When you're creating a new planetary system, what is the process for developing the lore of that system? You don't just pick a star at random out of the sky and say, let's make that one into a giant meat planet or whatever.

Well, I wasn't going to talk about spoilers and you just spoiled with the meat planet. Well, actually, for probably the first two years, a lot of it was very piecemeal just because the team was even smaller than it is. I mean, right now there's four of us. And it was just sort of slowly chipping away at individual systems and getting flavors. People would kind of come up with specific requests. And it actually wasn't until the star map started to become a reality that we kind of had to sit down and be like, oh, well, now we have to figure out the remaining 60 systems or whatever. With that, basically, we actually would do almost nightly sync-ups. It was Will, Adam, Cherie and myself just kind of sitting and brainstorming of, all right, we have Kallis system. What's exciting or interesting about that? That was usually actually the first question that we always ask: what is the specific character that that system would have that would make it feel unique and fun and be a place that people would want to go to? And also could theoretically be a nice generation pot for narrative and story ideas. So we always kind of started with what was the flavor and character of the system or the specific planet, and then we would kind of dig into it from there. And sometimes actually we would get ideas from the news. In one of the, I think it was the Orion Loremaker's Guide that just came out, we're talking about the gas giant Abyss, which is a coal black planet, which we had pulled from a National Geographic article. Because one of the things we learned very early on, because I know very little about science, is space is weird. And odds are that you can kind of say, oh well, this doesn't exist. And then weirdly enough, a week later, we would see an article that was like, oh, by the way, this exists. So it's very strange and it's fascinating and cool. So we were trying to pull real stuff when possible, but ultimately it always kind of came down to what was exciting or enticing about this place and would make it a fun, unique environment to go visit.

It's that slight sense of fantastic, I think, that will make things really stand out to people as well. Not quite a fantasy environment, like it could exist, but it's enough to wow you at the same time. With some of the concept artwork I've seen based on the ideas you guys have come up with.

Oh, I mean, the concept stuff is just insane. On a daily basis, it's amazing to look at. And it's a two-way process, too. The art teams come up with such fantastic visuals, and it's like, oh, well, we have to figure out a way to use that. So, yeah, it's definitely a multi-layered process.