When you're concepting a ship for a gameplay feature that has a basic design but isn't implemented yet, and we don't know how it will actually work in the game, how does that affect your design?
TL;DRDesigning for unimplemented features is tricky, so the team presents a few concept options, then reviews them in first and second passes where every discipline flags problems early, since later changes are very expensive.
It's tricky. John and his team do a good job of giving as much information as we can. Everybody can do better. But let's take the Vulture. We haven't done salvage. And so we did quite a lot of designs for that one. We went one direction, it was quite basic, it was going to be that sort of transit van with some kind of recovery arm on it or something like that. And then we did a whole bunch of things, and eventually Chris was just like, no, this is the ugliest ship I've ever seen. And then we were like, all right, I guess we're back to the drawing board. Initially then it was a little bit of rule of cool, but it's driven by gameplay. It's like, okay, I'm sat in the cockpit, I'm doing this task. How do we make it as visceral and interesting as possible? And that basically was how it arrived, and so that's how we got the two arms and we got the tractor beams pulling all the pieces, and it was like, okay, that is going to make it a pretty cool experience, all this stuff coming in. But there's always that: you're not sure what problems you may hit.
You don't know what you don't know.
Exactly. So you come up with a couple of options, two or three, and then you present that to everybody so people can go...
Yeah. There's the key stages of the concept phase, where we provide some options to Chris of possible looks. Once he's happy with one, we'll move on to the next stage, where it's like a first pass. It's like a white box of the production phase. And at the first pass review, we get every single discipline involved to call out what they see, what could go wrong with this ship, so we can change it now. Going from there is the second pass, where it's like grey box final, where everything's locked. It's like, this will go into production next, but again, we give them the opportunity to call stuff out.
If it doesn't get called out there, it becomes a very expensive thing to change.