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How do you expect to work through the backlog of ships, and at what point in the game can we expect larger ships such as the Kraken, Polaris and Perseus?

TL;DRThe team has improved its ship pipeline and is expanding, but delivering capital ships alongside current output needs more people, and growing the team takes time because training slows production at first.

John CreweVehicle Director

I'll start and then others can chime in if they want. So the last year or so, we've been really improving and just making the pipeline work better. Mark and Corey have done a great job revitalising all the documentation that I wrote years ago and we've just lived with. But because I've done more and more leadership and directorship, I've not been so hands-on with things. So they've taken that over and built the pipeline. The last few ships we've released have gone through that new pipeline, and things have mostly gone smoother. Still doing some tweaks as we go. But ultimately, at the end of the day, big ships need a lot of resources to make them. And where we want to get to is a place where we're still delivering the same amount of content as we do now a year, as well as one to two capitals a year on top of that, and supporting all the other teams like we do. And at the end of the day, that just needs more people.

Jared HuckabyHost, Community

You're not saying that we are at that point?

John CreweVehicle Director

We're not at that point yet. We're building to that point. So the last few months, we've been starting to expand the team, which people have probably seen with the introduction of the Montreal vehicle team. And we're also looking for more artists in the UK. So if people are watching...

Ben CurtisVehicle Art Director

Yeah, and any lead artists watching.

Ben CurtisVehicle Art Director

I think just to touch on that as well, people kind of think it's easy, right? You want more spaceships, you hire more people, and done. It's just 10 more people, you can do three more ships. But there's obviously a lot of time and effort that goes into training up staff. Growing the team is quite a difficult challenge, especially when we've got leads that are already at capacity, and then we're like, okay, we want to double our team. It goes from one person that's already trying to juggle three or four ships at once to then going, okay, well, they can now juggle... and it's like, no, it's just not sustainable. We have grown the team quite a lot in the last six months to a year. We've started a new team in Montreal. We're looking to grow a second team and probably a third team in the UK. So yeah, we're expanding, but it does take time.

Jared HuckabyHost, Community

Yeah, there's a misconception that, like you said, you just add more people and instantly more things get made. But the reality is, and this isn't just for vehicles, this is for any discipline in anything, when you have to teach, when you have to train, when you have to onboard, your production gets slower, because you now have to slow down everything that you would normally be doing in order to explain everything and make the support. So things slow down before they get faster. And then, God help us, the person doesn't last. The person goes and finds a different opportunity, or they interviewed well but the reality wasn't [there], and now that slowdown has yielded no positive results. So it is definitely a process.

Star Citizen Live›Invictus All-Vehicles Roundtable·
Published on this date.26 May 2023