Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

All right, we'll talk about Polaris. So Polaris is, I'd say, more in pre-production. We are spending time investigating at the moment, as we've already kind of hinted at when it comes to our capital ships. We want to make sure that we're tackling them in a way that allows us to scale up, to not just do one capital ship, and we can tick off a few more from the lineup. Literally the last couple of weeks we've been looking at it, breaking down the concept, breaking down what is involved with actually delivering it. I think what people need to understand as well is this is quite an old ship. The concept is quite old. There's a lot of gaps in it, as Corey mentioned. So really we're just doing our sanity check on everything, making sure we've got everything in progress. It will be going into full production very soon. Very, very soon.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Very soon™. Chris deleted the old interior setup level for it this afternoon, ready for the new one.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

So that's how soon it is. We are working on it. It's just [not] a full team on it. We're doing the pre-production. There's been a lot of pre-planning changes to help us not trip over ourselves. So it is in production in that sense.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

Yeah, we haven't started adding assets to the editor and stuff, but we are basically doing a full breakdown of what we've got, working out how we're going to tackle it, trying to get the plans in place and answer the questions. There's some holes in the concept which could do with a little bit more work, and they're a bit loose. So it's just breaking down that stuff. But we haven't got a team of artists that are working on it. We have one, and then I look at it every so often, Corey sticks his nose in it, and it's us trying to... we want to come to a point where we can come together, have a proper kickoff with the team that are working on it, and go, okay, we know what we're asking you to do, rather than being like, hey everyone, let's have a look, click, hmm, this is cool.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yeah, and to touch on the roadmap bit, something that often gets overlooked on the roadmap is it doesn't particularly show people moving on and off projects or tasks. So you could have someone on the Polaris for one week, and they go off it for a week, and then they go back on it for another week. That will show as three weeks continuous. Or you could have one person come on, one person go off, then another person comes on. That will show two people for that entire time. In conjunction with that, as part of all of our pipeline work, we've been moving away from our previous scheduling method, which is what the roadmap uses, to being more in Jira, because that live-updates with the data as we're working through things. And then at some point we go back and put it in there. So there is a bit of lag in how the roadmap updates. So yes, people have been working on it. But it's not like, hey, we've got eight artists working on it since two weeks ago, when the roadmap said.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

I was going to say, with the Apollo, because the Apollo was mentioned as well, that's pretty much what we've done on the Apollo. We had one artist working on it, doing all the pre-production work, making sure it was in a good state, answering all the questions that were unanswered on it, so it's ready to go into production. It is not in production. We haven't got a whole team of artists working on it, but we've done all that preliminary work, and that's why it's been on the roadmap, because someone's been allocated to it, they've been chipping away at it and getting it ready.