Do you ever do on-site studies to learn about environments before you work on them? Is it just personal experience, or do you ever actually go out and do environmental studies like that?

Also, another good question. As artists, we rely massively on our internal reference library. An example would be if I asked you, Jared, to draw a castle on a post-it note, and then I asked someone who'd had more of a classical art training to draw a castle, I'm saying the two would look very different, because they're calling from their internal reference libraries. So basically, what we need to do is constantly explore or expose ourselves to new things, be it architecture or design. So when we're talking about the transit areas, I remember going through the London Underground about six months ago, and I was just taking pictures of walls, ceilings. I was getting some very strange looks from the security. You can actually buy reference photography packs of cables, which we would look at and go, that's a great cable. That's a great cable. Actually doing research on a location is critical. You see other game studios or film production studios, when they do pre-production, they go to the location. They feel what that environment is, or they experience it: how it smells, how it looks, how it sounds, because you need to expose yourself to try and translate that digitally. Sometimes it's slightly harder for us, because we can't go to the moon just yet. So wherever we can, we try and base it on real-world locations or designs that have already been figured out. So just to bring it back to the transit, the London Underground: next time you're on the London Underground, just look up. Look up at the cables.

That's one of the things I did, definitely. Because when I was dressing and making the transit station, I had just gone to Paris and I got to see the Paris metro system. I took a lot of inspiration from there, and there was a lot of grandiosity to the architecture. I would look up and I'd see all these pipes, and everybody would give you looks because you're just there like, oh man, look at how that pipe works. And I like how all these things are working with one another, and you can see the history of this place and how things were made. And those are the things that you're constantly trying to develop as an artist. It's just like Ian said, this visual library, which just comes over time. You start to remember how environments that you've been to looked, and you try to pull from this library in your head and try to construct something believable. That's something I definitely did whilst doing the transit: going to train stations and taking pictures of really random things. And you try to do it in a bit of a subtle way. But yeah, it's quite important to understand what the environment that you're making is.

When I'm traveling with my family, I have two photo albums. One with the family in, one without the family in. [Referring to Jared's castle drawing:] So what you're thinking about there is battlement design, construction with those blocks, drawbridge design. But when you're thinking about that, you're probably recalling back to a film or a castle, but if you've never been to a castle, you would struggle. So that reference library is so crucial.