It's not just designers and artists who make the ships. Walk us through who makes these things. What are the positions?

Well, I'll start sort of roughly in pipeline order. You tend to start with designers coming up with the briefs. Then it goes around a lot of people to make sure the designers are not doing wild things in briefs. That sounds a bit odd, but... There's the concept team. The concept team makes the words become pretty pictures. Then we've got the vehicle art team who make pretty pictures become pretty 3D objects. Designers set them up. Tech artists set them up. And then we've got a whole bunch of downstream and sort of upstream dependencies. If the new vehicle or an existing vehicle has gameplay, gameplay people need to work with us on that to give us information. Especially if it's new coming alongside a vehicle, they need to work hand in hand with: hey, Feature X is doing this, we need this from your ship. And we do that. And they go, actually, it's not quite how we envisioned it, can we adjust things as we go?

And those gameplay people aren't on ship teams. Those are gameplay teams. They're the people that make salvaging, that make mining, stuff like that.

Yeah, it's the feature development teams, and the designer takes it from the original concept all the way through, and we liaise with a lot of different departments and teams to make sure that all of the features that make the ships fun to play actually work when they're implemented on vehicles, because it's a very different experience of how something would be with FPS ground and how it then needs to be implemented on an actual vehicle to work. So there's a lot of back and forth and maybe things change and tweak to make it work a bit better with a vehicle, because it just depends on how the original gameplay loop was envisioned to work.

I think we say that we've got upstream teams and downstream teams, but then one of our upstream teams, like the feature team that developed mining or salvage, probably is a better, more relevant or more recent thing, is they also have dependencies and upstream teams. So they'll have input from the UI team and the branding team and whoever else to get their feature working. And then we kind of supply them. So we're kind of downstream to them, but it's kind of a big web of connected teams.