10 for the Developers: Episode 12

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] you want to oh hi uh welcome to another edition of 10 for the developers I'm Dave hadock lead writer I'm Ben Lesnik uh director of community engagement and ships uh and so this is where we take uh 10 questions from subscribers who are our subset of our community who provide a little bit of extra every month to allow the sort of uh added amount of

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   community engagement uh and we do our best to answer them yeah our subscribers allow us to do programs like this ATV RTV bug Smashers uh all the community engagement you see us doing every week so we we really appreciate uh what you let us do and now some questions all right this is from Thanos I just read the entire writer's guide in one sitting you are brave individual is all the information included therein still up to date or will there be some more updates coming for the most part it's pretty up to date I mean we are changing some aspects of it uh and it's actually been sort of of on a back burner lingering list of things that need to get done to basically keep it more because we've

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   been doing obviously you know with all the script stuff and s42 stuff we've been developing the the Pu uh history and the alien races and civilizations and stuff like that so um we'll we'll probably be updating it soon I mean part of it is also just it's about how you know how we parse out that information but U but yes that'll probably be an update I thought the the Raiders guy was great especially early on where you know we we didn't have the game for people to play but you could you could already imagine yourself in the universe and you could start creating your your own fiction it uh yeah and and it was you know it was fun too also having the uh the aspects of it that we started doing with the lore Builder where there were the areas that we hadn't quite figured out and so we got to turn to the community and you know I remember particularly we generated a lot of like bands that did music and

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   beer we follow bands and beer no I always like looking back on like a show and it'll always be like 20 or 30 years later oh there's a Star Trek writers Bible and it's just cool that we put it out there for everybody early on yeah the uh actually the Star Trek next Generation Bible is I have it in my office actually if you haven't read it you should check it out one of my favorite things in the world is the licensed tiin fiction that comes very very early like so you know they kicked off some writer writing the first couple novels before they shot the first episode so data has blue skin and emotions and it's great great it's amazing question two um do you want me to read I could we can read it Phantom Of Truth asks when you wrote Whisperer in the dark what were your influences intentions and where do you see that story going into the future with that one that was that was actually our first

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   jump Point story uh so it was actually I think I think I was actually writing it at the same time we were closing out that was still that was still during the crowdfunding we started that off in 2012 end of 201 12 and I think I think we realized we done we set up all these subcriptions we promised original fiction and we need a story really darn fast yeah so that one that one it was a weird one because it was at the so at the time it was still writing the Cal Mason one still writing the kid Crimson one and still writing the news updates uh so I think part of it was just trying to set you know cal cal Mason was a very high adventure type thing kid Crimson was a sort of more noirish uh crime thing so this if weirdly enough like needed to feel distinct from those two so it kind of went for more horror like

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   love crafty and like the there's a a story he did called the nameless city that has this very long segment of it where this guy is just crawling in a tunnel and it's really claustrophobic and and uncomfortable and kind of and and and cool and so it was that type of feeling that you know um having this you know this woman going through this like abandoned old destroyed civilization and weird things start happening and is it real is is it not and stuff and trying to walk that line of like you know not it's not Supernatural stuff but could it be who knows you know so uh so yeah that was sort of the the the idea behind it uh and as far as the I mean the story for the system is going to be interesting because that's Hades system so that's the one that that you guys are all going to get to kind of poke around

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   in uh one day so we'll we'll see where that story goes but Tanya's gonna I think probably make another appearance at somewhere we have to see it's crazy thinking back to those early days where you could be writing three serials at once and you were doing all the graphics for the website like I I think back how did I do all of the Cs tickets and run the FL I don't I have sales it's crazy it was nuts I mean I remember watching with you guys do the last 24hour live stream and I was at home when you guys were in Austin and I was like I don't know how they're standing uh I fell asleep uh blue goggles asks as mind wracking writing can be I'm sure it's just as satisfying uh what area of writing has been more fascinating the large scale

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   lore of whole races events Etc or the personalities and conduct of individual characters I kind of like the individual characters a bit but the large scale stuff is actually fun because if you get stuck on character stuff you can actually just completely shift gears and be like I'm going to write about you know or think about how uh you know beer in bands for an hour and and work on stuff like that and you know what think about music or architecture and stuff so the large scale stuff is a nice respit but I don't know I always like I I like characters and making people feel unique and getting hooked into that sort of more personal storyline so I would kind of go the the latter but the large scale stuff is is super fun I I like the small scale stuff I certainly don't write as much as you

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   do but we do things like sales and just the tiny little details that build the universe that don't matter at all the first I remember was the the Branded pillow in the aora of course I love the uh the space comforter that's on the starf far like the captain like the planets and stars it's amazing First Citizen asks will the Star Citizen Nolla be a hard copy as well as digital at some point always nice to hold the book that is an excellent question um I don't know I think we're still trying to figure out how that's I mean it's the answers we don't know yet for that specific thing but I saw there were a whole bunch of Nolla questions spawn off of this one so where the heck is the Nolla uh what is the Nolla well there's I I have actually been working on it weirdly enough uh I I have I think the

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    setup for it is awesome I think people are really going to like that uh and I'm sort of at the the outlining stage of it uh time's been a little tight of late so it's I haven't had that much time to to work on it but uh it's coming along I mean but I think it's I think the again the setup I think is really awesome and it's going to be a lot of fun to to get into but uh but yeah hopefully it'll I can start working on it soon I think we'll start loosening up a little bit so I can yeah I've heard that before for the past three years this is true but I I should say I love the fact that you guys do all of the fiction yourselves you know like back in the wi Commander days they would say okay contract this out to some generic sci-fi writers and and here it's it's all people who have a grasp on the yeah I

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    mean we have we we have had outsourced some some really good fiction I me the stor stories that just finished in Jump point and stuff uh you know have have had a lot of really good writers contribute to it and stuff like that it's great to see people are able to because again part of the difficult thing with this is having a Contracting a writer to come into sort of an established universe and you because if you're approaching them because it's not they don't necessarily know the world and they have to you have to kind of you know help help them and and a lot of people have been kind of plugging in very quickly and he in the ground running and writing some really cool stuff so uh it's been it's been great but yeah you know it's always fun to you know we can kind of be very insular and kind of you know geek out about the little stuff that we were we write okay next question comes from Ober

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    this is a two-parter a two-parter so for Ben Lesnik how much do views like dislike ratio as in factors outside of direct Community outrage affect your decisions concerning YouTube shows articles and so on um to be honest specifically like likes dislikes does not especially matter to us we're still in a very much gut feeling in terms of reaction um you know we after doing this for a couple years we kind of have our sources for how people the source we trust to accurately represent the community so you know I know that when this person is outraged and they're complaining that I should definitely listen to them and we should think about things differently um but pure numbers for you know they

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    didn't retweet this enough or this ship sold 80% instead of 90% of whatever we expected not especially valuable to me personally so it's not it's not metric based it's more instinctual yeah and you know we started to do the metrics you know the whole company has changed so much we we we gather the metrics we look at them but I I I would say at this point we still do a lot more with just the human feeling right right right and uh for Dave hadock when millions of people play a game inconsistencies plot holes and so on are bound to be found so what happens to Squadron 42 how in that case how would you react ignore them patch them recom them into the next ACT um well there definitely no plot holes uh yeah this is like a pre- problem yeah

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    yeah uh you're going to screw this up uh no I mean it's you know it's it's one of those things I mean we we do the best we can to try and uh kind of troubleshoot that sort of stuff like you know among the sort of internal reviews and and make sure that logic is tracking and people you know and again I mean it's it's the tricky nature of Storytelling in general like you know those connections between logic points can work for some people and they can't work from other people so to the people that it doesn't work for it becomes a plot hole but if it some but other people aren't bothered by it so it's a bit of a a a a mixed bag uh I mean I don't know if if there's something that's conceivably fixable just as a hypothetical I I don't I don't know I think we would have to kind of

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    gauge it based on how glaring the plot hole is if it's if it's sort of kind of inconsequential maybe we just probably ignore it or and then try to address it maybe in the next you know the next section or game or whatever yeah I'm kind of curious about that so let's ignore like giant plot holes but something really really minor like say you say Tanya has a hair color different hair color in two different places do you go back and fix something that's already been published or do you explain it later what's your preference there I mean I I try to personally I dislike reconning especially I feel like with what we're doing because we're building it in sort of uh public view that you know everyone's getting really involved in this stuff and the last thing we want to do is to basically say

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    like oh yeah that yeah forget all that you know kind of start over and it's this you know they're not made out of marshmallows they're made out of you know sponge cake and people go oh but I like marshmallows stop spoiling the C sorry uh um but yeah I mean I think if it's easy enough I mean we found in consistencies within you know sort of uh jump Point articles and you know between jump Point articles and old news dispatches so when possible we just go back and we'll we'll just sort of fix them to consolidate and at least be consistent with them so you know there's so far we haven't had anything sort of you know anything really egregious uh that's really come back to haunt us but so it also I think in the early days and as you remember you know we would we

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    would aim broad so it was all just sort of like it's kind of this feeling rather than you know it's specifically blah blah you know ABC and D so we we gave ourselves wiggle room to kind of hone it down later because we knew we would come back to it so you kind of run into sort of a side problem with ships where we want to continue developing new ships that are also old ships and oh wait now we have three years of fiction where we don't mention the anval whatever yeah we know we we just had that in a meeting earlier this week we were talking about a ship we can't name yet and we was like okay this feels like one that the military has been using for years but I think I think to a certain extent I mean you know because we're again we're we're developing it and I mean no one has done that that's kind of the crazy thing that I kind of keep circling back to is like you know Star

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    Wars came out and star war and that was Star Wars there there was not you know uh the book on the universe of Star Wars and the different races and the different factions and stuff before the movie came out so this is like the first time that we're sort of doing it backwards so I feel like to a certain extent we have to you know kind of go oh yeah this ship has been in service for 80 years and we just haven't mentioned it because you know we didn't know about it this only barely in a side but actually just this last weekend I was asking myself what was the Star Wars Universe in 1978 oh God I I would be fascinated to well I I looked it up there were three children's books of novelization um and they it's crazy looking back with them one one of them is about after the movie Luke Skywalker is now a planetary settler and he's at

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    the Space Academy and it's it's so different from anything anyone would have thought of wow so what it was there was no plan of or it didn't seem like they were leing to any kind of setup for Empire Strikes Back it was like no no done there's even a point where he he thinks back to Obi-Wan kobin he's like oh yeah the force he mentioned something about that that's amazing h okay all right next question from jack knife one of the charms of the original Wing Commander was that there was one this one ship the Scimitar that almost no one wanted to fly because it was widely regarded as slow and underpowered and obsolete granted the team doesn't have the resources to deliberately design a flyable 30th Century Ed Su for Star Citizen but have you thought about including stuff like that as say NPC

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    background ships or maybe having the lower categorized as marketing failures ships that got rendered obsolete in their original function by evolving game mechanics short short answer yes absolutely and in fact Dave here has done some of the early ship stuff down back down to the Zeus from early on it's it's more a time of a point of how can we work these into the schedule uh we also kind of have the idea that our existing ships are going to age so you'll have the 2943 Aurora that is the model that's 5 years old someday 10 years old right um and we as you mentioned another question we we are going back and saying okay here's another ship that would have existed back then uh so de-aging or reaging existing ships is an option uh we do want to build more and more ships into the background of the lore um and as we

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    get to the point where ships kind of go directly into the game rather than going through this whole the concept sale proposal idea we can uh we can do some more less popular ships that won't sell right right um I I will also note that for the example wi matter though um and this is the power of lore uh the Scimitar everyone hat hates the simitar everyone who played the game remembers hating the Scimitar the Scimitar is bad it's only bad because one of the characters several of the characters repeatedly tell you it's bad in the game it's actually it's like the second best ship in the game I kind of like flying the CER yeah it's it's a the guns you yes it's the one with the mass drivers it's so much more pleasant than the Hornet and I I have an easier time with it than the Raper so right right yeah I mean it's also it's important to to to note that I mean like you know an old ship and a new ship are basically

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    equal in difficulty to like you have to go through as many steps so whether the ship is 50 years old or it's supposed to be the new Cutting Edge thing like sort of from a production standpoint they're basically it's the same requires the same amount of work uh so it's you know I think right now we're being a bit more like Ben said you know being a bit more surgical about what type of ships we're we're coming out with but but that is part of why we give ships a lineage it's never just sometimes it is here's the totally new ship but a lot of times oh here's the Retaliator and it has a 100e history with UE so we we're kind of planning that in yeah all right next question Hawks Hawks with an X asks why does the Endeavor have such weak Armament for a deep space science vessel that's the length of an Idis could it get some point defense systems along the

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    Center Hall to protect against torpedo torpedo attacks and ships attempting to directly board um well the first answer is that the Endeavor is not a combat ship it's it's the science ship so we've intentionally kept the weapons very limited um it's not an Explorer either it's it's a ship that goes to safer areas and does science in fact it has the armored cab specifically so you can detach the the valuable complex part and explore at your own risk um the other half of that question is it's entirely possible we get additional Point defense turrets it's going to wait until we go into the you know the white boxing gray boxing stage and we we start playing around with it oh okay here's an obvious Vector where enemy Fighters take it down every single time uh so we will build the solution to that uh but until we get

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    to that stage it's uh hard to say right yeah because I mean a lot of it is is sort of on paper it can be one thing but like you said once you see it in there and you aot yeah um I should say a lot oftimes every single every single shf goes into the game we say oh here's the flaw we didn't see here's the here's how we needed to play differently so there will be changes um and that's a potential one and we'll see cool uh next question comes from Steve Hunter could you comment on the intended difference we will see between a citizen and a civilian in the game well the citizen makes the choice to defend the body politic with his life uh no that's the stret Troopers well yeah I mean they get to vote and for the Senate I mean that was sort of one thing uh

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    um but and yeah I mean we sort of outlined I mean from the early days I mean you remember the uh the the very basic you know differences of only citizens can have multi-stem corporations you know U civilians can only vote in local governments not in you know Imperial politics and and stuff like that I mean if I remember correctly I mean you know while Chris wanted there to be a difference between the two I I seem to recall him saying that there was that it it it wasn't as divisive as like a cast system in like Medieval Europe or or I've always seen it as much more of a our equivalent of Yelp almost hey this guy's I can trust this guy he's a citizen rather than citizens look down on civilians andu yeah they're not you

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    know under the underfoot of of you know the regime of the citizens and stuff like that yeah I mean it it it was a bit more of a you know a choice like you want to do you do you want to commit to the Empire or do you not really care about the Empire but you still want to live in it like and and as you attach it to game you need that lower Spectrum too the people who decide to be civilians or criminals need to have a viable gameplay experience too so it has to be a choice rather than a ladder you climb right right and also you know I mean not so obviously better quality of life or something like that where it's like you know only civilians can have a job you know or citizens can have a job or something like that like uh U but yeah as far as the specific

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    gameplay stuff I think we're still sort of trying to hone in on that I'm just imagining it's it's literally the same as like a senior citizen's discount citizens get a150 off their you get an awesome pen you get to you get to use a shorter line when transferring Customs Aran BH asks how do you think working with Chris Roberts to make Star sism would be different and or the same if you'd work with Chris on a wing commander game that's an interesting question uh i' so I've worked a little bit on lore for old win commander games I did the all the lore for the Xbox Live arcade game I I helped edit some of the novels and stuff and I find going back that I don't take myself seriously I I I I look back and like okay wi Commander is amazing I love win Commander I love

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    everything about the universe this is a part Ben came up with I don't I don't know about that what was I thinking um so it's actually kind of been good to be doing Star Citizen where it's it's this new thing that I get to see developed and I I have a part in that I I don't know I find it gives me more buy and if I were working on a win commander game I would be an obsessive crazy person about continuity and uh just very argumentative probably um so it's it's a good thing we're doing star syst um but I'm I'm actually more curious about you because you have so much more so much more of the lore is yours and you know you look at that and you say there there's Dave hadock in writing for how how do you feel about that uh I mean it's it's it's awesome I mean you know people people seem to really like it but I mean again it's it's it's it's not just it's not

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    just me I mean there's so many aspects of the universe that I mean when we were doing early conversations and the kickstarter thing that we were talking about that have you know like you guys I I haven't touched ships like you guys came up with all the ships and all the awesome like I mean it's still the Retaliator to me is just a work of art uh which because you know I look at the ships and like oh my God I can't believe I got to do this I got to work with these incredibly talented people to come up with this there's a little bit of me in there but I look at a ship I did on Wing command on win Commander Arena I I did similar thing I named all the ships I did all the specs I came up with their back stories and like those are embarrassing they're not as good as the other Wing Commander ships but no I mean yeah it's it's been awesome but yeah there's so many I mean everybody contributes and and that's kind of the one of the fun things about the company is that there's like it's a lot of everyone kind of baning together

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    and coming up with cool stuff and you know going for what's fun and E9 asks why are new Ships coming out of concept sale and going into production uh example the Reliant Prowler Herald and maybe even the buccaneer instead of moving onto ships that have already had concept sales years ago example merchantman Redeemer reclaimer well there's a whole bunch of uh a whole bunch of reasons for that um a major one is that we kind of now have this pipeline down where the the concept artists are in sync with the tech designers and everyone else and a ship can very seamlessly go from one to the other to the other and come at the other end which you're seeing a lot with some of the smaller ships that the saber was finished very quickly the the buccaneer is going to go right into active development I believe that's that's the schedule as of today that may change tomorrow another big aspect is the uh

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    the kind of kits and the stylesheets they build for the different manufacturers uh you probably noticed that when we uh we did 20 you saw a lot of aus and then MK ships because those are the ships that had their uh their pipelines pretty much completed and now you're seeing a whole bunch of Drake ships we're finishing up the Herold we're doing the buer the working on the caterpillar and it all there's a rhyme behind it I know people we want to see the V richment now we want to see the ven richment now I want to see the vand new merchantman now everybody wants to see the vand new merchantman now but we need to take time to develop the band new aesthetic we need to do it right rather than right now um so the the other ships time will come they they they've all they're all scheduled out on the production pipeline now um I will also mention that the prowler was one of the ones mentioned as going into

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    production we're still uh we're still in concept on that one um it'll be a bit longer uh for exactly the same reason until you see it uh we need to build the Taran race first and we want to do that right cool uh and that is it that is 10 developers uh it didn't feel like 10 it did not it actually ran rather quickly um but I would like to thank everybody for tuning in thanks to subscribers for making this possible for asking the questions themselves um if we didn't get your question we will uh not answer it uh or or you can bounce them over to the ask of Dev threads yep we are on the forums and uh yeah yeah and also thank you big thank you to our community at large uh in general for helping us do

33. 00:25:45

    this at all you know it's been awesome well thank you to all human beings who um thanks guys bye hey guys thanks for watching um temp for the chairman uh if you guys would like to uh see more episodes go here if you guys would like to subscribe to our YouTube channel and always keep up to date with all our video content go here and uh if you guys would like to watch episodes of around the verse go here please and I will see you in the verse [Applause]