10 for the Producers: Episode 01 (2014.12.08)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] hi I'm Travis day I am Daren bck and we are the producers here at Cloud Imperium game Santa Monica you may have been expecting Chris Roberts but he's in Manchester and then the second choice would have been Dave hadock and will Weiss bom but they're in Manchester so here you are with the third string hosts of 10 for the producers this will probably be the first first and last episode you'll ever see so enjoy and stay tuned also thank you to all of our subscribers for making this possible without your support we would not be able to be here in this room being subjected to these cameras so good looking out we get into some questions all right Darien let's get into some questions you want to go first all right

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   beer for the beer God another Warhammer fan uh is that what that's from oh yeah blood for the blood God oh yeah okay what changes can we expect from the cutless now that it's gone back to Foundry 42 and what lessons did you learn from the feedback of that variant release so what lessons did you learn about that well by Distributing that workload around it at least frees up a lot of our resources start focusing on other things with 1.0 coming up pretty soon um we've got our hands full of just all these kind of new components that we want to integrate into the game The Foundry 42 guys were pretty anxious to uh kind of take on extra stuff and I have absolute faith that they're going to do a kick butt job yeah and uh nice censoring that

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   was good no and one of the other things about The Foundry 42 guys is that ship will be making an appearance or two or three or a ton in the Squad 42 campaign so it's very important to them that it meet their needs and they do a very very good job shout out to Andrew L on their 3D Concepts so they've been doing a great job so far we've really like what we've seen from them and so I think they're going to do a fantastic job on upgrading and altering the variants just slightly as for the lessons learned the feedback um we learned that you guys are very interested in having modular ships that was something that was a big takea away from that you're very interested in being able to swap out the internal components of ships so rather than just exterior components being able to say hey I want these crew quarters to be this now so that's something we've been exploring and hopefully we'll have more information on soon oh o o I want to do

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   this one go it's Arch ilele asking what are some Avenues of community contribution existing or new which you think would be a good way for new backers to engage and contribute to the game so my first recommendation would be to go back and watch every episode of every piece of content that we've ever released so you don't run the risk of asking the same question that somebody else has asked absolutely Paramount importance if you don't have hundreds of hours on your time I think that probably the easiest way to contribute to the community is to jump into the forums and the RSI chat role that's probably the two most common places where the Vel opers go to interact to read to lurk to troll sometimes um but know it's uh you know probably some of the better ideas and the better Theory crafting that we've seen is in the forums and on the chat R so getting in there participating

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   in conversations opening threads about things that you're concerned about or even just things that you're happy about or excited to see would be very much encouraged because it is something that all of us read there's 280 of us around the world it's a lot of eyes on the forums not as many as there are people in the forums but that would be my recommendation I'd say my recommendation is looking on the different fors you can see regionally uh what players are from your area and if any of them have any organizations or get togethers uh one of the interesting things I found about Star Citizen is that there are a lot of community-based events that players throw and backers throw so find some like-minded individuals who are within your region or at least within a reasonable amount of of travel um get to know know them um contribute to discussions on the forums a lot of

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   people have seen me making contributory posts uh commenting on other people's sometimes humorous sometimes serious questions so uh it's highly encouraged to interact and we try to interact with you so it's a good way to get yourself immersed into the game find out more about it and see which aspects that you are going to be looking forward to the most but most of all I don't think there's a a a direct plan of attack that we would recommend specifically to like hey you need to do this um come up with your own find out an interesting way if we like the idea we'll see what we can do with it I'm going to say this one with a Japanese accent as it looks very Japanese to me tokomi what major gameplay feature are you most looking forward to and why I'm going to repeat an answer I said in a previous interview which was I'm looking forward to Capital class ships the most um it it's got the most interesting

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   aspect that I look forward to in in space combat massive kilometer long ships blowing each other out of orbit uh being being able to do this in a multiplayer scenario just I find it incredibly exciting and it's something that I can't wait to be a part of FPS probably on a capital ship I don't know I I like playing games where I get to Point at what I want to die and click and so I a huge FPS gamer Counterstrike Battlefield Call of Duty um I've played them all metal honor back when it was good anyways so and I I really enjoy FPS gameplay and that's probably the thing I'm most looking forward to cuz it's the most unique thing about our game I think is the addition of fps to these giant Capital spaceship combat events and being able to go under the bridge of a ship and kill all the bridge crew and

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   then call my friends to say I've taken it I don't know just sounds kind of fun I'm not much of an FPS person I've always no played a lot of Borderlands left for dead but I never got into the hardcore fpss and I think it's mainly because I prefer using a control pad I for me I feel more accurate with a sniper rifle when I'm using a control pad I Mouse and what yes I know mouse and keyboard I'm actually I can do consistent head shots with a Gamepad and I can't do it with a mouse and keyboard so but this is the one of the first times I'm actually really looking forward to an FPS uh watching the demo that was at PA when they you know disabled the the core and all sudden the gravity shut off that looks exciting I'd love to see you know boarding missions where you storm the bridge as you said

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   taking over and commandeering the ship adding it to your Fleet or you know just turning against that fleet's own ships I always like the idea too of like finding a guy Mining and he's floating there and then you come and you like Eva over to a ship put around your mag boots walk up to the cockpit look down at him and head shot him through the cockpit next question comes from smart with different producers working on separate modules how do you ensure the modules work together to create a consistent overall gameplay experience okay that's a good question cuz yes I hear this a lot and people are worried about the designs the art styles and whether it's going to end up like the ISS or something where you have The Foundry 42 module strung along to the US module and the Canadian module um in reality uh the probably interesting analogy I would say the thing that we we

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    spend a lot of time on and Chris is very adamant about is making sure that we have one consistent design that works for everything so just because it's top of mind for me it's recent the FPS for example having been heavily designed out of the eonic office oh that's weird I can say aonic now and it's okay I'm used to saying redacted being heily designed by kedin and his team at the yonic office one of the things that's always been very important to Chris is making sure that that design is Thoroughly reviewed by the42 designers and by the persistent Universe designers and making sure that those designs work for them and if there are things that don't work for them or need to be changed or added making sure that's all part of the conversation at the Inception of the FPS module so that it's all going to be consistent throughout the entire game he does not want to have things that play differently in single player versus multiplayer versus the Pu and so that

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    has been uh a very important thing to do and we do that basically by constant communication between all the studios I would say a large part of our job is basically communication of information and dissemination of information I mean that's that's pretty much the job of a producer is just maintaining open communication between departments um whether it's nightly handoff emails because everybody's in a different time zone um when the UK is getting out for the night we're just getting in and vice versa so there's always this constant overlap of Duties with a constant stream of communication that makes sure all right here's what we left off this is what we need you guys to pick up on so there's always some kind of consistency in everything that we do actually that's a good point to bring up too is that even though this is 10 for the producers this is really 10 for two producers is a global team effort we've got producers in found at Foundry 42 in Austin Texas

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    in Montreal at Al phonic uh we've got a lead programmer that works as a producer at Moon collider I mean there's people all over the world who are involved on the production side so you know big props to the whole team on that one because it's an ongoing effort on top of that if it was two for 10 producers it'd be really crowded yeah that's true we need a bigger camera but more to the point also it's asked that when different producers working on separate modules there's a lot of responsibility overlap um we don't have a you know a producer who's dedicated specifically just on this item only we have the luxury of being able to be involved with various projects so for example my contribution is Arena Commander um and also the spaceship missile system and a few ancillary responsibilities here and there but those responsibilities overlap with some of the stuff that the UK is

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    working on and what Austin's working on so it we have our fingers pretty much in everything so and on top of that also helps kind of maintain that overall consistency between the different projects and different modules black Dr aegon from a prod production standpoint given how many features are planned for the product how do you make your choices on what will be in launch and how what will be in future patch obviously for the sake of getting the game out in a timely fashion not every feature that has been discussed will be in at launch what kind of feature density could we expect for the first major content patch once we've launched further down the road I guess you want to start with that one yeah so first of all I would say that from a production standpoint I would probably scope your question immediately so that we can make it for launch was very long sorry

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    um uh so given how many features are planned for the product how do you make your choices what will be in the launch and what will be in a future patch basically we have product road maps for each of the modules and that lays out our plan in addition to teams like the core Tech Team the graphics team so uh I would say non-m module teams that are working on maybe the core engine technology we lay out all of our road maps for each of these teams we kind of line up these Nexus points where they're will be releasing at the same time There features are coming on Time online at the same time and as for which features are attacked first it's kind of uh the same way that you'd build a house right so you build a foundation first and then you start putting up all of the uh I've never built a house before but you start putting out the outside and then you start building the inside you know it kind of follows a standard Paradigm and you know to to that end I think when you

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    start seeing the base in the core gam play Come online then you start adding the additional features it's like okay you can move now where do you move you can shoot now what do you shoot and things like that I mean it's just kind of organic um so while we will not have all features that we've been talking about and all the stretch goal features that we've talked about at launch I there's a pretty longterm plan in place for getting all of these things along the way even though we have road maps laid out for uh each of these different features um it's also good to understand that these things are moving targets sometimes based on an adapting to the the needs of the company uh we may push back a feature based on uh whether you know we suddenly encounter an obstacle that we realize that requires more resource and more attention or we realize that it's a feature that the

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    players may not want right now and therefore they want something else instead so we have the ability to and the luxury of being able to move these things around based on the needs of the game and what the players are going to want and what we'd like to see in the game yeah now that's a good point too about the constantly changing nature of it Alex has something he's very fond of saying is very true which is by the time that you've taken the time to write your schedule it's out of date and it's wrong so the schedule the road maps everything it's a constantly evolving process which is good because it keeps us employed in in a perfect world these are the goals and timelines we'd like to meet uh but we don't live in a perfect world and things requireed changing on the Fly sometimes and sometimes it's about to see to your pants um sometimes we can or at least a good producer would like to be able to forecast problems down the

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    road but you know real life happens Murphy's Law likes you know show its ugly head every now and then and we need to adjust things on the Fly uh sometimes a feature may make it and sometimes we may absolutely scrap what we started with and realized that it just wasn't the direction we wanted to go MH so our next question comes to us from K and Shadow there have been a lot of discussion about ship Pipeline and how you guys are getting into a mode of pumping out ships at a regular basis do you expect this pipeline to ramp down after the game's release or do you expect the current rate of ships or increased volume once the Pu goes live follow-up question do all the alien ships follow the same pipeline or are you expecting some to be shortcut in some way I.E not player pilotable or Pilot capable actually I I do have something for that okay the main i w say the main uh one of the things one of the

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    objectives we want to keep our eye on the main thing is that we don't want to make Superfluous ships that just serve no purpose so we're not going to be pumping out ships just for the sake of pumping out ships good point uh we want them to make sure or we want to make sure that any ships we do make and design serve some kind of functionality or serve a particular play style yeah exactly yeah and that way uh I I wouldn't say that it's going to increase or decrease like I said we have a road map for what ships we'd like to introduce um we're going to hopefully continue building more ships whether that's going to increase or decrease is going to wholly depend on what the needs of the game are uh we may find that we may need a midsize ship or some kind of Corvette or a battle Cruise us or one that's you know a large Capital class

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    ship that's designed specifically for exploring U we may find the need for that uh and then based on what variants we can base on find off of that so it's a question that I don't think really has a a solid answer because uh we have a lot of ships already in being designed and having been in the hanger I think it's going to be based purely on what the needs of the game are yeah and to the follow-up question point that was well well put Daran um do all the alien ships follow the same pipeline are you expecting some Shortcut in some way uh yes some of the vuel ships for example and some of the ships that are planned for squadron 42 exclusively at least at first are going to be designed without player piloting capabilities so they don't have to have fully flushed out Interiors they don't have to have fully functional cockpits cuz for a lot of these you're only going to be seeing

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    them as you blow them up or they blow you up from the outside our next question comes from flinton aario it seems to me that sc/ sq42 development is proceeding a break next speed how does the development Pace compared to other games you've worked on also how do you handle the extremely high standard that is being set because it must take considerably longer to get each step completed to CR quality but the backers continuously clamor for more so how do we handle the extremely high standard well I'm actually indentured to Travis I I met Travis in a Serbian prison camp and he took a knife for me once and I've been in a dead to ever sin so I promised that I would uphold his and Champion his standard it's a it's a similar story for me except just with Chris and Serbia so I

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    really don't have much to add I thought it was a Turkish prison camel oh that might have been yeah I get those all kind of that region geography is bad my buddy's having a wedding in Costa Rica and I thought oh what part of the Caribbean is that in and I looked at Google I went oh Travis your geography um okay how do we handle the uh Breakneck speed so actually yeah I would say that that the development does happen very quickly uh one of the things that I think a lot of people don't fully appreciate is that during the development of this game so far we've been building a company doing pre-production on a game and developing Something That We're shipping to the public so all three of those at once would normally happen uh well at least where I've worked before has normally been a company that exists and is a thing is large the product that we're working on has 6 months to 12 months of pre-production before any real production takes place and then we move

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    into starting to develop what is known concrete plan metric standards everything but with this we're kind of developing it along with you guys all as we go so you're getting to see it from the very basic foundations so that has been a interesting challenge that also is kind of what makes a lot of fun so I would say that with that in mind we are developing extremely quickly I'm constantly impressed by the sheer volume of patches and content that we put out to the community it's going to be a long ride so I think it's good to get as much as we can out there along the way as for the the CR level of quality um yeah there are times I think that that people have been frustrated or disappointed that they work on something for a really long time and it's you know oh it's going to be great it's going to be great and Chris looks at and he has a whole bunch of critiques of how it could be a little bit better uh you know that's always disappointing but then you come back at it and you look at it and

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    you go oh my God it really does look better and you kind of implement that feedback and it's always it for me at least has helped me to push my standards higher for what is acceptable in a game what I'm proud of and I really enjoy the emphasis on on quality because I've definitely worked on games where quality is not the emphasis the emphasis is getting it shipped and so I think that for the community it's well you're really privileged to have somebody that cares that much about quality that and we are just as committed to it um we have an incredibly talented group of developers artists Engineers programmers that and to kind of echo what Travis said it's hard not to be impressed with the speed that these guys and gals turn out content they're incredibly Talent incredibly skilled and they do it under a lot of pressure and so when Chris

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    gives his feedback it's because we all have that same perfectionist attitude that we want to see this thing not only surpass your guys' expectations but our own and like I've said before we have just as high expectations for this project uh as you guys do and as Chris does and we want to see all of us have that same unified Vision come to fruition if if it's something that when we release it to the the public if we're not all on board then what does it say about us uh we want to make sure that that quality is there so when it is released you guys can enjoy it we can enjoy it uh and we can point in it proudly yeah we worked on this we did this yeah that's actually that's a good point like there's so many times I'll be sitting at my desk and I'll turn to Chris and I'll be like can we just take all the crowdfunding money and invent a time machine so we can go to the Future and play this game with everybody like it's gonna be really

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    really fun yanor Dr yanor for any scrubs fans out there how robust is the plug-and place system for the ship pipes uh we already already know about the size two tractor beam in the store which can go on any appropriately sized hardpoint and the application of drop tanks for presumably wet class 3 mounts but does that extend to other potential systems and Equipment would there be a size five sensor cluster I could put on the nose of my Avenger instead of a size 5 Cannon to go exploring with instead of interdicting so uh my favorite part of this question is the idea of a size five cannon on the Avenger spoiler alert it's not going to stay size five it looks ridiculous when you put one of the size five guns on there so how robust is the plug-and-play

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    system for ship pipes that's a great question because I love answering it's very robust um basically the item pipes are something that flow between all the nodes on the ship they carry CPU power they carry power power and they carry heat the pipe system then references the data points for each of the XM which Define what that item either contributes or removes from the pipe system and then that flows into the pipe system organically based on the setup of the ship so you can if what you're asking is attach a a soda can to your class one hardpoint and maybe it's aluminum so it vents Heat versus putting a weapon on there as long as they can accommodate the size of the can the size of the weapon anything can be attached anywhere and it can work in that slot and it will update the pipes dynamically

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    is it's all a data driven system that's something was super important to Chris is making sure it was a data driven system so we could do just that so you as specifically about uh putting a size five sensor cluster onto your Avenger instead of a size five cannon so yes would be the answer as long as the hardpoint supports that size you would have a gimb sensor because you know what can make a sensor better gimbals but a key thing to remember is that the sizes we want to make sure that any any size Mount that we put on a ship is going to at least try to adhere to some uh modum of gain balance so uh we may adjust the sizes as we see fit to maintain balance we also want to maintain a certain level Aesthetics so uh if we find that a amount is either too large or too small

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    for a particular ship we may take it down a peg or bring it up one so yeah so maybe you know rather than menting a size five sensor cluster it's a size two sensor cluster you know something like that so our next question comes from SL P0 int apparently he had a very bad intr roll given the level of details and what we saw from the Pu I'm starting to have a feeling that beyond space there will be a few dozen football fields to walk around but not really much to explore the landing sequence on the planet shows a huge 30 million plus inhabitant City but you can only get to a small Marketplace can you give us the scale of the planned pu size space stations ground and so on so I guess there's going to be more than a few dozen automatically I don't know if football is still a sport in our universe or not I'd have to check with hack on that um but the plan in initially has always

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    been for uh I think it was the base 105 star systems each with an average of four landing locations which would vary in scale and size from a large falling City to something is more of a remote Outpost so I do think there're going to be if nothing else plenty of places to go and land and explore and walk around now to answer your question about like I guess specific you're talking about the AR Corp demo so first of all that was a demo that was the first area of AR Corp there are other planned areas that I think you guys have even seen concepts for um through different parts of our Corp uh another good example is terara so Tara for example has the large Central City and it's kind of the Upper Crust I know Abu Dhabi feel Rio de Janeiro feel a very high-end technology there are also other parts to Tera

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    though that are more like the flavas say in Rio de Janeiro the where everybody who works in the city lives so there areas called the blocks and so You' be able to take the monil to Traverse to different environments within that same Landing location the idea being that if we have these kind of uh sequestered areas you can introduce say one area during this patch and in the following patch we may unlock another part of AR Corp and another part of Tera and we can just additively add to the content that's in the game there isn't really a square footage or I guess Square astronomical unit he says football is a square yard okay um it's constantly going to be growing so there's always going to be new content to explore at what rate we releasees at uh again we do have have timelines for these development channels

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    so uh as more things come up uh the universe is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger uh so I don't think there will be a shortage of things to explore and places to visit and all kinds of new Mysteries to unravel uh because we do want exploration to be a a part of the game um but we also want people to visit established continents on planets space stations that all going to add to part of this Dynamic experience uh so it's an ongoing process all right this last question comes from beer cir but on when will we get Arena Commander currency and the beginning of the ship component upgrade system good question so Arena Commander currency is something that a lot of the community has requested since the Inception of Arena Commander the ability to have credits earned that you can use to try

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    out other pieces of equipment that you may not own so this is something that is definitely on our road map for the beginning of next year so it's coming to a patch near you pre- Arena Commander 2.0 and it will basically allow you to earn Arena Commander bucks Moon bucks uh a new form of currency that can be used for the purchase Redemption uh otherwise obtaining of items for arena Commander so they will not carry over to the persistent universe but within Arena Commander you will be able to use use items that you do not own uh after you've earned them using Arena Commander currency the ship component upgrade system I'm not actually entirely sure what you're specifically referring to but the components themselves you will be able to purchase with Arena Commander currency just the same as the ships so if that's what you meant there's your

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    answer so so with the the the arena Commander currency you're saying if you know I like the way that laser gun looked on my opponent ship and it really tore me up mhm I can just rent one and just you know pay for it and pay a monthly fee or some kind of ongoing fee to keep it on my ship the exact design of like is it a recurring fee or is it a one-time fee or how that's going to work hasn't actually been flushed out yet but that is something that you know probably actually like to hear Community feedback on once again I'm Daren vorick a production coordinator on Star Citizen I'm Travis day producer OnStar citizen uh thank you for having us uh and once again thank the backers for making this possible we assure you that Chris will be back next week um you don't have to tolerate us for another episode don't worry thank you subscribers though for letting us do this and hi

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    Mom hi darian's Mom