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What can you tell us about the Drake Dragonfly? What's it like working on that? What did you think when you first heard, "We're going to make a space motorcycle"?

TL;DRPaul Jones first thought a space motorcycle was crazy; an early mistake of using ship components made it too large, so they switched to vehicle components and made it more Drake-like.

Paul JonesSquadron 42 Art Director

To be honest, I thought they were crazy. A lot of us were just like, what? But then we started getting the design brief. And it was quite interesting, actually, because we were working with this initially with, I guess, we kind of made a mistake right at the start. We were working with the smallest ship components because that was the brief we were working with, and I was working with Gary and we were putting this ship together and it was just getting larger and larger as we put all the components in that needed to be there, or ship items. And so we showed Chris and we were like, yeah, look at this, this is amazing, right? And Gary had done a good job on the initial sketch. And then Chris was like, well, it's too big. It's too big. What are you doing? And we're just like, well, these are the requirements we're working to. So it was like, well, just make a... what did we change it to? So we went from small ship to vehicle components, basically. And then basically the whole thing scaled down. Sounds super obvious, but it was just a simple mistake right at the start.

Jared HuckabyHost, Community Manager

You're going from the components that you would build a ship out of to the components you would build something like the Ursa out of.

Paul JonesSquadron 42 Art Director

Yeah. We were just so in the mindset of ship, ship, ship, ship, ship.

Jared HuckabyHost, Community Manager

And that kind of thing happens because, I mean, yes, it's a virtual world, of course, but they are functional within that virtual world. So you have to have all the components where they're supposed to be, how they can interact with each other, because folks will be able to damage those components, have to repair those components, stuff like that. So it's very important that all those things have a very real and very physical place.

Paul JonesSquadron 42 Art Director

Oh, yeah, totally. And it's always a challenge for the concept guys because they've got this big laundry list of things that need to go in it. So they have this idea in their head and then they have to massage it to basically fit all these pieces in. But one of the things I like about working with Gary is that he always gives... I don't think it's a problem. That would be a negative thing to say. He just gives me tons of options. You can tell the speed his head's going at and he just gives me like 50 options and I'm just like, I'll have a bit of this one, I'll have a bit of that and a bit of that and a bit of that. Change this, move these lines a little bit, make it a little more Drake.

Jared HuckabyHost, Community Manager

It's a good problem to have though.

Paul JonesSquadron 42 Art Director

Yeah, it is. And we initially started off too sleek. It wasn't within the Drake manufacturer line. So I was having to bring him back, dare I say, make it a little more agricultural, a little heavier in places, a little more exposed tech, less expensive types of manufacturing, basically. Eventually, we got it into the right place and yeah, there you go.

Reverse the Verse›2.5 - UK·
Published on this date.2 Sep 2016