Maybe talk a little about New Babbage and the moons? What's coming in this, and how were they made?

I really think on the environmental side, I think some people just think, oh yeah, New Babbage Landing Zone, what's special about that? But I think a lot of what makes Star Citizen special is that our locations, even though we use procedural tools to help sort of create at scale, they're very specifically authored. We have a lore, we have a universe, we have a history, and you can feel it. And so when you visit the places, you feel that. And I feel like that's kind of one of the things that makes Star Citizen special, even though we don't have a billion planets or anything yet, you do feel like when you go to microTech, it is different than going to Hurston, for instance, or when you go to the moons. And as we build tools to allow us to sort of create that stuff a little bit quicker, but still with that same level of quality, it'll be great. But I really love that, and I feel like the environment team did an amazing job on New Babbage, and it's going to be fun to go around there and get your burger or get your coffee or just hang out. And there's another nice thing, which we also showed off on ISC: we have the ability now to sort of change our light states based on the time of day. So it's also the interior of New Babbage. One of the really cool things about it is it's one of the first implementations of that. And also there's a whole area, there's a whole bar with a DJ and at nighttime, there's laser lights and it's the party scene. And during the daytime, it's a bit more of a sort of chill day drinking scene. And it's equally cool. Both equally cool. The three moons, which I think we've also done some ISC on, they actually created those in, I think it was like two weeks per moon for one person. So it was three moons, each one took two weeks, basically. And those look great. I mean, they're some of our best looking ones. And now that team's off doing some stuff in another star system, which is looking quite good, but that's another story. But I think there's going to be a lot of fun. Definitely keep people busy for a while. So I think that's really cool.

The other big thing in 3.9 is the prisons, which I mentioned kind of at the top, which I think is a unique consequence when you have something like a law system. And so you now end up in a prison and you've got to do your time. And so there's a consequence to it. And we got some fun stuff, like you can potentially find a way to escape from the prison. You can also go down and sort of reduce your time spent by mining down in the caves there and basically getting what we call merits that will sort of reduce your time. And it's kind of a fun element. And it's also a very beginning building block of fully fleshing out sort of the law enforcement, which would include the bounty hunting side. So we've got a lot more stuff planned for the prison stuff going beyond this V1 implementation we've got, where we'll have the ability to have prison fights and all sorts of fun stuff. And on the other side, the bounty hunting side, we've got some stuff long-term where we want you to be able to track down other players, secure them, put them in your ship, take them, drop them off at the local Advocacy office, and then that person wakes up in the prison, and you'd be able to hopefully track them long-term. So we want you to basically play that Mandalorian-style game. When you watch The Mandalorian, it feels very much like the sort of Star Citizen experience. But anyway, the idea of bounty hunting and tracking someone is stuff that we're working towards. So the prison is one of the elements that's, again, we talk about putting bits of the gameplay there. And of course, we're going to build on top of it. And I think by the time we've finished all this stuff, it will be really cool. The prison system is one element that would add towards making your piracy and bounty hunting and sort of law enforcement cycles all work, and that's one of the elements, but it still needs other stuff and we will get there, and that's kind of our sort of plan. But it's this iterative point where we put another, it's like putting another brick in the wall, another brick in the wall and finally it's there.

It's always the last 10% which brings it from, okay, there's a base system here, to actually now it's a polished feature and you can use it intuitively and it's fun to use.

I think that's the challenge. In normal game development, you wouldn't be doing this out there publicly, but because of the nature of the way the game is, we develop it with the community out there who support us; it's a totally different way. And I actually quite enjoy it because you get the feedback and the early feedback. And we can also make things better and more stable longer term this way. But in the short term, it does present challenges because we always have to make sure that, for instance, we have as stable a build as possible. So we do spend a fair amount of time stabilizing a build that we may not necessarily do if we weren't having to release something every quarter. I think long term, it ends up with a better product because we're iteratively testing it and we're iteratively getting feedback. But on a short-term basis, it means that you always have to spend some time making sure you're triaging your current build and making sure it's working. So that's time that you couldn't be spending on a feature or polishing it. If you're expecting everything to be fully polished and working brilliantly the very first time you load it up, then you shouldn't be playing Star Citizen just yet. But then you would have to wait. That's the flip side.

That's the big advantage: people can play right away. They test out a feature. Not just, oh, I'm part of the last 10% where we polish everything, or I'm a beta tester. You're a part of it from day one almost.

I would say a project of this scale. There's definitely some smaller indie projects where it's very like that, and that's very cool, but a project of this size and this scale, there's not many people doing them, and the people that are, are the big publishers, and the big publishers would never do what we're doing because they just wouldn't want to have to be open to that much feedback early. Star Citizen is never getting canceled. We're just going to keep working on this thing until it is the best space sim, or universe simulator, I should just say, not really space simulator, because it's a complete universe sci-fi simulation game, possible, and that's kind of cool, and it's fun to be working on it, because I feel like Willy Wonka, and it's imagination, whatever you can dream is possible.