Paul Jones · Art Director / Vehicle Concept Art Director, Foundry 42

I think I'm in my fifth year now, so the expectation is it would get easier. But I think every year the bar just gets higher and the expectations and the quality of what we have to provide just increases. And it's just one of those things. Sometimes you just get it. You knock it out of the park first time, like you say, and everyone's like, great. Sometimes everyone's like, great, and then Chris is like, I hate it. And that for me is, nobody likes that position because you've got it wrong essentially, but sometimes it happens because it is art and it's just not what Chris expected. And it's just how do you... because you've always got deadlines with these things. So basically we have this pretty down pat now in terms of how long we assign to each segment of the development process. Obviously, there's a sale date tied in. You do have these heavy demands of trying to hit these deadlines. Otherwise, there's a big knock-on effect. For me, of course, you've got the artistic pressure and you've got the, okay, how do we make this cool? Is this going to work for the game? Is John going to be happy with this? Is Nate going to be happy? Is Chris going to be happy? Is Todd going to be happy? And then you've got, are we going to hit our dates?

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

These are done so far in advance as well for some of them, like the designs. We had that RTV last year for the three Drake ships. So the design for this ship was done back then, really. So that was November? December. We're in June now, so that's seven months.

Paul Jones · Art Director / Vehicle Concept Art Director, Foundry 42

Yeah, and it's because this actually was scheduled in, in terms of extra time, because it was going to a concept artist who wasn't familiar with working on ships. So a lot of our timeline is sort of worked towards a senior artist. So for this one, we essentially doubled it, because I know there's going to be more back and forth. I need to give myself time to react, to think, to solve the problems, because at the time there were still five other ships going on at the same time. So it's not like I'm just working on one ship and we can noodle away and just craft this beautiful thing and solve every single problem. I've got five other ships, one FPS weapon, two other ship weapons going on at the same time.

John Crewe · Vehicle Pipeline Director

So they're all in different stages. So it's not like they're either linear one after another, or they all start at the same time and finish at the same time.

Paul Jones · Art Director / Vehicle Concept Art Director, Foundry 42

And you're swapping, it's that changing of gears. So you're swapping from, let's say, the Origin style to Drake style to Aegis. And you're going from a small ship to a massive ship to a career starter ship. And the career starter ships are always interesting because they're trying to solve something very specific. And so it is quite important that you get the look right, but also the gameplay experience.