How do we decide what ships get made?

We look at the schedule. Obviously we know Star Citizen, we joke about it internally, we have six quarterly patches that we do every year: we have the four quarterly patches, Invictus and IAE. And we always deliver at least one ship in every one of those patches, if not two or three. We also sometimes do point patches as well. So we can look at a year, pick this year, next year, whatever, and go, right, we've got these slots, there are ships going in here. And then we'll go through and go, if we are going to do capital ships, that's going to take up a big chunk of the team. So putting a capital ship in here means the rest of these slots become much smaller. We have to balance delivering backlog ships with fresh ones as well. And it sort of sorts itself out. It's like doing a big jigsaw puzzle. You go around the edges, well, I do go around the edges, and then you know where you're going from there. So once you put a few of the big pieces in play, you don't really have a lot of options. It sort of dictates the rest. And then we go through that with Chris and Rich and they go, actually, no, we don't want you to do this cap ship here, we want it here instead. That changes the order. Or, no, we don't actually want that there, we want two other things. So it's a lot of iteration and it sort of boils down to: we have chunks of time, a finite amount of people. We could put everyone on capital ships and then you perhaps get two or three a year globally, and then we've got patches without anything. Two or three ships, period. And we're just talking about new ships as well. I think we're going to talk about this more in a bit as well: 4.0 has a huge amount of support that the vehicle team needs to deliver. So we have to factor that in as well. We can't just go all new ships all the time. We have to work with those other teams, like the gameplay teams we talked about. They might be coming online with a feature like base building. We need to support that as well. So it's sort of a balance.

That one often dictates what we have to put into the schedule. Random example: when Salvage came online, we needed the vehicles that can support Salvage, so we have to make sure that we can have a vehicle ready to go with that gameplay as it comes online, same with mining.

Also with that, it's not just doing the Salvage vehicle, it's the fact that we need to do a pass on every vehicle in game to get them to support that feature. To be salvageable. And even little things like, oh, we want to add fire extinguishers. And you're like, okay, cool, that's easy, right? Our ships are big. And it's like, well, it's easy on some stuff, it's not easy on others. I think we were doing something the other day where we were looking at: right, if we spend a month on each ship, you're like, okay, that's one person for like 16 years. It's a lot of work, right? Or 16 people for one year. Then you get nothing else. So I think even little features, when you're talking at the scale of the game we've got, it does become quite a challenge to play that kind of Jenga of stuff, which is why we try and fit these things in. Like you say, oh, there's a pocket of time here that's got two months on someone that could be used for a small ground vehicle. Or we could actually tick off support for three other features that are coming in, and that gets more gameplay.