Feature Team

Documentation, it's like you have so many designers and they come to you asking questions, and at some point it's like, I can't answer the same question 20 times. I need to start writing this down. And then a lot of it's just pouring all of that information onto pages so that more and more people can just digest it in their own time.

Elliot Maltby · Principal Designer, Mission Feature Team

But the worst thing that comes from that is that obviously we're still building the game. It takes you a full day to write this huge system up and you're like, "I've done it." And then the next day, one of the engineers will go, "I changed how this works." And you're like, "Oh."

Edward Fuller · Senior Principal Systems Designer, Mission Feature Team

About three years ago, I remember trying to write a document about how to put multiplayer logic into missions. And I started writing it, and then I was like, this is going to take ages. And I just knew on the horizon it was all going to change. So I just went, "Luke, I'm not going to write that now. I'm just not going to bother. It'll be out of date by next week." But we've written them now, because things have solidified a lot more, but at the time they were not super solidified.

James Tyler · Systems Designer, Mission Feature Team

I've seen both sides of the coin as well. When I first joined, I found a couple of little systems where I'd go to Elliot and be like, "Please help me with this, I don't understand it," and then he'd be like, "Yeah, that part is tribal knowledge, and we're going to do better and we're going to write that documentation down." And then Ed and Elliot have gone away and spent, like Elliot said, a day writing this. And it saved us so much time further down the line when me and Lars or whoever's coming back to these things, we can just read it. There's GIFs, there's all sorts to help us out.