At what stage of the ship pipeline does designing sound start? Do you start working on a ship in the greybox phase, the whitebox phase, final art? Do you wait until flight-ready to begin?

Well, we can do appreciable audio work in all stages. So as it comes through whitebox, we can basically start gaining source for the different types of thrusters to give that ship character. But it's not until it becomes actually flight-ready that we can actually start implementing the sounds and actually play. We almost use the ship as a controller. So we actually pull these sounds in and we try and manipulate it to make sure it sounds right and stuff like that. So really a lot of the work gets done as and when the ship becomes flyable.

You try and get in and start thinking about it as early as possible, at concept stage. We want to do more work in the area of branding, that sort of thing, so that different manufacturers have a different signature to them in some way. So there's some work we can do outside of ships being ready: if we've got some idea of a brand identity of different manufacturers, we can start work there and keep evolving that too. So in a way, it's another one of those things that's ever ongoing. And it's another big job. The ship pipeline is probably one of the most consuming ones; there's a lot of ships in our game. And we're always reviewing them. We just had another review session just the other day, which had some interesting conclusions, I think. And we're going to improve those again. In my own opinion, it's a little bit too thruster-led at the moment. It's one of those things where you go down a certain path trying to get that right first, and then you bring that back and start to emphasize other elements again. That's kind of where we are.

Again, I think that comes from simulator versus fun. You want to make sure it's not too literal and not using too much material, but we know there's a context of hearing that sound in atmosphere when it's going to be in space and stuff like that. So they constantly get iterated upon. But there's dialogue assets, UI assets, thruster SFX assets and stuff like that. So there's loads of stuff to work on.

And it's hard to get it all right when it's still very much in flux further upstream. I think a lot of people don't necessarily realize that. It's something I keep banging that drum on. It's frustrating for us as well. If the game was finished, finished, finished, then you could make so much more progress on the audio in quite a little time. But the reality is it's getting better everywhere else all the time. We have to try to keep up with it.

And we're not always dealing with normalized figures. So it's not always zero to one. They might just say, okay, this ship now can go twice the speed. We rebalance all the audio then.

Yeah, so we're at the end of a lot of frustration with that as well.

Fun, though.