Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Relay Recap

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:03

   [Music] hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse I'm Shawn Tracy and I'm Chris Robbins this week we'll take a look at some of the behind the scenes work that went into the mission playthrough we saw at citizencon but first let's see what's new in our player community yeah a couple of weeks ago synchronizers put together a large-scale meet-up event they rally their old mates for a cooperative in-game adventure always cool to see so many ships like

2. 00:00:51

   that working in unison yeah no it's hella fun actually every weekend there's usually some group posting so much cool shenanigans and we all share it over and fiddle chat Wow yeah it's fun when I sort of build systems and people play with them so totally totally agreeable so also on the community front many of you who attended citizencon got the chance to sit on a life-sized dragon fly I did I saw a life-sized me too I am how the picture taken but it was definitely unique photo op a lot of you got pretty creative with your poses we've posted all the dragonfly photos on our website so make sure to check them out not all of them I mean I got one with steve bender i've got one with okay so they're not always we go on it's not safe for work now on to development hopefully by now you've all had a chance to watch the mission playthrough that

3. 00:01:39

   was the corner piece of our opening keynote at citizencon yeah so the mission highlighted the up-and-coming planet Hurston is main landing zone level and some new systems and mechanics deputing with alpha 3.3 a lot of teams contributed to this mission in its various moving parts so here's Luke Presley Gareth born Ben Curtis and Brad Adams to shed some more light on the inspiration and design behind the mission the mission you saw at citizencon is just one of the new missions you'll find on Hurston we had a really big list of locations with Hurston that i had to think about the law involved in and how the family doesn't care a whit about the planet whatsoever they pollute it and they even bombard it from space to just test for own weapons and that was one of the things that me and varieties were very keen on showing and if you just imagine the gameplay and

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   can come out of that it's like both space and ground level action this gave us the idea of one of these satellites will malfunction and fall from orbit or be pulled down by some kind of nefarious action so what we ended up with was the relay due to it being this big piece of technology that would really heavily juxtapose the Savannah and then it would just look really cool so down relay was quite a large I'm taking from the props team this year yeah we really wanted this thing to look like it kind of falling out of orbit in our space what started out was quite a small communications boy that we're already an existing asset and we were just planning on making like a crashed version of it we really wanted to expand the scale of the asset the designers had a few kind of key gameplay mechanics that they

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   wanted to introduce and we needed to kind of back that up with the art we really wanted it to look great as well as play great so the whole idea of the demo was making something that the end user could actually play so the main challenge was making the climbing section not look too contrived so a lot of time spent in the visual damage reads read well things like the fins kind of bending forward they kind of like the scorch marks and the burn marks and not the read damaged kind of panels because if we tried things like falling over solar panels that you could walk off and all of that kind of stuff and it was like well isn't that convenient that felt that way so you thought about the rear section had a lot of structure and we thought about bending and breaking that and making that look a little bit more organic than simply oh it fell over that way so you can climb off it that

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   way isn't that very useful this obviously helped with making the the puzzles in it more believable one of the kind of key areas was the jumping puzzle there was a bit of iteration to kind of make it fun from the gameplay point of view but also from the our point of view once the pair have made their way up onto the main neck we wanted to make sure that it was really clear to the player where they needed to go okay let's try to make this job it's like old-school platformer game here all right we gonna do it glad - we gonna get rid up you got it

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   the beauty of our game is it's so transparent to the public with us having something live it shows that it's not fake so accidents can happen maybe can many pens can be forgotten desk and after you kind of made your way up to the nose of the relay the server blades that was the item that you picked up and kind of interact with and inspected to progress the mission on so we took one of the computers ship items and and yeah that's the thing about she kind of pops up and comes out the top of the nose but the the computer blades are something we haven't actually tackled from an art side yet and yeah as these are the things that we've got that the tech where we can pick up and kind of inspect them now want to yeah we spent a good extra time making them look really nice

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   as you can see here like we've actually got help us out for the actual prom what we actually do is set these helpers so that the prop actually aligns for the hand so there's a bit difficulties trying to get it fit in in the actual camera view for the player because this is what actually the player sees sort of first looked at the you know the biggest size that we have for the square type props and this is what you call like the max pose and then this would be like the min pose so like maybe holding a piece paid for something what this allows us to do is then blend between the Max and the moon pose so asset wise we only have two assets really just for this so a system so then once we jump in game you can then see the helpers are actually

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   aligning where the prof is in the hand but at the moment you can see the grips don't actually conform to the object so this is actually used in the current max pose that we have so if i dial down the grips you can then sort of see this is like a blend between the max and the min pose and again you can see it's not fully conforming yet so I then dial it down a bit more you start to see it coming a bit closer to the min pose per go down to about 0.4 you can start to see the calypso be used in the actual demo so this would be a value that we then set specific to that prop so that group doesn't get used for any of the prop other than this server blade there's some mission side of things there's various soft elements

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    that are on these props that might help you in the mission that you're and so actually saw in the demo that you wanted to look for the prototype blade this is what the inspecting allows you to do and also you know allows a player to sort of investigate props actually look at them closer and you know maybe there's some hidden things on different props or you know just allows you to investigate so it wasn't just making a random piece of tech that comes out of the panel on a mission it was actually you know this is progressing well it's giving us an understanding of what we want to deliver across the game and not just this one mission apologies yeah is especially dreadful today still alive I think what can I do for you on

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    this fine day it's an excellent question okay say satellite that's fallen from Alba and it has a prototype blade in it we want to check out in the demo itself we had it that the blade had been stolen by the scavengers but it's kind of going to be random in that the blade might already be there and therefore misses shorter or the blade might have fallen out during the actual wreckage itself so you might find it in a large chunk of debris kilometers away once you found the main transponder of the relay you might find that the scavengers have taken it to a stash house instead of the

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    underground facility all of these kind of things that really bring variants and excitement to the Mishnah study you can play it more than one time and it will guaranteed be different but the challenge for us was how do we then if it's missing let let the player find it like so we settled upon the idea of it this is kind of like the chip in your phone the GPS chip in your phone when it's powered up like if it's taken away from us I like the satellites can still kind of know where well know where it thinks it is so that then shows up on like the tracker again so that's how we got around that and it meant that you had to go like into the thing then so we were able to build out the unit of satellite as well the interior yes it

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    was one of those things that we really wanted that kind of excitement when you kind of go down into the neck and and you can kind of get that really kind of atmospheric feeling that they're kind of like the the whole thing's crashed onto the planet's surface we also realized that there was a lot more we could do than just the set of puzzles that you see in the demo so in the future we're hoping to have the kind of uncrushed version one of the actual things that we did very early on is we made the complete version first so that then it made our life a lot easier when it we were making the damaged version but it also means that we've got that to kind of now finish off to find a while and then I hope you'll be seeing that around the game soon yeah it was really nice to hear from the guys actually working directly on the mission I'm sure for them this year was a lot better too well

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    and easier I think better for the players to work on an actual mission that was about ship that's not you know your way but but more a few weeks away from the community and it's actually content that's going in the game it's not just for that yeah well I think that was you Sean well one of the people that was really pushing for this when we were discussing what we were gonna do off Hurston and we were sort of deciding you know is it a tech reveal or is it more like okay this is game play you're gonna get and you're like okay the games becoming more mature the idea was like you know yes we can go and put a specifically scripted mission together but let's build it right let's build the starting module that would be this mission template that you could have in different locations with different outcomes and I think it was really good for the team to focus on game mechanics

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    with them I think the other thing that we wanted to do was sort of start to work in some of the interaction the player interaction system that we're working on so you know taking the blade out interact inspecting it you can do the same with all items you have that will also be the way you'll be able to put attachments on or change stuff out on either weapons or you know look you pick up an item and it's not working maybe you turn it over there's a door on the back you open the door there's a room there's a dead battery take the dead battery out put a new battery in BAM it starts working again so there's a whole bunch of gameplay that opens up because of the item port system and the interaction system that we're building and I mean you know some people you know I'm sure we're like oh why are they bothering drinking coffee why are they bothering doing all these interaction things but it's all about this this world being a lot more tactile and it seems so simple that okay you'll just

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    get press a button and you interact with the thing you're just holding it perfectly well we go as far as you know all the different grips that we have to have whether it's two-handed whether it's one-handed there's so many different sort of subtleties within that so it's good still to do the coffee cup and you know the bar dream well yeah I mean yeah the whole goal is to make the game very I mean it's a first-person universe and we want you to be tactile and we want not just it be about flying a ship or be about shooting something so we want to have a toolset where people can put things and use things together yeah do really cool stuff with it and so that was one of the things that were showing off with the mission I and I hopefully you guys liked it I mean it was it was kind of fun building it and we'll be doing lot more cool stuff yeah I'm one of the maybe one of the last things to touch on is that the longer the designers have access to these systems the more

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    creative they will become with them so like you know at first you set up a system to grab the coffee cup grab a whiskey glass grab just a little card but as soon as they start combining them and super interesting ways and it just comes from having the systems a little bit longer and being creative with them I think you'll find a lot of really fun gameplay comes out yeah I know I totally agree so next week we will dig into the conclusion of the mission we'll get into the design of the underground facility the combat III and other elements that were at play nice well moving on to non silicon related updates we now have item previews for Moby glass and shopping kiosks working yes I'm coming so they're starting to look good there's still some polish and improvements to go in especially in the lighting but I think they'll be in shape by the time released

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    three point three awesome and speaking of kiosks and shops here we see some previous work on the branding options for splash screens this will lend an appropriate amount of variety to the vast array of shopping experiences throughout the universe yes by the way if you're shopping at a rest stop make sure your crime site isn't too high because I've heard those shopkeepers have a zero tolerance policy to criminals and they may be a little aggressively auto turrets as you can see here Halloween is just around the corner and we've got two different but equally chilling contests kicking off tomorrow to bring it in a pumpkin carving contest on Twitter and a spectrum bass showdown that challenged you to fight your most terrifying or terrified face in-game I'm sure Josh will love that yeah I think it will be an I sure will be it'll

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    be pretty brilliant in both cases so yeah looking for that and that just about does it for us this week Jared's back tomorrow with an all-new reverse the verse live following up on the new flight experience panel from citizen that panel is available watch now on our YouTube channel yes and all of our panels continue to be released through the end of the month so go check out whatever you may have missed cuz that's some really great stuff and people really took some time to put some nice panels together absolutely someone over here maybe did a few of them I appreciate but ya know they're great it's like a mini GDC so it's cool luckily lucky for us as developers to get to do this so we show you some behind the scenes stuff and so it's great a big thanks to the subscribers speaking of who make all of these shows possible yes and of course thank to all the backers out there we won't be I'll do this without all of your support

20. 00:15:36

    that's right until next time we will see you around thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen squadron 42 you can subscribe to our channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www.uvu.edu/library