Was there an AI team in place when you came here, or did you have to build it from the ground up? What do you recall about those early days?

So when I joined, a lot of the AI was taken care of through the middleware that we were using at that time; we were using Kythera as a middleware. But then we moved into deciding that we wanted to have more in-house development. So yes, then I built the team pretty much from scratch, where Marius and Andrea have been the two first team members on the tech side. And Shanine was our producer since pretty much the beginning. And then the team grew from there. So we started with three people pretty much. And we started to work a lot closely with Tony, when we started to move a lot more development internally. He really pushed for Subsumption at that time. And then me and Tony pretty much started to crack on implementing all these things, where he made a lot of the external tooling for the Subsumption editing, this C# tool that we used for a lot of stuff, and I basically ran all the runtime code, all the low-level code, how the graph gets executed, how all the tasks run, and so on, together also with Marius and Andrea. Andrea, with his background, took care of a lot of the ship stuff, especially the 3D, this really unique approach to 3D pathfinding and 3D movement that Andrea has worked on. Marius has supported me on all the navigation stuff since year one, pretty much. And I think that has been the foundation of the team.

And right now, I think we are super lucky, because the people we have on board are fantastic. We have some new juniors that started a few months ago. They're doing super awesome. They're really fantastic. I'm really excited, because I think people will see more and more improvements, because of how the team has been growing and the type of culture we are trying to push, which is a culture where everybody helps each other, especially, and everybody tries to share as much as possible the knowledge that they have. We still try to keep people responsible for specific areas, because engineers love to have their own expertise and grow in a specific way, because otherwise you can never be super good at something. But all our stuff is very shared. We push for knowledge sharing, but also sharing the usage of the systems, so that the more you use it, the more people feel responsible to work on common stuff. So we built it from pretty much the base, from zero, to right now: me, Marius, Andrea. We have two tools programmers on the core team, like Michael Madsen. We have Fadi, who just joined us as an intern tools programmer. We have Alex. We have Daniel in the UK as well, who just joined a few months ago. It's fantastic. We have Jake, we have Jacob, Wout, we have Andrew. They're all fantastic programmers. I hope I didn't forget anybody.

I forgot one person. It's Chris, who also joined us recently. It's hard to find people to grow a team in a way that's not disruptive, for different reasons. Not only because you want to grow in terms of skill; you want to give people enough of your time to grow them into their roles, but also it needs to fit from a personality perspective. And I think those guys are fantastic because they fit both ways. They fit on skills, but they fit also on personality. They are super motivated. They're super excited. They're bringing so much to the table, even in terms of new ideas and new approaches.