How has your writing focus for Star Citizen changed from the start of the project until now, and how do you see it changing in the future? When it comes to making missions or things to do in the PU, do you create the stories for them first or do they get built based on gameplay requirements?asked by BombSquad

Well, we'll start with the first part. How do you feel writing has changed since we have begun this crazy journey called Star Citizen?

It's certainly become much more interesting because it's-... now that we're having things come online - conversation systems and actual mechanics and stuff like that - you get more of a direct plug-in of like, you need to write something for this, that needs to accommodate for this system. Rather than before, where it was-... for the early news updates we were trying to write about what the plan was for game design aspects, and now we can actually kind of write about game aspects.

The project has definitely gotten to the point now where we're starting to really focus on specific content, and churning out scripts, and getting things done for moving into recording stuff, and really heading into the production phase of things, and moving out from more of our kind of brainstorming and dreaming-of-lore days. So that's kind of fun to see that switch happen - get more focused and lot more panicked... panicked all the time.So the second question - when making missions and things do we create the stories first or do they get based on gameplay requirements?

I think at this point we're still building a lot of the mechanics around the PU, so we haven't gotten into specific mission stuff. We're sort of-WW: Tony and the guys have been doing a lot of experimentation with figuring out, like - without story applied on top of it - just how the missions work from getting the player from "here to here". So, we're gonna - once they sort of have a handle on that - we'll be able to dive back in and start building up with stories, and how to tie it into this bartender and going to this system, and you know, what are you carrying that's interesting?

And yeah, maybe one the process gets equalized it might be a half-and-half type thing. If we come up with something - because we have a better understanding of how it could be implemented - we could theoretically pitch ideas and they could just pitch stuff back to us and go, "hey we have this new thing - could you do a mission for us?". So it's probably gonna be a bit more even. Right now we're sort of taking cues from them as to how they wanna-, how they see that sort of mechanic working out.

Yeah. And we'll come in more, definitely, on those missions that are gonna be designed to kind of twist your expectations or be a spin on the normal everyday missions. That where we'll come in and-... Squadron 42 - even though you didn't ask - with that it's kind of more we start a very high-level story that sets the initial road map down of where we're going narratively, and then the designers take that and plan locations and more specifics of gameplay. And then they pitch that back to us, and we take it and we start saying like, "oh, well that's interesting! If they're gonna be in a fight right before they have this big heartfelt talk then maybe we can adjust the fight. Maybe we can, rather than being a big battle, we make it just a one-on-one fight with this guy cos it'll be more impactful," and Design says, "no, that won't work - how about 3 guys?". So that kind of finding that beautiful middle-ground between gameplay and narrative.