Chris, how much has changed about your plans since you first started building this game?

Yeah, I've scoped it down. Obviously, the scope has gotten bigger because the funding has gotten bigger. Essentially, when I first started out, it was going to start off with a much more limited set. For instance, a great example is being down on the planet side. The original version of what I was thinking of doing was the high fidelity out in space. I think we would have had high-fidelity models down on the planet side, but we wouldn't be walking around it in first person originally. I was thinking it would be more like Privateer or Freelancer, where you would have some angles and you would have a character or two. And then Hannes, who now works full time for us, Hannes Appell, he's in Germany, he's the guy that did the original Squadron 42 five-minute trailer when I launched the crowdfunding campaign. At the time he was working at Crytek as their director of cinematics, but he was a huge Wing Commander fan, and so he'd asked if he could help me out on what I was doing, and I was quite happy to have him help me out. And so he did a little preview that he did in first person. I thought we could do first person, but then I was thinking, well, we'll make it very... okay, just a location or two. And over time, as we've gotten more funding, as you get deeper into what we're using CryEngine for, we're like, well, we've got a full first-person engine, and we already have items and all the handling and the combat here. And so we're kind of shooting ourselves in the foot not to use it, because it's already part of the package. Some code and support for it, but you already have it. I mean, as you can already see right now, if you want to, you fly in Arena Commander, you can jump out of your ship and you can be shooting the gun around, and I don't know if anyone's done it yet, but I'm pretty sure two people could eject out of the ship, get to the platform, and have a gunfight with each other. And that is literally because it's all inside one first-person engine. So the level of scope that would happen on the planet side has definitely increased in terms of what Tony's been talking about, like having the action. Because we sort of take a look at it and go, yeah, you can really make this game step up to the next level. And a lot of the... you guys haven't seen this because of the Squadron 42 stuff, and because that's a very specific story, we don't want to really share it up front the same way as we share everything in the Persistent Universe, because it would spoil the story. But just seeing... we have these things that are called gray boxes, where the designers run the level or the mission or the chapter or whatever we're doing on Squadron 42. Just the fluidity of being in your ship, flying a mission, being called for a distress call, landing on a space station, getting out of your ship, getting involved in combat, running through, going inside, as this platform, as this space base blows up, having to run for another ship, get in there and fly it off, is something that... So there's been some really great fan stuff that people have done where it's like, oh, look, I've EVA'd out of my Aurora into a wrecked ship to collect an item, and those kind of things. And those are all things that, looking at it as we were building it, we're like, okay, we've got the systems to do this. We now have the backing. We now have the resources. So let's really try to make the world feel more alive. And it's like Tony was saying, it's not just the fact that when you're in space, you have some sense of trepidation. Maybe down on the planet, you're going around, and you go down a dark alleyway, and you could get jumped. Or if you're on a particularly lawless planet, maybe someone tries to rip you off when you're unloading your cargo. It just adds a whole level of immersion to the world. I would say that kind of stuff has obviously definitely increased. I mean, we've obviously added a lot of functionality. We have all these stretch goals, so that's a lot of stuff that we weren't planning to do originally that has now been added. And I would like to clarify, because there's always this sense of, oh, well, you've done all these things and it keeps feature creeping and you'll never deliver the game. The concept with what we're doing, and this is the other thing that I think has changed from when I first started building the game, is that we have a very fluid development methodology, which is we're basically rolling out... Right here, we're basically pulling up our skirt and showing everything in what we're doing here on the social module, in a way that I wouldn't necessarily... I still like to share everything, I just like to maybe have it a bit more polished before I share it. But anyway, the idea is that we roll out the pieces of the game as it makes sense as we're building them, which is an incredibly different development methodology than pretty much any other game. There are some games that have done early alphas and then built functionality up, like DayZ, Minecraft. And so there is a little bit of similarity there, but I don't believe it's ever been to the level that we've done, where we're literally taking early components, before you would even have something that would be even close to what you would call the holistic alpha, and sharing them. And so that's why when we say, okay, we're going to do this extra feature, do this extra feature, it doesn't mean that you don't get to play the game until that feature is done. It basically means, no, this is one of the things that's on our development list and we will get to it. So, I don't know, I've always wanted to have pets in a game. Well, yeah, you'll get them. You're just not going to get them maybe now. You probably won't get them next year, but it'll definitely be on the list. And so the way I view it is we share the development as we go. And everybody gets to experience it. And they also get to give their feedback. They get to stress test it. And I think it's just going to make a much better game. I can already tell on our early stuff. I think people first played Arena Commander v0.8 and then .9, to 0.9.2, to 1.0. You can see where the progress has happened. And we've still got loads of things to change and polish and adjust. But that's going to happen on everything. That's going to start happening on the planet-side stuff. So the very first version of the planet-side stuff is going to be, I'm sure, rough. And there will be lots of things that we want to work out, user interface-wise, performance-wise, functionality-wise. Same will be on the FPS. But the thing is that as we're playing this as we're going along and sharing it, I think we're getting to really craft something with a level of iteration that you normally don't get when you develop. And I would say that, for me, is the biggest change, because when I started this, I wanted to get to where we're going to end up now, but I didn't think we would ever be able to do it from the start or plan to do it from the start. I felt like, okay, I'm going to have to have something... I guess it would be more equivalent to, I'm sure quite a few guys have Elite, right? So Elite's got a more basic feature set right now, and they plan to do a lot of extra things, like, okay, we'll have the walking around in first person and be down on planets. They have a more limited set which is now out, and that's the game that they've released. Ours is just different because we basically got so much funding at the beginning that we can say, okay, well, no, this was really part of the vision, and build towards it from the very beginning. And so I'd say that's kind of the biggest difference: remodulating development, figuring out how to do open development and share the development with everybody that's supported the game while we're also doing R&D on the new stuff, and keeping all you guys interested and entertained, whether it's by playing parts of the game or hearing about the stuff that was coming up, or giving you an opportunity to comment on some of the ideas that we have in terms of how we're going to handle cargo or how we're going to handle trading or whatever it would be. The openness of the development, the level of interaction. I wanted the game to be very community focused from the beginning. That's why we launched a community site before we even announced the game. And that was one of the goals of the whole website stuff from the very beginning, but not to the level that we're doing it now. So when we got into the campaign, it was, no, we need to keep this up. We need to keep adding to this. That's been the biggest change, and to be honest with you, it's also the thing that is probably the most invigorating about doing it, because when you work on a really big, huge project, like I could say Freelancer was a very big project and that took a long, long time, and I wasn't even there at the very end when it came out, it can get tough when it's just you and your team and that's all you're working on. But having all you guys out there be part of it, and the energy and the excitement and the ideas, I think it invigorates the teams that we have working on the game. I would not undersell the power of that. I think that has a lot of our developers get up in the morning wanting to do great work, because they know there's a lot of people out there that are every single day excited by what's been made, what they're hearing about, and I think that's going to end up spurring on a lot of our developers to probably do things that you would think... I mean, it's still going to take a lot of time, but considering the feature set that we're doing, and when I think we'll be able to deliver the features, I would say that we will be doing a pretty good job with respect to maybe some other really big projects that went off and worked for five or six years but were hidden away from what was happening. It's because of that interaction that we have with the community.