[Talk us through the pipeline:] can we get the TLDR version of what every ship goes through?

So TLDR, as we start out, John and his design team come up with the idea of, we want a ship to do this role and deliver this, and then I think you normally sit around, you pitch it to people, don't you?

We have the very high level, like one sentence: I want a space food truck van. We use that as an example for this. And it has to be Drake. And either I've come up with that or I've got it from Chris or Todd or Tony or someone like that. I give that to a designer and they flesh it out into the full brief. That goes back around all the design leads because there's a lot of design teams and they're all working on slightly different things. They all may have slightly different ideas; the designer who did that vehicle brief may not be aware of, say, what EU PU is going to be working on in nine months' time, which may have an effect. So they all have their feedback. We update the brief, it goes to Chris for the final sign-off, and then it goes into the concept phase. Pretty much unchanged.

But we spend a lot more time on the concept to make sure that everything is going to work now. So we do the interiors fully fleshed out to make sure that everything that's going to fit inside the ship actually fits inside the ship. And with the extra complexity we've now got, there's so much more to consider during the concept phase.

It would also be worth adding to this point, obviously I'm not the most knowledgeable about the concept pipeline, but I am aware that concept is literally not just drawing a picture. I know you mock up the geometry of a ship and the general shape and everything. So you have a reasonably clear idea of what it's going to look like.

It's much easier to make changes and to invest time when it's in concept than it is when you get into production. Because in concept you've got one artist working on it and it's fairly easy to course correct. Whereas by the time you're into production, you've got an art team invested in it, plus all the downstream teams and design and everything. It's a much slower shift.

And you've got to worry about performance and actually having it work and stuff. Whereas in concept, it's a visual representation of it. So it doesn't matter if you look at the geometry and it's really jank, because we've got a whole team of production artists to basically convert a concept mesh into something that actually goes in a video game and runs, right? And looks good.

And looks good. So concept's complete, we then do proper planning. Planning phase. And then it gets scheduled. I'm still learning the new production. And then into white box, which is basically, we do a fairly quick breakdown of the ship and all the parts that need to be in it and get it into engine as quickly as we can, just to allow us to run around it, make sure that what we think works visually actually works from a gameplay point of view, and make sure it flies, make sure thrust is in the right position.

The ever popular: when I open this door, does it actually stay within the ship? Does it go outside?

We actually have that test, just to drag the ship around to make sure everything stays attached.

At the end of each phase we have a review process where we sit down with everyone, get everyone in a room and make sure we're all happy with it. White box is basically: make it work. We don't really care what it looks like at that point. It's about making sure that we know what we're doing and it's all going to work. And then into grey box is where we do most of the modeling, most of the artwork.

We don't care about what it looks like aesthetically, but we care about what it looks like as a basic representation for every aspect.

We need to get proportions right and everything in white box.