We first learned of the possibility of caves and underwater gameplay when you wrote the lore of Yela as having underwater caves. Can you elaborate on the interplay between the lore team and the environment art team and level designers? In some cases, it seems seamless, and in others, like ArcCorp's missing ocean, it seems like there's a disparity.

Well, as still being in development, as being an alpha project, we will always bump into our current tech limitations. And so rather than waiting until we can do everything perfectly, we release in iterations. Like the release of ArcCorp and Area18, that's not the end of it. We're always improving. And so I think our experience working with the environment teams and the level design teams when it comes to planets is definitely different than the game mechanic ones, in that every location, as we've seen with our hundred systems, has a narrative write-up, and that's the seed of everything that starts when designing these worlds. They get those short blurbs, and again we do a kickoff where we expand it out. And as the art team moves on to their schedule of, now we're going to start building this area, we've been going through providing additional lore, getting into landing zones: okay, we mentioned these couple shops, but it turns out we need a lot more stores to go in here, or in the end we have too many armor shops now so we need something else here, and going back and forth. And the environment art team, they're amazing, so we give them a lot of leeway just to take our inspiration points of, this is an icy moon, and go to town on it, and what they come back with is incredible.

Yeah, and after that kickoff, the level designers will go off and start to actually build the ground-level blockout of the space and stuff like that. And from that, we'll get a sense of exactly the size we're dealing with and the scope we're dealing with. And then, as Will said, that'll determine how many stores there are, how many little nooks and crannies there are where we need to populate with people, possibly, and stuff like that. So it's a very collaborative thing. But usually it will start with a kickoff where we go over the narrative write-up of the system, just to provide a launching place for conversation. And then we spread out from there.

And then after they've done their initial passes, we also come in for our detail pass later on: additional branding, figuring out NPCs, and all that kind of detail work that comes a little farther down the pipeline. So usually narrative is at the start, and also downstream at the end for the finishing touches.

And to specifically address the ArcCorp missing ocean thing: ArcCorp not having an ocean was a limitation of the tech at the time when we were implementing ArcCorp. It wasn't that they decided not to make one.

Yeah, I'm only going to touch lightly on it, because the tech limitations I don't quite fully understand. There were some difficulties in blending terrain with urban environments without putting that solid wall around that we have. And so they're still working on being able to transition between urban environments and mountainous areas and beachfronts and stuff. And that's hopefully coming soon. And so the plan for ArcCorp is to have areas that are natural spaces.