How are you writers approach a new detail for yourself. Is it more like BAM something comes into your mind and the creativity starts or do you guys have epic discussions with good ol scotch and a massive Churchill cigar involved? Also I would like to see more stories about relations between the races. When will be your next stories? Or do you guys getting other authors to write about in game stories?asked by Perry_Hope

So to start off, I think the inspiration comes from a lot of places. A lot of times you'll just be driving home and an idea will pop in your head and you'll come in really jazzed and it will really flow from you. But a lot of times having a creative job, it's the job portion of it where you have to have the discipline to come in and write and generate ideas on demand, and that's the difficult part.We all have an office together and it's really helpful to be able to turn around and toss out ideas. So sometimes we'll sit around and do brain storm sessions where we use shared documents to share ideas with each other and that's a life saver! I don't know how it is as an artist having that forced creativity come about.

Yeah, it's pretty similar but the difference would be the writers would come up with a backbone for the visuals, for the concepts. But we have to flesh those concepts out and sometimes the definitions of a character or an idea are very broad so we'd have to fill those in and that's where the creativity comes in. Which is very close too, since we work with other artists, we bounce back ideas. Sometimes, like for the John Rhys-Davies character, you and I, we chatted quite a lot actually just regarding the outfit.

Yeah, it was pretty fun coming at it from his background and how that translated into the materials or the designs.

Right, right. So art is pretty much similar. I mean sometimes we do have "artist's block" and we're like "oh no what do we do, it's due in two hours but we don't know ... !"

So how do you get past your "artist's block"?

For me it's research.

Okay.

There's a plethora of information out there and so, if I'm designing a leather jacket, I don't just type in "leather jacket" on Google. I might ...

You should! That would probably be a good place to start! [laughs]

Yeah that would be. But if I want something original I'd search for things that might be related, so I might do like "motorcycle outfit" or like, I don't know, "World War II" and maybe if I see some cool shapes I might implement it into a leather jacket or something. So that's my way of getting round the "artist's block".

Yeah, research can be very helpful to take a break and do it online. I find myself getting caught in "research loops" though because I love learning.

Yes!

So I'll start looking up stuff and ten minutes later you are somewhere completely different on Wikipedia and you're like "okay, I got to actually go back". And then, probably the biggest thing I would say, that took me a while to learn, is even when you don't feel inspired or you feel like you don't have a good idea is just to put out whatever you do have in your head and oftentimes just dumping out that first pass will let you be like "well that's stupid but this would be cool" and then you can revise from that. But staring at blank sheet, or blank canvas, is the really daunting part.

Oh, gosh yeah!

So if you can just start filling that in with whatever then that a huge grab.[referring back to the question] And so stories about the relationship between the races? Yeah, hopefully. We have a lot of discussions going on behind the scenes about the races and how the different alien species are going to interact with each other. And so we're planning on how we are going to roll out that content. And we are still working with various different authors to generate material for the Jump Points mainly right now. So that's been a lot of fun working with those outside authors and getting their takes on things.