What is the relationship between designer and gameplay engineer?
TL;DRChris outlines what he wants, and for cargo the requirements, such as a grid, physical cargo and kiosks, largely fell out of the design, which made it easy to pitch to the team.
Obviously, everything starts from Chris. He will outline what he wants to see. The cargo system, we knew it was the basis for everything. We knew we needed to be able to take cargo from place to place. All of these cargo ships needed to be able to store cargo. So it was kind of, what's the most fun way of doing that? We looked at other games where you do it all through a menu, and that wasn't what Star Citizen was, where we needed that physicalized sense of taking cargo from one place. The connection: I have a box and I can go down at any point and see that box. So we knew we needed to physically generate that cargo and show it in your ship. So we needed to set up a cargo grid that restricted where that could go. Just the evolution of our requirements really laid out: okay, well, we need a grid, we need physicalized cargo, we need a way of moving it, we need a way to buy it. We ended up with a cargo grid, and you can physically pick it up, and there's commodity kiosks where you can buy it. I don't want to say it's not rocket science, to downplay your guys' job, but the design of it kind of designed it.
It's a lot harder than what you say.
The design side of it, it was self-explanatory of what we wanted to do, which meant it was incredibly easy to sell that idea to the team of: here's what we want to do with this system, here's how we're going to get there. Immediately, there was no "well, I don't understand this." It was like, yep, that makes sense.