What are the most difficult hurdles involved in the process of making props?
TL;DRThe hardest parts are anticipating future features and uses, such as destruction or driving a cargo loader, so props are built to work later, and reworking them when others find new uses.
I suppose for me, it's that you have to anticipate what sort of features you will expect to come online in the future. For instance, before we had all the destruction stuff or the entity stuff, we still had to think ahead for that functionality. And it's also just figuring out what sort of situations that prop's going to be used in, because we make these things and it's hard to say where they're going to be used or what they're going to be used for sometimes. So you have to think about that on an individual basis.
Yeah, I think we do have an element of realism in our game. So if we're making a cargo loader and we get a beautiful concept from the concept team, we're like, yes, ace, how's it going to work? It might not work straight away, but we have to anticipate someone saying, that's cool, I want to be able to drive that. Okay, cool, right. And as long as we're making those decisions at the start and we go, okay, we might not necessarily be making it working off the bat, but we're going to model it and approach it in a way that it could work, we know that eventually when we get to that point, we've done the hard work, rather than having to go back and go, oh, those proportions don't work, we can't extend and actually pick things up, and that sort of stuff. Although we are making a sci-fi fantasy game, it's futuristic, it is set in the future, we've still got to consider how technology will work at that time and what that functionality will be. So I think a little bit of time spent processing that now is really important. I guess the other challenge is that you can't just take a concept and make it. It is very much: does this have any performance capture attached to it? Is it going to have any performance capture attached to it? Or is somebody on the design team going to see it and go, oh, I like that, I could use that for XXX?
And you have to also be responsive to the sort of things people want to do with them. So you may have to take something back and then alter it to work with what they've been inspired to use it for, which can sometimes be quite interesting.
Yeah, it's a nice thing when people are like, yeah, that's really cool, we want to use it for that. That sentence alone is like, yeah, you know what? We're doing a good job here. This is cool. And it's the same for the community as well, when we get positive feedback, they're like, oh yeah, we love this and we love that. It's nice to see our assets used not just to make things look nice, but actually to affect the gameplay and bring more exciting things to the community.