From a team perspective, producers, writers, artists, and designers. How have the ship pipeline and development/balance process changed since the original ship packages were put on sale? Did those changes, if any, change how the ships and the lore involving those ships have been developed since then to account for balance those ships with other ships that have been introduced after the first batch?asked by Chaplain

So the question is ... [laughter] ... From the beginning right, from the beginning of making ships, from the beginning of the idea of what Star Citizen would become, has that process changed? Now, do we do things differently developing ships, maybe from the lore side? And maybe there's only a few people here who can speak to the original, but I think at the same time how's changed? Or has it change? For the better or how's it going?

I think the lore side is quite similar only we have more writers obviously and we get better fleshed out ideas earlier on; we've got more designers so we get more designs earlier on. Previously, obviously, we started with running preproduction, production at the same time; and we started from scratch with no company. These ships, we had to build these pipelines for how the ships work as we were building the ships themselves, which explains a lot of the reasons we go back to the Connie and go "now that we've got it figured out, let's revamp it a little bit and do it right". Probably, initially we've seen that a lot of things, is it compatible: the original Constellation is a perfect example, we got the ship going, we wanted to get it out there but "okay wait a minute how do the escape pods actually come out of the ship?"; when you lower the elevator "wait a minute do I really want to only one person to be able to get into the ship at a time, maybe I want three". So these are things that are part of the evolution process and pipelines in general, you get it going, get it started and then you have to use it a couple of times and then you figure out what works and what doesn't work and then it continually evolves. I think with design as well, one thing that we absolutely learned is how important it is to get design and the literature as early as possible; and as much fleshed out as possible because it significantly helped and it significantly saves time. And spending that time at the beginning saves a lot of time at the end.

To speak to, because I'm at six months I think, so I haven't been here since the original; but what I was really excited about with the Endeavour , the most recent one, I felt like, and I know we've done this with a lot of ships recently, that was the first time I saw everyone that needed to get involved, get involved really early. We're doing that right now on a couple of other ships but I was really excited because I got to sit in those meeting that got everybody involved: Tony, and Ben; and the key stakeholders from the beginning. It wasn't like "hey we've got this far down the ship concept and we never showed Bill over there, we never showed this guy, we never even showed the writers". It was kind of cool to see that one come together and all the ones we're starting to do now it's got this level of polish from the beginning so when we're getting into these phases and we start developing that ship it's like "yep!"

And the goal is to get it in ... we've learned the most important thing is to get it in the game as soon as possible.

That's coolFS: Even if it's just shapes. Get it flying, get it moving. See what works, see what doesn't work. And not try to build an entire ship from scratch and then get it in the game. But build the ship up very simple, what we call "white box" which is more like proxy-based, and then get it in where it's functional for design to start balance and testing. And then they can already be balance and testing while we're actually doing the final art and then we're just swapping things out as we go. And then we start with the white box phase, which is again just the proxies. And then we move onto the grey box phase, which is like the Constellation during our previous GamesCon demo, and that's like the ship is there, you see it; it's not final but it's pretty close and you can visualise what it will look like. And obviously we do our final pass which is our pristine version.

Context is everything in making these artistic decisions: how this thing should feel; how this thing should behave; what it should look like. And we've gained all this experience from creating Arena Commander; from creating all these ships that are flyable. And the combat and the flight behavior and all of that; we can see what the game is like: just load it up and play it. So it's the same thing: that informs our decisions, that informs how we want to make the thing grow, and [turns to FS] to your point of getting it in as early as possible, we need to see what it is in order to see what we want it to be.[General agreement]

That helps; we barely had a game. You could fly around. I remember the first demo I ever saw was Chris showing me the Hornet on a landing pad and you could kind of fly it around but we didn't have all these game modes back then. So now we have all these game modes so we can throw these ships in at a very early stage and see how does this ship handle against a swarm of Vanduul ships: Scythes and a Glavie.

The ship pipeline has gone through a lot of changes but I almost feel like that just very natural.

It's very natural.

What you had from the beginning, like right now if we made an RSI ship we might be able to steal pieces from previous ships. You didn't have that when you started the pipelin; you're making everything from scratch. It's like doing sequels of movies and stuff, I already got ...

Iteration!

Exactly!

It's about evolving and not doing things from scratch. And a lot of times it seems we're doing things from scratch but really we're evolving.

Totally.

And from the lore perspective too a lot of the stuff that you guys are talking about, they've done a lot of the heavy lifting before for this. Dave and Will and I ???, with Chris and Ben involved in that too, setting those guidelines, putting the ideas or our thoughts into the Corporation Matrix or in certain places so designers, artists can go in and look and see exactly what the intention behind all those and form their design to it.

That's great!