Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Bugs, Boids and Beasts

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   hey everybody welcome to another edition of calling all devs I'm your host Jared Huckaby now calling all devs is where we take questions from you the star citizen community and posed them directly to our developers and this episode one of our most voted up questions was about well a very common question we've had for quite a while about fauna about the non-sentient they're non humanoid life forms that will populate the star citizen universe and so we thought we would go wait where where most things start with design and our very own mr. todd papy Todd how you doing man hey buddy doing well I like the hair thank you you have more courage than I did I didn't shave I'm gonna let mine go and see just how crazy it is before we get back in the studio well I went went for the mohawk last week and then now it's down to this and then it'll grow out from here thank you so we're here to

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   talk about the non humanoid life life forms that'll that'll populate the stars isn't universe break it down for us what types are we looking at developing for star citizen so we break it down into three different types there would be insects or kind of just VFX that play around trees or more things to give it life in that area then there would be voids which are like small creatures like a frog or a snake or you know a raft whatever we'd kind of consider to be appropriate for our universe and then like those floating things we saw at citizencon yes yeah just like we had it and then from there there would be much bigger creatures you know like basically herds

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   or or apex predators or sand worms kind of thing all the way up to sandwich what where where do where do we start with where are we starting with it with the non humanoid life-forms when we saw the sand where I guess that at this city rendering another citizen gone but what are we what are we thinking without committing to it right now but what are we thinking is our first non humanoid creature we're gonna see in Star so we're gonna be working on the space cow just to work out the new rig and and so obviously it's a four-legged creature so from there it's we're just working on new Riddick and basically seeing how that will work you know in that intent any sort of alignment issues that we might have on the planet you know versus

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   okay so and so forth and then also building usable is associated with it so it's drinking its water holes or you know whatever it's 24-hour schedule dictates and then from there will will be the next big one would be space whale that will we'll look into its you're confirming space whales of course father's like I thought against space well as I lost no space no space was a great it's it that's that's that's exciting you you you you you be ready to tell us where those will appear in Crusader in Crusader yeah as far as I know they are native to Crusader Wow all right well maybe we'll put a call in to

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   if native let's call it well call Dave haddock we'll see if we can't find out more i Todd thank you so much I'm gonna let you go all right I mean taken by now we're gonna go to narrative director mr. Dave haddock and find out if the space guy was just called space cow or if it has a different name Dave how you doing man I'm okay Jarrod I just would like to start off by saying that I am in color under duress that I I appreciate it if you if you don't know we won't get into it but Dave does web conversations in black and white he's a very unwire person it's probably due to the step Seven Samurai poster behind you I know it's nice I'm a big Max von Sydow fan so who isn't who is it alright we're talking we're talking fauna on today's show we just got done

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   talking to Todd he talked he talked us a little bit about stuff he mentioned that we're starting we tend to start with space cows and I'm thinking that there's probably more information about space cows of hoping it has another name what can you tell us about space cows no that's the that's the in Lauren it's just forever now gonna be known as space cow from from here to perpetuity no we we definitely jumped on that one very very quickly to make sure that it was not known as space cow because those things tend to stick obviously but yeah I mean we so we're calling it the Kazi grazer Kazi Kazi as he named after the region on Terra where basically it was sort of originated and yeah so it's you know it's basically kind of a you know a pack herd animal type thing I can read

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   the description if you want yeah these large warm-blooded herd animals were originally discovered on the vast plains of Kazi on Terra most notable for their unusual method of carrying their young the Kazi grazer has become one of the standard seed animals and can be commonly found on most terraform planets in the UAE aside from using their eggs for cooking the grazers are also used for their meat and in more remote sections of space tanning their skins for heavy winter clothes alright so there's a little I want to unpack there one even though they're indigenous to Terra it sounds like we're gonna see them on other planets we don't have to wait until Tara comes to see them yeah yeah I mean sort of the idea I mean it was it was one of the weird things that we we're trying to kind of baked into the terraforming thing to kind of save us some trouble in the long run uh was obviously we have the guarantee incident

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   that kicked off the downfall the message but the idea being that like terraforming kind of wipes out the plant the all the life on the planet and so they reseed it once there once they're done with it in the hopes that basically that would mean that we didn't have to come up with like entirely unique biomes for every single planet in the game that we could have you know we have naturally-occurring ones which would be like Terrace and naturally occurring we didn't terraform it so we could have its own animals but that these animals would be kind of like migrating around the universe as as people are settling on them they would tear from employment and they would have to populate it so they would bring in space cows and stuff like that to basically so we could have basically kind of reuse assets and we could kind of have a smaller panoply of animals and plants to to to work with so that that was sort of

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   the idea with it and the second thing was eggs yeah I mean they I'll I'll save that I I don't want to spoil the surprise but yeah just say that they have an interesting way of transporting their young that all right and then we also talked about space whales do we have a name for space whales yet and apparently they're going in the game yeah yeah no we don't have a name for them yet we're actually still kind of waiting on kind of seeing them I think before we kind of dive into it but yeah the idea is that yeah they are going to be indigenous to Crusader and not for like at large indigenous but like down

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    the road indigenous but but yeah that they they sort of exist within the clouds and the deep kind of highly dense parts of the of the planet and then but we'll kind of like basically like breach every so often so they'll come up to the surface and you know hopefully get to the point where players can actually kind of see them and and I mean one of the things we're talking about and I really hope we can pull it off because we've been talking about this idea about tour guides because obviously tourism factors very heavily into orison but the idea that there could be basically like whale tours space world tours where they basically go out and kind of like look for for breaching space whales and and and yeah and also the idea basically with a lot of like the sort of

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    harvestable stuff that you that the the PU is starting to implement now with like you know plants and materials and stuff like that part of the fun with these things is also like aside from coming up with this sort of the name and the history it stuff is figuring out kind of how we can incorporate them into game play is there stuff that you can collect off of them that's where I talk about the Kazi grazer like you know you can harvest their eggs or harvest their skin stuff like that but like are their gameplay opportunities for the space well like you know barnacle you know she's getting barnacles off of it stuff like that to make it more fun and get players the opportunity to get really up close to these things I was I was afraid you were going for whaling there for a second and I was like I was like but no they do it you're talking about being able to like

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    land on them and maybe scrape collectible stuff off off the surface under under the into like dense parts and they come up and they have they brought stuff with them and that you kind of it's a race against time to kind of harvest stuff off of them if you can they'll want to be a Habs here no it's good nevermind I was gonna go somewhere else that alright as so I mentioned you mentioned when you see the space wells we've shown a couple of potential concepts on on inside star citizen but we haven't locked down the final design so I think we'll check in with chance and see if there's any see if there's any updates to the artwork so today I'm gonna let you go thank you so much for for fleshing this out and we'll talk to you soon all right all right thank you

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    so much Dave now we're moving on to someone who can talk to us a little bit about how these things are actually created character art director mr. chance row chance how you doing man doing well good afternoon how are you I'm doing well we talk in space cows and space whales here where do we start when we create these things how do you how do you make a cow that's a cow but scifi where take us through your process great great question obviously when you're making humans you know what they're supposed to look like right and clearly that's a pretty straightforward process of you know you'll make them make them look photorealist because we can you know we have actors to go on and so now once you start talking about creatures then you know it's kind of a wide-open thing right you know the obviously we're not on earth so they could be really

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    weird-looking you know nobody knows what what these things might look like you know but one of the challenges though is that you want some some ability for the player to understand what they might do right and so that's kind of why you start with just archetypes of things you might think of you know on earth whether it be a cow or a bear and not necessarily just in visuals but some behaviors you know and so if I see something as a player out on you know I might wondering is that thing going to eat me or am i okay to walk by it you know and that's and that's where we really have to start and you just got to keep that balance because we don't want to make something to earth like it's just gonna be you know a little on the boring side but but I think it's something that you know many many artists love to get into making creatures because the the nice thing is you've got so much freedom you

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    know what's the what's the space cow look like I don't know I've never seen one before so go ahead and make it something cool you know and it's so really it's the fun for us you know it is is most leaders are very very excited to get you know more creatures into the universe and and just the idea of being able to land on a on a moon or a planet and it be teeming with life you know that's a very exciting thing you know we haven't got to see and and I think that um me personally that's one of the things that I'm I can't wait to to get into and for the space-boat which we've learned is going to populate the the gas giant of crusader we've seen we've seen three potential concepts already take us through that process yeah yeah that's that one's a little earlier on than a space cow just an initial concept phase you know but that's a very you know exciting one and that is it is much more different than a cow well what's a space

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    whale you know what would it what would something like that be something this massive that would be in a gas giant like this you know that's a many many considerations for us to go over you know what I mean even just from a technical and you know site of how do we get something like that to to be in the world where we can get all the way up closest thing and it's got all the detail on and everything so that's a that's a much bigger discussion but but very very exciting thing to to imagine going into so but it early days on that though you know we're just in the you know concept phase so we'll definitely have more in the future to show that's a little more toward something that you might actually see in-game so we know that this is still early days through all of the fun development whether this is something that we'll see this year or not is still being determined so the

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    pipelines are being built it's too early to say when we're going to see our first final but we start after starting from space cow so then go into space whales can you do you have an idea what's what what's next those seem very passive things what can you tell us about what might be next I know exactly what's next and these these groups animals are getting much more dangerous I can tell you that but they are already being concept it as we speak so very exciting stuff you know definitely our worlds are gonna get a little more dangerous I can say that all right chance thank you so much congratulations on your first star citizen video I'm sure it won't be the last I'll let you go take care of it all right thanks very much and that brings this episode to a close I want to thank todd papy dave haddock and chance ralph

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    for taking their time to be here on the show that's this week for calling all debs i'm jared huckaby we'll see you next time you