Inside Star Citizen: To Go or Not to Go | Winter 2020

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:05

   In the universe of Star Citizen, we want the choices players make to matter. What ship will you need for a particular mission? What kit will you use to accomplish your goals? What supplies must you have to survive the elements and duration found in your upcoming enterprise? The adventurer that masters preparation will find themselves with an edge over those who hap themselves hazardly throughout the universe. And that's where the upcoming actor status system comes into play. Now, more than just putting on a jacket when it's cold or eating a ration when hungry, the actor feature team are working to create a system that aims to avoid the treacherous traps of tedium and tiresomeness while providing a fun and rewarding experience to players. Star Citizen's not really a survival game in the traditional sense. Survival games generally kind of pin eating and

2. 00:00:55

   drinking and you know, staying warm at the you know, the forefront of the gameplay. That's kind of their main game mechanics are to kind of keep yourself alive. Whereas the Star Citizen experience is so much more. It's just another addition. It's been very interesting working on it actually. Actor status is essentially anything that can affect the status of the player. It's been like a a mini science lesson every day is just cuz you want to ground this in reality. We want the player to kind of like have a realistic response to the environment they're in and change the way they play around the places that they're visiting. And we want to make it so it's not getting in the way of you doing anything, but it's something that you have to consider depending on what you want to do. One of the big things was like you don't think about it very much, but you know, people always just say hypothermia in reference to cold. People don't think

3. 00:01:42

   about it also being hyperthermia when it starts to get a little bit hot. We also found out kind of like how much humidity and wind chill affect the temperature. If it's humid, you can't sweat and wick away temperature from your body. And if it's if there's wind chill, it affects you know, the temperature a lot and makes things a lot colder. So, kind of like looking all of that up online and just kind of like reading some like scientific journals and whatnot just to kind of get a good basis of what we're doing here. The way this works is every kind of room or planet will have an apparent temperature, which is the temperature of the planet that's then affected by humidity or wind chill and you'll have that kind of number presented to you so you kind of know what the environment's like you're in. That in turn then affects your body temperature and if it starts to go too far out of whack, you'll either start to suffer the

4. 00:02:29

   effects of something like hypothermia when you start getting too cold. So, you might start getting sensitive to light again, start shivering, all the stuff that you saw the good stuff you saw at CitizenCon. And then on the other side you've got something like hyperthermia, which is when you're getting too hot and you start like getting like raspy breath, like your vision might start swimming a little bit. And eventually both of those conditions will result in death if you get far too cold or far too hot. Not all like statuses are negative. So, like hypo and hyperthermia, there are no benefits from suffering from those two things. We do have buffs and debuffs gained from the food. They will have some positive effects as well. So, you might drink some water, which will kind of keep your thirst at bay for longer. You might eat a chocolate bar that kind of gives you a bit more energy and increases your stamina regeneration.

5. 00:03:16

   There might even be something medicinal that you can eat to you know, give you a small amount of health regeneration. It's fun in the same way that you have to pick the right ship for the right job in the PU. Like if you want to go and kill some pirates, you'll want to take a combat ship. If you want to go and mine, you want to go and take a mining ship. In the same way, you want your choice to matter when you go to a planet. We want you to consider ahead, you know, what you want to do when you're there. Like you you're going to go there to go and explore outside your ship, then yeah, you'll probably want to you know, take a cold suit with you and some food. If you want to go to a hot planet for example as well, you might want to take the hot suit with you and you might want to take a lot of drink with you. And, you know, make your decisions really matter. It just kind of rounds out the Star Citizen experience that people expect with all of these varied, massive environments to explore.

6. 00:04:04

   The process of developing Star Citizen is a continuously evolving operation, constantly evaluating where things can be improved and how the way we make video games can grow and mature. From the move to a quarterly release schedule with 3.1 to the switch to a staggered development cadence, one of the ways we improved the process towards the middle of last year was the implementation of the go, no go meeting. An effort to better identify not only when features in development were ready to be included in a quarterly patch, but to find those which would be better served by hanging back and staying in incubation a little while longer. The go, no go's are where we make a decision on whether or not features and content are ready for the releases. The feature team get together with the

7. 00:04:52

   directors and production, some members of the executive, and with all of the other directors um from the other teams as well uh to collectively review the feature they've been working on. Actually, one of the reasons why we started this process was before we didn't have those gates to actually really control what was going into the game. Sometimes people will do things in isolation and then they won't see how it works together as a whole thing. It really makes a a point in time in the development schedule to say, "Actually, guys, let's pause. Let's evaluate. Let's really look at this. Play it through." I think as directors we we we basically had to create a a list of, "Hey, this is our criteria. This is what we expect from the from the product owner. This is what we expect from the team." And so, the real important thing is that we actually as a group are able to make

8. 00:05:39

   those decisions to say, "This is ready, um and it hits a certain quality bar that we want to be able to push forward with. The determination of whether something goes live or not is basically dependent on the quality of that experience. For instance, when we have um a typical feature or a game loop, we want to make sure that a lot of what is needed to prime the player to perform a certain action. Take FPS mining for example. You can actually go to the store and buy buy the mining equipment, uh go out, find the mining minable rock, mine it, take it back, sell it, you know, and that would be a complete game loop. So, if the experience is something that we think enhances the game, and something we want to get into the public's hands and get feedback on, then obviously it's a go.

9. 00:06:27

   In terms of um decisions we've made, there's been times where things have been a bit 50/50. With those kind of decisions, there's been a fair few times where we've said, "Well, actually, we think that it'll be good to get out to the backers." And that means they're not always going to be 100% perfect, but that's why we want to push them out there. We want to gather feedback. We want to look at analytics. We want to talk to the community and discuss, "How can we progress this? How can we move this on to the next level?" In some circumstances, clearly the feature isn't ready, and then it's easy to say, "Actually, let's relieve the pressure. It's a no-go, and then let's give the team more chance and opportunity to make it better." I think you anytime you work on a project or or anything, you're expecting it to be done by a certain deadline. Um if it doesn't hit that deadline, you know, then you have questions of why, what held us back, but at the same time,

10. 00:07:16

    I would rather hold something back if it's not right than put it out into the public. In terms of how these things affect the road map, I always feel that on a personal level, um can feel a bit disappointed that we were really close to delivering something, but um it may need to be pushed out. That's kind of why we've started doing the road map round-up is so that we can try and convey the reasons behind why something that was on the road map for a little while has then got moved. If we let a feature in that maybe isn't ready, uh there will be delays. There will be um other bugs that it might create, and you know, therefore it affects our quarterly releases. That's why we we need to be so harsh on these things. An example of something that we've held back from releasing actually is uh in this quarter. Uh we have a

11. 00:08:04

    uh a new targeting system that's been worked on from the uh vehicle team. They're working to update and overhaul the targeting system for the ships, uh which currently does work, and we could actually release at this point in time right now. However, the the UI that comes along with it is um not the best way of us showing this feature off for the first time. Uh this is actually going to make a lot better use of the new building blocks UI. So, we're going to be holding the new targeting system back until the building blocks UI is at a position that we can release that to the public, and these two things can come together and be a really good first example of this new system. Sometimes when you do get a no-go, you know, it can be disheartening because you really work, and you put some effort in to actually get it up to that point. Our job is to try and hopefully convey

12. 00:08:53

    that it's not because we don't think what they've done isn't good enough. It's just simply that in the review meeting uh we're addressed to just give it the the best impact that it could do so that the community can feel uh really impressed with it all. So, while it might be a moment of disappointment, in the long run, it's a much greater feeling when you release that feature to the public, and they really enjoy it. So, what did we learn this week? Well, we learned that in Star Citizen's first-person universe, it's not just the spaceships you'll need to maintain to achieve your goals. That delaying an anticipated feature can be disappointing to developers and players alike, and a decision never made casually or lightly. But that a no-go is an important firewall against allowing a feature to go live before it's ready, and just one more way we're working to ensure all features get the time and resources they need to maintain and improve the gameplay experience for Star Citizens

13. 00:09:42

    everywhere. For Inside Star Citizen, I'm Jared Huckaby, and we'll see you next week.