From an outside perspective it can seem like the people who make the ships make the gameplay for the ships. Is it rather that the feature teams make the tools and systems, the underlying existence of mining, and then it's up to the content teams to build the ways in which we use them?
TL;DRFeature teams own the core of a feature, such as how mining works, while relying on content and other support teams, like a general contractor subletting specialist work.
For example, like harvestables. When we start building a location, we have an idea, we have a breakdown. Here's everything that this location will need. It will need missions associated. It will need harvestables associated with it. Here are the different POIs, what we consider points of interest. Here are the mission givers or key NPCs that we need. Here are the stores, so on and so forth. We have that breakdown, and then when we start talking about, okay, is this using a unique harvestable or unique mineable, what is needed there, then we need to make sure that we're building it associated with it. When we're talking about the feature team, they're building, okay, here's how you harvest, here's how you mine, and the full game loop associated with that. So finding it, and then they're working with other feature teams, like radar and scanning is here in LA. So Dan was working with Kirk and Mark Haven and the team here for ping and trying to find it, and he was working with environment artists for actually building it, and then the effects team for actually putting in different effects and putting out different mining heads and so on and so forth. Think of feature teams as kind of like the heart and soul of the feature, and they are the ones responsible for delivering that feature. But they have a lot of dependencies and a lot of requirements that they pull from different support teams, whether those be content teams or other support teams or other feature teams.
I guess the way I was thinking about it, I used to be a swimming pool contractor, and I used to go to vendors and purchase engineering. So I didn't have to know how the engineering worked, the shape of rebar and how to put that. I would buy the engineering and then use that to build a pool.
From a housing standpoint, you were the general contractor. So the feature team is the general contractor, and then they sublet to an electrical team or to, let's say, a framing team or drywall team or so on and so forth. But the general contractor is responsible for the end product.