How often do you have to go back and re-examine the processes used for design? For example, the ship pipeline has grown and changed greatly over the last 2 years and I imagine other areas have also had to adapt as newer, more efficient ideas and technologies arise. Is design and production basically an ever-evolving thing in your world?asked by Skwisgaar

Yeah, absolutely!

That is totally your question.

Yeah it's every single day we come up with something that might be a better idea. Whether we can do it in time for, say, 1.0, which we're in the middle of finalizing right now, or if we're going to have to put it off 'til a later date, and what that later date is and what the time involved in researching that technology is... but yeah...In the time that-... I took over the ship pipeline in late August, beginning of September, and since then we've added a ship paint which involves a second UV set to all the ships, which was a whole big thing that we had to go back and redo all these damage states. The UK team right now at Foundry 42 is working on adding a new procedural damage system for ships so you basically can eliminate the 25's, maybe 50's, maybe the 75% damage states and handle it all through procedural damage - and that all sounds really promising and cool but that will, again, impact the way that we go about making our ships.So it's a constantly evolving thing, and then on the design side, I mean if you saw the initial Cutlass release there was a lot of-... the Cutlass was done, I think it was put in the hangar... December of 2013 - just in time for Christmas around this time last year. And that ship originally, it's design wasn't fully fleshed out, the variants weren't fully fleshed out. So one of the things we've done is Foundry 42's going through and doing the white box for all these and trying to figure out more of the logistical things, like at the time we didn't have a lot of answers on, "what is a med bay? How does a med bay work? What is the bounty hunting? How does that work? How do you capture people? How do you reclaim them?" - Not reclaim them for resources but reclaim them as, like turn them in. Those things weren't answered, the designs weren't in place, and now that we have answers to those questions, yeah we have to come back to the ships and look at them again with a critical eye and go, "okay, now that we've got what we think is a solid gameplay loop, does the ship actually support that mechanically?"So yeah, it's a constantly evolving thing, but all game development is like that, right? It's a constantly evolving, iterative process, so that's really I think part of the fun of being in game development is it's always changing, it's always new there's always an openness and a quest for new ideas, and better ways to do things... so yeah, it's part of what's great about the job.

Even just as producers our day-to-day stuff is evaluated on a regular basis such as: "How do we handle certain types of emails? Certain email groups? How do we send our weekly newsletter or even weekly production report?" So we try to find ways to streamline every single thing we do, so if we find a process that is inefficient or at least could be iteratively improved, we are going to explore it. That's pretty much what we do.

Yeah, if you don't like change this would not be the gig for you.