These new procedural tools [like Claudius] are allowing you to do a lot of the systemic audio we've been waiting to do. Is it easier to create for procedural stuff, or to just make a bespoke thing that's done? Personally, do you like making the bespoke stuff more, or do you enjoy working in the procedural stuff?

For me, I love the systemic workflows that we're going for because it means that I don't need to open three or four ships and do some little tweaks on those ships. It means we can do broad strokes on hundreds of ships all at once, ships that don't even exist yet. Without even opening that ship in the editor, we can create that content that then exists within the ship, and then we can move in to individual ships and add the little touches afterwards that elevate them to a level that we wouldn't have before. To use your example of the two different contexts you mentioned, it is both of those things, because it'll be: here's a huge block of content for procedural systems, and it's just, here's 50 loops that we need to make for maybe ambience. Or I've got a big block of content for impacts on me right now, and I can be making 200, 300 different little one-shots for things impacting the ship. And that takes a long time, but once it's in, unless we have a ship that's made of something else, maybe it's made of jelly, I don't then need to make new content, because reasonably all the ships are made of metal. So it's a good mix of: we're making changes that will persist across all ship entities, and then to take that to a higher level we'll be able to go and make those little touches and then improve ships one at a time.

To add to that, I would say even knowing how the system works and even helping design them as you're doing, I think it brings up the excitement of working on these systems. Because if you're told, okay, you have to make 200 sounds for this impact system, if you don't know what the system is, you're like, wow, this is 200 sounds, that's a lot. But when you know what the outcome will be, this gets more exciting and you know where you want to go. So I think this helps a lot when creating these massive asset banks for systems.

And we've seen that manifest as well. Just yesterday, we'd been working on thrusters and different vehicle systems. Corentin's started authoring thrusters for just one ship in the game, but it's a system that, after we throw the content on it, will persist across all ships by class, and then they'll have individual little touches on top to make them unique.

All ships that use thrusters from that manufacturer kind of thing?

Yeah, but then each individual ship will have its own thruster audio signature. We're looking at doing things with quantum travel exits. So when a ship arrives, say you're just floating through space and a really evil-looking ship comes out of quantum, you will hear a big impact as it finishes traveling. And it's somewhat akin to how you know what a TIE fighter sounds like when it's coming, and it's trouble. That's what we want to invoke with that. And I saw a quick demo from Corentin yesterday of the thrusters that we're currently working on, and we went through some feedback together on how that system's coming along, and versus what's in the game at the minute, it's a resounding difference. It sounds like you're bolted into the ship and each little movement that you make is meaningful. Even just watching it rather than playing the game itself, you feel like you're in that ship and it's really maneuver-happy, and it really elevates the experience.