How do you prioritize what ships we work on? We've heard that Squadron 42 needs can bump something up to the top of the list, but not every ship that we've put into the game is used in Squadron 42. So how do we decide what the next ship to put into production is?

So it's a very fluid thing. I don't think there is really one particular... No, there's many different aspects to it. So you obviously mentioned Squadron. That's a big driver of it. Another one is ensuring that there is some ship content in every quarterly release. Because every ship takes a different amount of time, and we have different amounts of resources in different studios. If you gave the same ship to the three studios that work on vehicle content, they would all come back with a different end date, because they have different capacities. So depending on when we want a ship to release defines when we want to start it, which also puts other gaps in the schedule. So if we know we want to have a ship finish at X date, and that team is currently working on something that's going to finish at Y date, which is six months before, we can't just have those guys sat around for six months not doing anything. So if there's a ship that those guys could do in six months, that will go in there, which explains why sometimes it seems quite random, where a ship will go from not on the roadmap to suddenly on the roadmap, done for the next quarter, because that swap has changed. It might also be tied to gameplay features. We try and work with the gameplay guys to go, right, this quarter you're doing this gameplay feature. When possible, we'll try and deliver a ship. That's not always possible. Sometimes we'll slip on the vehicle side, sometimes they'll slip on the feature side, sometimes we'll both slip and we'll slip different amounts.

Needs of the company as well, sometimes what Chris wants, what he wants to see in game too, what John wants to see in game, what makes sense with other things that are in game.

Yeah, there's no point just... I mean, we could sit down now and completely change the schedule and just focus on doing capital ships that we have in our backlog.

We wouldn't see a ship for nine months.

Yeah, you wouldn't see a ship for nine months, and that ship is for a very small amount of the community that have it. You could argue that it'd be better time spent doing multiple smaller ships.

I think you also made a point earlier on about picking the right artists. I imagine not every person who builds ships for Cloud Imperium Games has the aptitude or skill set to work on every type of ship. Some artists' personal styles would be more appropriate to work on a Drake ship, and some artists' styles would be more appropriate to work on a MISC ship. And when you have an artist come free, you want to keep that artist engaged. Like you said, you want to keep them working. And, yeah, we wanted to do a Drake ship next, but this artist isn't really the right fit for Drake, but they are a fit for MISC, so maybe we pull something from MISC up ahead since they have that opening, to keep them going.

Yeah, it works the opposite way as well. For instance, on the 890 Jump, there's certain artists that needed ramp-up time to get used to that art style, because they'd been working on something from Aegis or Anvil beforehand, which doesn't have the curvy flows to it. So we need to think about that when we're also scheduling in the ships.

And as a reverse of that as well, we can also sometimes find that if someone's worked on the same style of ship for a long period of time, they're great at doing that, but they're absolutely sick of doing that art style. They're begging to do another one.