What's the general atmosphere in the studios right now? Are you crunching for 3.0? Are tensions high, or are you guys taking it in stride?asked by BriBase
So I could tell you how Austin is, you guys could tell us how LA is. So the thing is, for Austin, everybody is kind of heads down. One of the reasons that we're having this style show as opposed to one of our other ones is just because we don't want to bother anybody, because everybody is super focused. So while everybody is working a lot and heads down, there's also a level of excitement, because one of the things I always like to remind people is that a lot of the people that work at CIG, we work here because this is our dream game as well. A lot of us left other game companies or other jobs or moved halfway across the country because we want to play this game too. So everybody is focused because we want to play it just as much. And I've seen some really cool stuff, just people getting creative because everybody wants to be efficient and get stuff done. We want it out. And so just the other day they were doing a quick pick-me-up mocap shoot in the Austin studio where they took a bunch of ladders and they set it up and it was like duct tape, and they were really just like, we can do this just with what we have here and with this equipment. And they just made this really cool setup and captured a few animations. It's really cool to see everybody right now so proud of what they're working on and so close to being able to share it with all of you.
Yeah, I would say very much the same here. There are certainly long hours. There's people working insanely hard, but there's no sense of despair at all. We know we have something extremely cool that's about to happen, and everybody is together on that. I think the most despondency I have seen here is on our side. There's the support side and there's the dev side physically in the office. And I think the most frustrating thing is we want to support the devs more. We want to feel like we're working as hard as they are. But no, it's definitely a team that's cohesive and believes in something.
To piggyback on trying to stay out of folks' ways, if you watched Bug Smashers earlier this week, you saw it was very low tech. We were back to only the webcam. Our voices were muted. It was, all right, let's just sneak this in there, a quick 10 minutes, not to bother. You can hear everybody talking in the background. We're shooting under the radar right now to try to get something out for you. And to piggyback on the level of excitement, this is a true story. Ben and I got a Skype call out of the blue from one Tyler Witkin in the Austin studio earlier this week. And we're both like, what's Tyler doing calling right now? There's no meeting right now. We answer. And he's got the screen share to his 3.0 open. He's like, just look at this. Look at how cool this is. I'm in here, and I'm playing, and look at this base, and look at the textures here.
He was on the dark side of one of the moons, and he was zoomed out above it, and he was like, look down there. You can see the ship from all the way up here, and I can fly close to it. It was so cool.
Seriously though, we work a lot too, and a lot of it isn't directly in the game, and so we don't always have the time every day to check the latest build and jump in. There's a lot to do. And so I had a little free time. And so I downloaded the build. I used to be in QA, and so it was kind of nostalgic. And I jumped into 3.0. I went to Yela, and I had a rover, and I was just driving around, and as I got to the dark side of the moon, I was just taken aback. I'm not trying to tease anybody. I just want to share this experience with you because I know that we're all going to get to do it together soon. But yeah, I called Jared and Ben, and I just had to share it with them. I was like, guys, this is incredible. The headlights on the rover lighting up the path in front of me just looked unreal. The red glow on the ground behind me from the brake lights. It was awesome. And honestly, it got me so hyped even more than I already was.