Back in 2015, we said that all Squadron 42 levels were in greybox. Now, with the publishing of the Squadron 42 roadmap, we can clearly see that many levels are not in greybox anymore. What happened there?
TL;DRLevels were redesigned because better tech and new ideas meant they weren't where the team wanted them, and Squadron 42 won't release until it is right.
We went back in and redesigned them, simply. We had better tech. We had other things we wanted to do. The procedural planet system came online. There's so many different things and so forth. And we didn't feel like the levels were where we wanted them to be. And so we went back through so much of the stuff. Some of them were changed, some of them were moved around and so forth. But it was basically just a decision, because Squadron is not coming out until it's literally the perfect game. This for me is... I'm getting long in the tooth here, and this is probably the last thing I will work on. And I know people like Chris and other people feel the same: when we do this, it's going to be absolutely amazing. And so if it's not right, then we're going to make sure it's right.
One of the things that I really enjoy in educating our backer community is that game development is not a linear line. It's not A to B to C to D to E all the way to Z and you're done. There are review gates. There are points where you go back. Most famously, I think one of the Metroid games just recently announced that they're going all the way back to the beginning, starting over. We're not doing that by any means, but it's a good analogy to the type of review and step back and reevaluation that happens in all game development. And so when Squadron was in greybox in 2015, that was the expectation.
It was a different game. That's what I'm saying. We went back. We looked at tech with the support we had and so forth. And we knew we were pushing it. And so we really looked at what we wanted to do. We changed up a lot in terms of just the tools and the shaders and stuff, the way we do the art. There's a lot of different things we could do, so we wanted to change that up in terms of the characters, the way we do them, the way they live and all that kind of stuff. How we want to make certain events play out. All those things have a big effect on stuff. We're not here to make something average. If it's not amazing, then it's not coming out of the studio.