Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

I think it's a really dangerous thing to get into if you have multiple teams and you're like, oh, you're the A team and you're the B team, or you're team this and you're team that. And it's not a case of that. The way we prioritise our ships is we get our ship priority, and that comes from John and the execs and all the important people. And then we look at what resources we have and what people are best fitted for, and then we allocate work that we feel confident that people can achieve. If we had a new team come in and we're like, hey, we've got some capital ships for you, here you go, you're not setting that team up to succeed. You're just setting it up to fail. Realistically, our big capital ships take a sizable team to deliver. So yeah, initially we're getting them on board to help fill out some of our backlog ships, help do some variants of existing ships. At the moment we're just trying to, like I say, onboard them. They've been going for... April 1st is when they officially started.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

A couple of months now.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

And they're getting up to speed, they're doing a fantastic job of learning the ropes and understanding our processes and pipelines, working through a few ships that will be coming out at some point, and then we'll put them on something bigger.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

That's the other thing, they're a brand new team, they're not massive. It's not like they're anywhere near the size of the UK ship team. If I remember correctly, it's three artists, one designer. Is it four artists, maybe?

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Four, technically. Four artists, technically, but one's in the UK at the moment. And one designer, who was here for the last three weeks doing his onboarding. He's literally on a plane now back to Canada to carry on with those guys when he gets there.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

And when you get a brand new team like that, it's not even just them learning how we do things, because obviously every team does it differently. The way you build an environment isn't the way you build a ship, and the quality and the techniques and everything are massively different. So if you've got a brand new team coming in, you're not going to throw them on a ship that's going to take them, for argument's sake, the next 18 months to develop, because the quality in their work over that 18 months, from when they first start to when they get towards the end, is going to massively change. With the larger ships, you need people who are more experienced, who are already embedded within the pipeline, because otherwise you're going to have such an inconsistent experience across the actual ship.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

Small ships can be complicated, big ships are complicated. It's all fairly complicated stuff. But like I say, when you get to a capital ship, there's a lot of unknowns there. We've got Jason, who's come across from the environment art team, and he's got a whole wealth of knowledge on building environment assets and building out those kits. So he's got a huge amount of knowledge that we can lean on for building out our capital ships. But yeah, like I say, sticking someone on something for a year and a half when, initially, you want to get a few under your belt, learn the processes, touch lots of different areas of the ships, do interiors, exteriors, and just learn everything.

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

I think another point as well is that in general for interiors, at least, the quality of what we receive in pre-production is generally spread a little bit thinner. So the interior concepts for capital ships are generally key art and some fairly vague interior spaces. So the production team has to do a lot more of the exploration, whereas if you have a smaller ship, generally the interior concept's a lot stronger, because there's just fewer things to work on, right? You get a lot more detail, a lot more to work from. So yeah, definitely, coming into production, you have fewer things to figure out on smaller ships.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

The other thing is with the capital ships, once we actually put them in, we want to try and build them in a way that makes it easier to then do the other ships of that exact same manufacturer. So once we do one RSI, we want to set ourselves up so that we can roll into the others a lot easier. So instead of having to reinvent the wheel every time, we have stuff as a foundation to just move it forward quicker.