What is your favorite prop that you've worked on in the game so far?

There's a lot I really like. Recently we got the Artex GSS locker downstairs, which is pretty awesome, and that was quite a fun asset to make itself. It was probably one of the first assets I did that required animation, and it really got me into the animation system a bit, setting it up, and I had quite a lot of fun making that.

So you actually made the GSS Artex?

Yeah, I made the model for it. It was concepted by York. He's no longer with us. I mean, he's no longer at the company. He's still somewhere. But he concepted it, I did the model for it. And I saw it on Reddit, the physical version that was made by John, and I was like, oh, holy, wow, that's really cool. So that was pretty awesome. I guess artistically, my favorite is probably one of the shield generators. It's not the Godi one. It's the other one with all the cool shapes. I'm trying to remember now. It's been a while since I worked on it. Also, slightly morbid, the body bags were really fun to make.

In Star Marine? That was in 2.6.1 when they were added?

Yeah, 2.6.1.

Yeah, I remember going past Cory's desk and being like, let's see what you're up to. And he's like, yeah, I've been asked to do different effects as to whether or not you shoot the body or the bag. If you shoot it here, the blood comes out. If you shoot it here, it's just the normal hit thing. That's cool. That's fine. We can do that.

We use a tool called Marvelous Designer, which is basically a cloth simulation program used in the garment and textiles industry to prototype clothes. The character team use it, I believe, quite extensively. I've used it for things like bedding before. It's been quite fun having my little dude in the bed asleep, and I get the simulated cloth and I tuck him in, and then we use that in game. It's quite funny.

I don't get to really see stuff from start to finish very much. It's quite rare that I really get hands-on in that side of things, but my favourite time is normally release times. I think that's the time that you see everything come together and all the teams really pushing to dress the scenes. I think some of the Star Marine stuff, I think we really nailed it for that. Visually it was good fun being able to get in there and do a really good storytelling pass on it and work with the writers. Getting information on the lore and the backstory and all that sort of stuff is really, really helpful for us, because it really leads to how we build the assets. Because there's probably something else I should clarify, because it comes up quite a lot, is that as a prop team, we make the assets, we don't necessarily dress the scenes. So it means that we work closely with the environment team and with the design team, and there's a lot of 'it's really cool if we had this,' 'that's a great idea, let's bash one of them out and get that done.' I think for me, it's more the work atmosphere and the coming together with all the different departments that I really enjoy.