Can you tell us about the hybrid approach you're looking at for V2?

Okay, so hybrids. So what's super interesting about the hybrids, and what do I mean by hybrid? A hybrid is a resulting head that we can reuse as a source head again. So where it kind of started was what we found when using it, and this was over the course of the last years anyways. What I found when using it is that there's a lot of redundancy within faces, within heads. And you probably even notice it right now that we've got nine male, nine female within the system right now. But of those, for example, on the female side, there's probably four of them that are mostly the same. They're very close to the same, let's say, archetype. So there is some redundancy within there. And what's interesting to see about it is it makes the average head that people end up creating look a little heavier on the sort of Asian, Eastern European kind of side right now.

Okay, I wasn't imagining that. I thought that was me.

No, that's what you noticed. A lot of people kind of look like that. And a lot of that has to do with just the source heads themselves. So what we did in this early iteration, because we didn't want to make this thing wait until halfway through this year. We wanted to get this in front of players. The main reason was we wanted to get that feedback, because we use it all the time.

Yeah, and interacting with it is so key to the actual feature that just seeing the results isn't sufficient.

So the heads within there have some redundancy. So what we want to do instead is make each piece of data that you are sourcing be meaningful in its own way so that there's no redundancy in there. So what we're going to be doing over this next V2 thing is, what we've done is cross all the Squadron heads and everybody. And there's so many benefits to doing it this way. We've archetyped all the heads. So there's a huge mosaic that basically has every single face that we've got. And what we've done is kind of align all the people into their own archetype. So to use an example, I'm almost scared to use it a little bit, but Sandi and Rhona Mitra have a very similar archetype of a face. But then between the two, there might be unique features of each. So what we're going to do within the data sets is, instead of just the nine male and nine female that you've had since the first character creator, it will replace all of those with our hybrids of meaningful data sets. So we'll take the unique ear of that guy, the unique nose of that guy, the unique brow of that guy, all within the same archetype group, and make that a single head.

Yeah, we're distilling it to the extremes so that you can pick between those extremes.

Yeah, exactly. Meaningful data so we don't have redundancy across it. So what it does is it makes it a lot easier to use, because each of the data sources are unique in their own way, and you don't have a lot of redundancy to sort between. And this doesn't mean that we're only going to have four or five heads. Even within that archetype and hybrid approach, the reason we can do this is that I can take very specific features of maybe an actor that we can't use the full likeness of and create that into a hybrid. And that's actually not an issue at all. We're making people that aren't actual people, but are combinations of people. So basically, we're using our own system to source our system, which makes some sense. The other cool part about that is, because we're going to have this ability, it does make a pipeline for us making guys like mission givers or new heads a little bit easier. But what's really cool about it, I think, is an interesting design idea that we're trying to flesh out between myself and Todd and CR. I call it the loopback or the feedback pipeline or the sins of the father kind of idea. Legacy, or heirlooming or something like this. If you create a character within Death of a Spaceman, after you've died a certain amount of times or whatever, you can't respawn and you have to create a new character. But I would love to be able to then source back my original character as a source head within the pool. And this is totally possible because, again, it exists as a combination of those hex values. We feed it back in as a source and then we blend against it. You can only do that so many times, because eventually you will just end up back at the average if you just keep blending, blending, blending. You'll just end up back at the average over time. But I like the option for characters to do that. So I like this concept of, if you were playing the game as a criminal or something like this and you've got a certain amount of reputation, that when you roll your next character, if he's kind of, quote, unquote, the son or your child, some of that reputation comes with you. Because if your dad's a horrible criminal, maybe you start life with a little bit of that, and you have to work against it, or if you just want to make something anew. But I love the idea of being able to source back the player head.

Would we do anything where we could source from different people, from other players? Your head ends up in my pool because of a certain reason.

That kind of goes to the copy-paste of the data. We could absolutely do that, because if you could share the data between players, you could feed that back into your pool. But, and by the way, a lot of this is theorycrafting still. I don't have a plan for that. Hybrids are in. That's happening this quarter. The sins of the father kind of thing is a little bit different.

Yeah, we're exploring all the potential consequences and ways we can really leverage it.

So we've talked about possibly having the gene pool or the head pool basically controlled via the org. So for example, the org could expose all the heads, all the characters that they have within their org as sourcing. It's a dangerous road to tread, though. If they just want everybody looking a certain way or looking a certain type or something like that, they can absolutely do that.

You'd be able to deviate from it, but there's also an element of family or whatever you have to it. Just things to think about. People spending time together.

Yeah, I like the idea of dominant traits sticking around. What if I have a player that has this massive crooked nose and I just never die, and eventually this guy's like 100? Traits stick around in the gene pool.

But that is an idea that has been expressed, that orgs could share individually within there.