[Ben,] you are the 'which ship next' man. Are you also the 'how ship feels in flight' man?asked by Rayfighter
TL;DRBen Lesnick only gives broad direction on how a ship should feel, technical designers implement it, and flight feel is tuned last through testing since paper designs never work immediately.
Not entirely. I'm very broad: this ship should be this way, and then it goes to our actual technical designers to turn my vague feelings into how it actually works.
Yeah, that's where QA and Evocati and PTU testers as a whole come into play. They give us the feedback on a lot of that stuff.
That certainly is the last thing, because that can change at any time. Once the look is locked down, once the animations are working, the ship can go from being a tugboat to a super maneuverable ultra fighter with a couple of changes to a database. So we get to play them in many different ways until we find out what... Because one of the things about game design is what you have on paper will never work immediately in the game. I think the exception to that is the original Wing Commander, which Chris said was designed because Jeff George did all the missions and the specs on paper and they worked perfectly. That was back when you got your game designer from the pen and paper industry. And these days there's a lot more variables.