One of the things we talked about months ago was the Turbulent studio's mission to be as self-contained as possible: to not just create environments, but to provide the gameplay and the feature sets for those environments. One year on now since taking that goal, how do you feel about your progress so far?

I think we're doing really good. Essentially, what we want to create is a team that's somewhat autonomous but not working as a lone wolf inside the company. So we are connected with other teams. We have reviews with other teams. And just this morning, we had a biweekly art review in which all the teams were showing absolutely amazing content. But when we work on the day-to-day, that's when we want to have more proximity with the team so that, for example, when the people in the UK are leaving work, if we have questions, it's much more simple if we have someone here to answer them. So I think so far, the combination between level design and environment art was absolutely successful. Then adding the tools team, who not only are helping us sometimes to understand things better, but also doing quality of life improvements for the artists and the designers, was also super helpful. And it's essentially our base of growth, where we want to grow the entire studio by adding teams that are relevant to each other so that we support each other even more in that area. And to be honest, when we first joined one year ago, we thought it would be quicker to ramp up and, let's say, do a star system. And that was probably very naive of us. Now we see the absolutely gigantic amount of work a star system takes to develop. So that's in terms of the scope, but in terms of the team we have assembled, the luck we had of having so many talented people... the 37 people that we signed and are working with us are top, top, top in their craft. So in terms of creating an autonomous team that can work together, we're so, so lucky.

We're autonomous, but it's important to know that we still ask for a lot of help from other teams in CIG, in Europe and everywhere. In no way could we have ever shipped hospitals or even anything without the help of the level design team in Europe, and everybody from VFX artists to environment teams to lighting artists everywhere. I think on a daily basis we chat with the level design team in Europe, and all the time we're asking, what's this bug? How do I fix this? Because they have years and years of experience under their belt. So for them, the problem resolution is five times quicker than it is for us, because they've seen all these bugs 100 times and we're seeing them for the first time and we're a little bit clueless. So we try to be autonomous, but at the same time, the support we're getting from every other team in CIG is what's helping us ship these things.

The people were so welcoming. It was pretty amazing to see that. And to echo on your question, Jared, I think we're doing great environment-wise. It's been super nice. I think that the ramp-up's been great. On the gameplay side, we're still looking for more hires to be able to totally dive into complete gameplay loops. Though on the design side, like Neno was talking about, we're moving forward with puzzles and what we're able to action today. I feel like we still have ways to go to dive fully into new gameplay features, but we know which ones we're looking at. I can't talk about that. And as Guillaume was saying, the strategy is going to be to have a team that can complement the group here to basically iterate together gameplay, level design, design tools, art, concept, everything into one giant loop.

[These] are all things that are in the works, but again, as we discussed earlier, the game development side of Turbulent has been on for a year. Anyone who has worked in this industry knows that a year is nothing; it's a very short amount of time. So just to have been able to give to the community what we have so far, like the hospitals, and put all these processes in place, that takes time. It's insane the amount of stuff we have achieved in such a short time. And Guillaume can correct me, but about half of that year was just ramping up and finding the right people for the job. So all in all, it's six months of development. So it's very inspiring what we're able to achieve with these amazing talents across the board.

And going back to the gameplay side that Ben mentioned, can we do a shameless plug? If one of you is a lead gameplay programmer, drop us a line. We're looking for one. We've got some really great topics for you. Contact us and we'll talk.