Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Death of a Spaceman
Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment
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hey everybody welcome to calling all devs the uh series where we take questions from you the star citizen community and pose them directly to our developers on this show we got something a little different a little special it's october it's halloween time it's spooky time and we of course are going to talk about death of a spaceman now death of a spaceman was first introduced back in 2013 we're going to get the update on where we're at now where we're going forward and to do so we have two esteemed guests with us in no particular order we got richard tyrer from the core gameplay group hi richard hello how's it going and um this is chris right that is right yes the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated is what i would think really appropriate it's just it's been a while since we've
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chatted so uh uh this one's probably gonna go a little bit long whatever you we're all we're all very loquacious so i'm gonna sit back let's jump into this death of a spaceman as a primer let's introduce it to people that we haven't talked about in a while just what is it the idea with death of the spaceman is to try to get uh some kind of meaningful uh consequence to dying in a game so like you know most games you play modern games anyway uh you die you respawn back you know a few seconds before you die and you keep on doing again so it doesn't really feel like there's much consequence to dying and a lot of times your uh gameplay approach uh is pretty sloppy i mean like i know when i'm playing uh you know a standard fps shooter in the story mode i just keep blasting into
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people i don't really think about it i die i start game uh whereas if you play you know and you know a game like say for instance demon souls all the years ago and all the ones past it you know there's real consequence i mean you die and uh you know you've got to fight back through all those enemies you've lost all the experience that you've gained the souls in the case of demon souls but the thing with demon souls and it was one of the you know it was one of the things i was playing it reminded me of the good old you know the days of in the 80s or the 90s when you'd make games and like you know dying was was was had a real consequence you wanted to finish your level before you died or else you had to do the level again right so so and consequently when you finish the level or achieve something you really felt you know proud and happy you're doing yourself which is definitely uh you know i think one of the mechanics
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that makes demon souls and it's a subsequent games um you know so uh both infuriating and rewarding when you manage to do it um so so kind of the idea was like you know what kind of consequence can we have in uh our persistent universe uh in terms of i know how do we encourage the players to stay alive how do we encourage the players to keep uh their ship or repair the ship intact we don't want people to just go oh i got a scratch i'm just going to respawn in a perfectly you know pristine state for you know the character of the ship and so death of the spaceman was sort of an idea to to give an association with your player character in the game in terms of this is who you are and you want to keep yourself alive as possible as much as possible and identify with your your
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your avatar as an actual real person and character and you care about and you want to keep alive and then you know finally when you know you've had one too many close calls or lost one too many battles you no longer can be uh you know resuscitated uh you know uh and you have to pass on essentially to your next kid which will have you call out basically who your next kin is when you're sort of doing your character creation and you know that idea is you you know whether it's passing it down to your son or your daughter or a relative or a friend or whatever it would be you you call it out and when that does your possessions and reputation kind of passed down but not all of them right so there's always you know like this inheritance tax and um you know there's you know the sins of the father aren't fully
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invested on the sun but there's a little bit of that um and so you know the idea would be you know yeah you would want to you know live as long and a healthy life as possible before you pass on to uh your progeny or whatever and uh so that was the that was the inspiration of death of the strengthened to really give a sense of um you know kind of close association with your avatar and your character and you know if at the end of the day you've got to be there at your you know essentially you know the god view of the funeral of the character that you spent a year or so venturing around star citizen there should be a tear in your eye when it when it happens and so that that was that was the goal and so it was really a mechanic of how can we do that um inside the game you know inside our science fiction setting uh which was you know coming up with
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this concept of um you know in the future uh you know with all the medical science we have in states that you may consider you would be dead now you would not be able to be brought back to life or repaired potentially we could do that in the future but maybe we could only do it so many times and so you know in some ways it's a little like the old school of you've got so many lives right and once your lives are done the game's over uh and you know you know the concept was that you know that maybe the more you know the the worst the death you know you're in some big fireball that's more serious in terms of you know the lives you lose off your character than it would be if you know you you were down and bleeding out and someone came and got you and managed to repair you you know fix you up in the medical table
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or a hospital um and the idea would be yeah you would want to you know not run out of lives and potentially there could be things you could do over time go get some gene therapy or whatever that may be out of life back to you or whatever but you know i'm talking lives in a game a sense here but in general we're trying to put it inside the fiction of the world but the idea is to have real persistence to your avatar and you know wear and tear it's also one of the reasons why we've got things like where in the game uh you know uh is essentially one of the things that we have for equipment we're gonna have for characters you know you're gonna get older you're you know things are gonna get old and you know all that we have parts of that in the game but it's not fully working but that's all systems that are on the plan or we need to turn on properly because that's part of the problem with what we're doing right now is we're building
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this you know incredibly complicated interconnected sort of simulation system and not all the pieces are there quite yet so even though we built some of the pieces and we can functionally do stuff with them because the other pieces aren't there the whole system doesn't work yet and that is actually one of the challenges of building uh a game the way we're building it sort of while people are playing our building and deaf spaceman is a good example because it's something that you know i talked about at the very beginning as a as a core concept it's always been a core concept but we're only just now getting around to starting to implement the the actual functionality and the gameplay features that will enable and i think when you have it that will make people behave very differently in the verse which is going to be super cool yeah now you buried the lead there at the end that's big news we are now uh beginning
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the process of actively putting this into development it's been this idea it's been this core tenant of star citizen's uh character since it was first introduced uh you just gave us a wonderful refresher so they just still on the website if you haven't read it you want to read even more detail you can check that out but that basically brings everybody up to speed with where we're at here now richard we are beginning the process of putting these things into active development of that process where we're going to start working on it start testing these ideas building our tier zero implement implementations where do we start so well we've already kind of started so body dragging was the first feature that we released that kind of gave the premise to be able to manipulate uh you know dead bodies but as chris calls out you know death is going to be a really important factor in star citizen now our death this kind of three deaths along the
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spectrum this kind of what we're calling like the down state so that's kind of like when you've you know your health has gone to zero and you're there and in that when you're in that scenario you'll be able to kind of choose to kind of stay there and be like okay i need my buddies to come and rescue me i need the you know law enforcement to come and help me or maybe i'll pay for some insurance that rescues my body or something like that then there is the kind of like you've died in terms of you've you've given up the ghost nobody's coming you're like okay that's it i'm leaving that body there and i'm gonna go back to a hospital and be revived and but that's kind of part of your dna that dna is kind of going to be reimpregnated into essentially a clone of you and then you'll be able to then go back to your location and you'll be able to see you know your dead body there and as long as nobody's been there you'll be able to retrieve your gear and so on and stuff
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and then the third aspect in terms of like you passing on to your next of kin and that kind of thing so what we're actually evaluating now is kind of how this is integrated into kind of like the core healing gameplay and the actor status so we already did kind of some of the actors status with uh you know temperature in terms of hypothermia and hyperthermia and things like you know starvation and things and what we want to do now in terms of the next iteration of this is what we call like the healing and active status t1 and what that will do is introduce it will introduce drugs so you'll have a blood drug level and you'll be able to manipulate things but it will also introduce all the different statuses that are surrounding you as a character for example when you're in battle and you take a really bad wound to the arm you know you might say okay i've got a fracture you know so my arm i've got a permanent fracture i'd
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have to go back to the hospital to get that repaired otherwise i'm going to start to suffer some status effects that is surrounding but if you keep taking damage and you keep taking more damage that that fracture might turn into um you know an actual a break and then it might turn into actually coming out of your arm kind of thing and and the level of that status will dictate the level of cover and level of healing that you need to to get to go and basically get that healed so you can go to uh you know a med bay and get them repaired but it also allows other people to act as like support roles and come to say help you and you let's say you've got a really bad broken leg which means that you can't walk anymore because you know you haven't just like fallen over and taken a little scratch you've repeatedly taken damage in your leg and not gonna get just you know you've not gone to heal it because medipens for example will no longer just be like oh i'm a
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pen and i'm full health you will have these permanent statuses like hypothermia and hypothermia and so you'll have to have um those will be only be able to be removed when you go to these locations either a medical bay in a ship or a medical bay at these hospital locations so when essentially you go into that down state that's where body dragging you'll come in so that people can come in and drag your body back to the medical facility we're going to have obviously the medical um gun in terms of the multi-tool attachment we'll be able to inject um essentially the material that's inside the medipens but a stronger version of that so the meta pens will basically turn into something that is kind of stabilizing you in the moment um you know you'll still be able to like replenish your health but if you've got a bleed or something like that it'd be like a clotting agent that stops that bleed and that kind of allows you to get
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back to safety and at that moment in time you can then go okay do i want to go on a push on but i've got this status effect that's kind of you know causing you know if i go back to the fracture on my weapon's now swaying more and you know similar to how we have the eyeball effects for the other things and and that progression of the active status t1 in terms of the different limb statuses that you're going to have in terms of whether you've got a traumatic brain injury whether you've got leg injuries whether you've got arm injuries whether you've got internal bleeding in terms of your organs the level of those statuses will basically go up and go up up to the point of view where you're like i can no longer function now and i need somebody to come out and you'll have plenty of opportunity to to back out so it's not going to something that's going to be like oh hello you've broken your legs and that's it it's going to be something like the other actor's statuses that it's like okay you're going to have junction points where you can make a decision
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were you like should i go on and it's that moment like in the arctic you know you know i'm close to the i'm close to the edge but i might lose my toes so you know if essentially what we're working on right now is that kind of like healing circle and that healing gameplay and it also allows that cooperative gameplay when you do go into this down state which covers like is it the first version of the three death states kind of thing that's the state where you really want to you don't want to go to the next stage because as soon as you go to the next stage that is what what chris touched on in terms of like it's almost like the dna integrity because you're going to go to the hospitals and you know when we release this it'll be your hospitals will be live in in the locations you'll be able to go to these and almost like download your dna matrix into the hospital database and say okay
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like if if my body is unrecoverable or my friends can't get to me then i'm gonna i'm gonna you know kind of die and have to be recloned into this body that my dna is gonna have to be reimprinted into this shell and during that process that's the process where your dna can kind of fracture or kind of lose some of its integrity and that is kind of what chris touched on in terms of like you're losing a life in terms of gameplay terms and that is what's happening as it's being imprinted into you and and depending on the the manner of your death and depending on like oh if if you've just been ignoring all of these stasis and all of your arms don't work and your legs don't work and you've got a brain bleed you know some of that dna integrity as it's been injected back into your body can be re-inherited from those from those basically systemic statuses that you've had and that means
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that you might come back in your body with a prosthetic arm or you might come back that you know your eye color has changed or you're not as tall as you used to be and because you know there's something that's gone wrong with that dna in printing so uh that's kind of what we're working towards now in terms of that hospital healing gameplay loop active status the extension of the active status system that we put you know we went live with before and obviously body dragging and all of that kind of setting your spawn point in terms of game terms and the life that's the stuff that we're working on right now and to be honest that's going to be a significant change in how people play the game because when you go to the next or the third stage you know where you're shedding your tear i'm not shutting my tear at the character i've lost i'm shedding my tear at the inheritance
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that i've just been levied you know and it's at that stage that that permanent permanent death where you're you're having to pass on to your next of kin where it is you know the sins of the father you know you're still going to have some of your reputational statuses but you know they may not be as high as they were because you know it's like oh you know your dad was part of xyz but you know you're gonna have to prove yourself and so and that kind of that kind of loop is is a really unique aspect in terms of an mmo and and that really ties into that you death has a real meaningful consequence like in demon souls you know the amount of times you get to the boss and you're like you just you get to that one percent you know and your palms are sweaty and you you know you're moving the mouse and you're like no you know that that all of a sudden changes
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you know when you get to the edge of that cave and you're like yeah i'm just gonna go in there and you know what you know if i find something in there that's not friendly to me then you know what i'll just respawn no now it's gonna be well if i respawn what happens to my ship you know am i going to lose my gear i'm going to have to come back to it because obviously physical inventory ties into it and and then oh will i lose some of my dna integrity and how's that and all of a sudden it changes the choices you make along the journey that you're going on it's critical yeah i mean we're gonna i mean you know one of the other things we're doing is that we're not going to be despawning player bodies anymore so when you die the you know the body that's there and all the equipment will will stay there so if you end up having sort of re-cloned you could essentially go back to
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where you died and recover some of your stuff and see the scar skeleton of your previous incarnation but that the other thing i would say is that the cost of um you know sort of the new life basically the and you're only going to have so many of these for the degree there's much more than getting rescued or having someone come and grab you and and fix you up so you'll so you know there's there will also be an economic um uh you know incentive to live to essentially not just go oh yeah i'm just going to respawn because there you're only going to get a very limited number of those and be there but it can be very expensive so you would prefer to have other players or your friends uh or a service come and uh you know get you and fix you up and i think that i think i'll be really useful and important because like even in gameplay like
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that like okay if i'm now exploring in a corner of the universe that doesn't really have a lot of people my level of risk there is much higher than if i'm in the middle of you know a really well traveled area of space i think in terms of gameplay things like uh you finally getting around to the full sort of health depth of a spaceman setup and the physical inventory uh the gameplay potential and uh you know just what's gonna happen and the interplay with players is is you know i mean i don't there's not other games that i think of that quite have all this stuff all together to do this at this level of detail and i you know personally i just think it's i'm super excited to have these come together and we talked about them for a long time
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obviously it's taking a while but that's because we're building something incredibly high fidelity with all this detail but with all this scope uh but it really will change a lot of the gameplay mechanics a lot of how people are playing the game right now just you wouldn't want to do it just wouldn't wouldn't make sense and and i think that's super exciting yeah and and hopefully you can see some of the method to the madness of the development because it's something it's not like hey overnight we go hey let's just add this cool thing it's like okay it's it's underpinning these things so when we add like actor status when we add eating and drinking when we add physical inventory when we have the ability to hold things in the hand from the grenade from through t1 all of that all of that is tying into the bigger picture of what we want to achieve and that core gameplay and just have access to everything i want and
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you know there's no consequence there's no there's no feeling if that you're in the world because of you know you have this access to this infinite bag of holding this consequence of i'm going on a real adventure the things that i take with me are the things that i have access to the ships that i have dictate how much storage i have and how much you know what i have access to inside those ships do i have a kitchen that provides me food and drink do i have a medical bae i do i got room to take a body with me is he gonna wear support armor that allows more replenishment of the medical gun that can revive me when i'm down in the cave and we can get out together all of a sudden that becomes a and not just a single player oh i've just got access to it all of a sudden those shared experiences are the things that make it a true experience and that is something that
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all of these individual systems you know in isolation they're really cool and you know we put a lot of effort and a lot of heart into them and you know they're really they're complex because we want it to be scalability on the size of star citizen but when you pull them all together and they start talking to each other and they start you know okay have you got space for the amount of food and drink you need have you got space for ammo what guns are you taking am i gonna take the grenade launcher well i can only fit so many you know magazines of that well maybe i should take an energy rifle because that recharges and and all of those different decisions all of that ties into making it you know that's when all of a sudden you go hold on a minute the game was already we just needed to have these systems start talk to each other i feel like at some point we need to rebrand this to the life and death and then in parentheses and taxes
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of a spaceman it would be that would be the more appropriate i mean i mean we you know i mean ultimately i mean we do joke a little bit about but but you know the goal with star citizen is to you know essentially it's a it's a virtual life i mean and and we are trying to simulate or you know obviously in a more primitive state than the real world but simulate all the things that would happen like naturally you would feel okay if i'm going to go the antarctic i've got to like bring my supplies with me i've got to worry about if i get hurt and all these things that you know i think create great opportunities and also great cooperative gameplay opportunities right so there's a lot of things that we talked about clearly if you're you know going to be adventuring in a dangerous place having equipment and having people with you is probably a good thing because otherwise something
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goes wrong you're by yourself uh and so i i feel like when we get a lot of i mean and you know there's been a lot of engineering just on the very low level and some scalable stuff that we have to do to enable a lot of these systems and you know but you know over the next year or two years we've got a lot of this stuff sort of coming online and i feel like when they all start um interoperating together then it will be an experience like no other i mean i don't know another game that does it to the the level i mean there's some games that do yeah you know some really nice i mean red dead redemption 2 is great i mean there's a whole bunch of other stuff that sort of does uh elements of this but i think not to the the scope and the level and the detail that we're doing and that's one of the reasons why it's taking so long so i mean you know that is you know it's definitely taking longer than i'd
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like it to do and it's part of my frustration when you know i you know people are like wow where's my gameplay loops and i'm like but you know it's it's going to be so awesome you've got all these elements you know i can already i know the big picture i know how they're all going to pull together and it's just one of the things that when you're making a game live developing in front of people that people experience you wouldn't normally like normally most game developers will tell you in the old ways certainly was when i was making wing commanders and all the rest stuff and richard probably can opinion on when on all the ones that he was making um that you know the game really only comes together near the end right so you all these disparate parts and you do it for years you know especially in today's world people work on it for years and years and years and then it really only comes together sort of kind of in that sort of alpha to
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beta stage and you know we're sort of i know we say we're alpha but we still got a lot of features to come and normally a traditional alpha would be you've got your um you know features there but you don't have your content polished and then beta is all content and features are in there and you're working on the books um so a lot of it doesn't i mean like you know wing commander you weren't playing through until you know a couple of months before we released the game and it was all in different pieces uh but in the way we do star citizen people see us develop all these pieces in different parts and they go why you got that that just seems silly that you're focusing on this aspect over here when i don't leave this everything over here well we are we have a plan they're all working uh you know we're working all those pieces and when they all come together it's going to be a great experience you already have already there's elements of
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it now so you can sort of go around an event you know run around the verse and yes there's gonna be a lot more but there's already fun stuff to do and there's the social aspect of it and i see amazing videos every single day it's like one of the funnest things for me to see cool videos by whoever like there was one that terrada just did and i on 311 that i uh that was shared around here and there was someone i mean the point is this is really cool stuff uh that people are doing with the sandbox we're building even though the sandbox is unfinished but you know whether it's you know me or richard or todd pappy or tony zeravec you know we're all operating at the level of you know we kind of we see the matrix we just haven't built all the elements of the matrix yet but we know it's coming together and when it's done it'll be like in this amazing simulation
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and uh you know our only frustration is because it's not like me and richard are like oh yeah guys take longer it's like richard and todd and everyone else are like is it really going to take you that long through that future you sure you can't do that in half the time so we're always on their case so i know i know everyone out there is on our cases but it's sort of like we're on the other way around but you know some of this stuff just takes time to build it to test it and also to do it when you're doing it in a live game right because we are building in a live game so you can't just break everything by introducing a new feature you've got to make sure the old features work as well um but you know to be honest with you it's a it's a it's actually a fun way to do it because a lot of how we're doing it also informs our development as we go along because yes we've got our big plans but some of the you know feedback we get helps
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tweak how things are coming in or what areas we'll address or what things worked well or what things didn't work well that we need to adjust and if you were doing it the old way you wouldn't get that feedback you'd just basically put it all out there you would it'd be your best eye your best shot at it and then you'll be like oh well we gotta fix this thing or improve this thing and yeah you know so i i so i like it and also just you know people experiencing what we're building so far is is is you know awesome for the team as well because the team you know they they get all inspired when they see cool stuff that the community is doing so so you know there's you know upsides and downsides to what we're doing but i i wouldn't change it um for the world because i think it's it's it's um you know one of the one of the funnest things i've had to i've ever done in games and it's awesome
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talking about reading the matrix and i'm just like yeah i'm the guy sitting here for six years now trying to do an online correspondence course how to read the matrix you know every week just i i gotcha uh we are at time at this point uh the wonderful thing about interviewing either chris or richard is that i come with all these questions and i only ever have to ask one because then they just kind of just hit everything i'm like i don't have to ask that i don't have to ask that um before we let you go uh just one final thing for some folks this is going to be kind of a new idea for many folks they've been following along with this for since since 2013. uh as richard said we're building this out actively we have been all of these active feature things are all laying the groundwork they're all the foundation for this when this is done it's not going to be like a like a big switch there's not going to
- 00:26:20
be one day there's not death of spaceman and the next day there is death of a spaceman these things will come in in iterations just like anything else does tier zero of cybernetics tier zero of hospitals stuff like that um one last bit of like expectation setting uh what without giving dates or anything uh what can people expect going forward how do we go from here what what's what's the plan from here generally speaking so i don't get in trouble yeah okay so what we're planning on working on in you know in the future so relatively soon shall we say uh is kind of the hospital groundwork so the hospitals in the locations uh the ability for you to be able to go to those hospitals and kind of download your dna it's kind of like your save
- 00:27:06
point or kind of like the area that where you would be respawned um we already obviously have body dragging in and some of the medical bays in there but what we'll be introducing is active status t1 so that will be drugs so for example we'll be introducing some drugs as part of that so like adrenaline uh i think we've already got some black market drugs in there that will tie into this but also um like alcohol so if you go to uh the bartender you know you'll be able to get uh drunk and we'll have you know the relevant animations and locomotion sets that tie into that uh because obviously then there'll be a risk reward that you can't just keep medipenning like you can't in real life you can't just keep popping paracetamol you know all of that kind of thing will kind of tie into it in terms of that blood drug level and that will you know if you keep taking drugs you will eventually you know overdose and you'll need to be revived
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uh so you'll have to manage that on that actor status side of things and we'll also be introducing the healing loop in terms of those uh being able to revive you from a down state and obviously that in the dna integrity side of things so as you basically get you go die you'll be able to have battle through revive so we can bring you back in the same body and that is obviously you'll be there but you may come back with you know you may have a permanent um visuals but that won't be part of t0 the visuals just to be clear um but yeah so that that's kind of what we're working on that core gameplay loop actor status t1 and hospital locations those the three main big kind of like areas that we're trying to push forward on uh and hopefully you know um alongside physical inventory which is we're also actively working on i mean i've done multiple talks on you know and i think every patch we do something
- 00:28:41
to do with other updating the ui and all of that is in along the journey you know we've just been releasing small bits but that will tie into it so kind of like healing active status hospitals and um physical inventory those kind of things will kind of come uh hopefully kind of come as one thing to be able to deliver that experience but you know if they don't then we'll make it work as long as they come but that's kind of the stuff we're actively working on right now all right and then uh one more follow-up earlier you said that sometimes when you rez you might come back shorter were you just giving an example or are you confirming short characters i was giving an example definitely not confirmed you know people were going to grab onto it and there was going to be a reddit thread so i had to ask
- 00:29:28
all right thank you oh guys so much i'll let you go take care all right well thank you everyone you
Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.
