Richard Tyrer · Lead Game Designer, Vehicle Experience Team

No, so I'd say it's part of the journey. And let's say we throw away everything tomorrow, we still have what we've learned along the way. And that's really important because we're constantly learning. It goes back to what you said earlier: I've been here seven years and my understanding of the game and the game mechanics has fundamentally changed in that time, as we've built more systems and added more to the game, and we do know the game's not complete. But it's kind of exciting because we're building towards that and we're always moving in that direction and learning more and getting better, hopefully, at what we do. So we change things along the way, and then we have other systems that come in and they might throw a curveball into that system that we've made. But we're learning along the way to build what we think is the best game.

Mattia Monticelli · Game Designer 3

I think I can add something on that from a different perspective, because I joined the team roughly around two years ago, so not as long as these other two veterans, right? But it's very important, as a game designer in my case, but in general I think as a developer, to have that knowledge and to be able to have that experience in tuning and getting accustomed to the game, getting to know how the game is working currently. Also to understand, first of all, what you can do and what you can plan to improve the game in the future, in the long run, and also be prepared for that when the moment comes. You know what to do, you know what to expect, you know what to manipulate in order to create the right experience. It's never a waste of time. And also, I guess you guys want to play the game as well from time to time, so playing a game that is in a better state is probably better than a game that is not balanced at all.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

We know what we're doing and there is a plan, but those things change. We know what we're doing, but we learn more along the way, and those things that we learn change our perceptions.

Yogi Klatt · Principal Vehicle Programmer

I don't think that the vision has changed a lot though, right? I mean, the one thing you can't underestimate is engineering and design and development. It just takes time. I mean, seriously, 90% of all the things that players propose that we should do better, we usually thought about these already, right? Because this is what we're doing for a living. But it just takes time to implement these. If somebody tells me, "Oh, please add an altimeter" or something like this, then there's 15 different problems we need to solve. It's a lot.

Mattia Monticelli · Game Designer 3

And those are the easy parts as well, because a lot of the time players have very interesting insights and ideas about very complex systems that we can potentially put in place, but those touch such a vast amount of other features in the game, and organizing that type of work and getting everyone on board from completely different teams, especially in a company the size of CIG, is very difficult, right? But in general, it's very difficult in video game making, so it's not a unique problem for us.

Richard Tyrer · Lead Game Designer, Vehicle Experience Team

Yeah, we've got a very complex game, but that's very exciting because we are doing it differently. All our systems are real systems. They function, they work, and they do real things based on real physics mechanics. Most times. There's a few exceptions here and there. But most of the time, that works really well for us, because it's a really complex problem to solve. But actually, it makes Star Citizen, I think, really unique. And it makes it really fun to work on.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

That 90% is probably a bit high. There are still plenty of times, being completely honest, where an idea has come from the community and we've been like, "Oh, that's a really good idea."

Yogi Klatt · Principal Vehicle Programmer

No, but I mean, we've all seen similar media. We've all seen similar films. We play Star Citizen because we probably liked Wing Commander or Star Wars in the past and so on, right? So there is a common understanding. So I think even for some things where we would say, "Oh, we had this idea," it probably just came from somewhere else. We incorporate a lot of community ideas in the designs as well.