Luke Davis · Location Producer

Yeah, it's an interesting question. And I think just understanding the backstory and why I'm on locations right now hopefully gives you a bit of insight and everyone a bit of insight as to why it's quite a difficult question to answer, because we've been trying to get these locations out on time with everything that's needed in it. And I think as a backer community and everyone, they can see when we brought Levski out, it was a bit bare bones. It was very nice to look at. It was great. There could be more to do there. And we know there is more out there in terms of gameplay that we have to offer. And I think the first proper gold standard landing zone that we're bringing out is Lorville. And that was quite a bit more complex in terms of how much goes into it. We're learning a lot. And I think we discovered that shift on the ships. If you remember the Gladius, we did the damage states. It looked very new and different to what we had done before. And we were like, right, we've got it. We know what a ship is now. And ships after that were like, right, yeah, we know how to schedule them. We can build a pipeline from it. And now we know, we can tell everyone when they're getting certain ships. And obviously we have our fun discussions of going, well, is it in white box? Is it in gray box? And really on the locations pipeline, because of how much the tech has changed. If you think about just the planet tech by itself, a few years ago, that wasn't even a thing. And now it's what we're centering a lot of it around. And we have our procedural tech group, rest stops and our outposts and underground facilities. And basically, we're trying to aim to go, right, Star Citizen at one point is going to have 100 systems. How do we get there without being in development for 100 years, right? We need to be able to scale up. So a lot of the past year or two really has been about what tech do we need? How do we prove a lot of this out? And I think we've seen that on the rest stop side of things where we showed it off and we've gone, here's a variation of it, here's what the procedural layout tool can do in terms of you go to a rest stop and the interior may not always be, the shop may not always be at the same place, or that particular rest stop may not have the same shop that you're going for. So we've actually learned a lot. And this year has been about, as I said, restructuring the teams and making sure that, right, you as a landing zone team, here's a pipeline. We've created a pipeline this year, and it's similar to what we have on the ship side. We know pre-production, we know white box, and there's many fun, colorful boxes that I'm sure you would love, Jared, to slot certain locations into. We make sure that we don't move into a certain thing until we've done the previous steps, so to speak, right? Like an obvious one being making sure there's a level design document before moving on to the next bit and making sure there's pre-approved concepts. Everyone's on the same page on what characters, mission givers and bartenders we're going to have, what are going to be in all the shops. It sounds a bit obvious when you think about it, but it's like you pull everything together and you make sure, right, as a company priority, you want to work on CBD, you want to work on Area18. What does it mean? Get it out there. And there's actually stuff to do and everything's being considered, right? I think one of the good examples being our landing zones at the moment, where we put a schedule in place for Lorville and we're like, ah, we have to consider this and this and this and this. And this year we went, right, you know what, we actually need to start making common elements. So common elements are things like hangars and habitation rooms or transit, and essentially it's areas that we can make once. And let's say we have a utilitarian space station and if we have the hangar, we can plug it into another utilitarian, like a landing zone for example, right? And anything that needs that hangar, we can reuse that. And if we wanted to make a high-tech version of it or a super modernism version of it, we could basically go and create that visual archetype for that, knowing we've done the design for it, we know the metrics, we know what goes into it, and now it's just simply skinning it from an art point of view. And basically all that is so we can speed up development later down the line. So when we move on to something like Terra, we can start creating the common elements for the area and then we go, right, we simply plug them into certain areas, and then everything that's unique to the area is still very unique. We've learnt a lot on that side. If you look at Area18 now, we didn't know previously that we wanted to have a transit system and a spaceport in Area18, right? But now we do, based on all the lessons we've learnt on Lorville and based on what Chris, Erin, Todd, and Tony, everyone is wanting to aim for as a vision for the game. And we're taking that into account now. Even just a year ago, that wasn't a thing for Area18. It wasn't a thing when Area18 was in the game initially. And now that we're reconsidering it, we're even learning things in terms of, right, to make it run really well, there's changes in layout. And we've learned a lot on how to optimize our landing zones as well to make sure that there's a much better frame rate on that front. So there's a lot. I know I'm going in a bit of detail there, but even something like a system, right? Consider you have a big system versus a small system, something like Pyro, which is less inhabited. It has a small planet base, versus something like Terra, which is a lot more populated. It has multiple landing zones, even just on one planet, right? It's a lot more complex than something that we've done before. And based on everything we're learning now, we can take that into account in the schedule. Even down to space stations, we know how to do a space station, we know how to do an outpost, we know how to do an underground facility, right? And now we can go, right, let's make a utilitarian version of an outpost, right? And then we can put it into the correct system. We can make a super modern version of a space station and then it'll go in the correct system. And you won't be left going into a nice, shiny, going into Terra seeing old style space stations. You would want to see what you've come to expect. And also, right now, to elaborate on the fact that we did split the resources in terms of being focused on specific teams, it's also about going, right, we actually want more teams so we can do more. We have one landing zone team, but two, and we want a third one. And then we can have multiple things in development at the same time. But a lot of that is depending on our current hiring rate. And we are having probably the biggest push towards hiring. We've done quite well this year. And obviously we're trying to make sure that Squadron have everything they need as well. So they finally have, we've given them what they need, and now we're going, right, let's hire everyone we need to basically make the game that we're envisioning on that front. And I think once we get into the motion, if you take an LZ1 team, for example, they have a backlog that they're working from. And once we get through their task list, we can build up the team velocity, so to speak. And then we know how quickly they get through one landing zone, one space station and whatnot as a team together, and not just let's make art. Oh, and then design jump on it. Oh, then tech art jump on it and tell us what we need to change. Oh, and then we go back to art. And I'd say now we're following a pipeline, and we're doing it properly.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

You used the word velocity, and the word I like to use is momentum. Momentum is so important in game development. We've now built our first one, and that took this long, however long this was. And the next one, hopefully, if we're doing everything right, will take this long because of what we learned from the last one. And the one after that will take this long, and the one after that will take this long. So I think the short version of how long do we think it'll take to create a solar system is, one, it depends on what the solar system is, because not all solar systems are created equal as far as their needs. But two, where it falls on that platform, because every time we do this, we're going to get faster, we're going to get better, and we're going to get more efficient at it. So how long? Less than the one before it. We feel safe with that?

Luke Davis · Location Producer

I think that's a very fair assessment to make, but at the same time, we're probably adding more in than, Area18 the very first time it went in the game compared to what Lorville is now, there's a lot more. But as you said, I wouldn't say that's necessarily more time because we actually know how to build it. We have a pipeline and we're doing them a lot quicker than we have ever done before. Even looking at the schedule and how much we have just of last year, if the community realized, oh, how much did we actually make last year compared to how much we're making this year, even on the ship side, we are getting a lot quicker, and you can definitely expect that into next year as well.