Okay, so say he's got the brief done, and now it comes to you. Where do you start?
TL;DRLayout comes first because everything the designers want must physically fit and it sets the ship's size, followed by art style informed by the manufacturer's look and its place in the timeline.
Really early, the layout is what we need to work on first, and really that's the stuff that sets the foundation of how big the overall ship's going to be. Because a lot of the time the design guys will have their wish list of 'these are the things we want to fit in the ship'. But because our game is the way it is, that needs to physically fit in the ship. And that can dictate a lot of how big the ship's going to be and how much space we want to assign to the different elements of it. And then once we've got the floor plan down and the rough idea, it then goes into the art style, looking at all of our library of RSI stuff, looking at the bits that... lots of, yeah, all the struts, the weird kind of angles. Lots of nice sharp angles in it. But the thing with all of our stuff is there's a timeline to our game as well as our manufacturers. So we've got to decide where it sits on the timeline of [RSI] itself and when its release date is.