10 For the Writers Episode 03

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] hello star citizens welcome to another episode of 10 for the writers I'm will Weiss spom and with me is the newest member of the writing team here at Star Citizen Adam Adam would you like to introduce yourself yeah hi I'm Adam Weezer this is uh going on my third month here at the company so very excited to be a part of this and very excited to sit in for Dave today who is still in the UK working on the Squadron 42 shoot so hey Dave hope all is well over there and part of that caveat is without Dave here you cannot trust any of our answers we are just shooting in the wind he is our heart and soul um and along

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   we'll be answering questions today that were asked by subscribers and of course the whole 104 series wouldn't be possible without the subscribers so thank you guys so much for stepping up and really being a part of the team thanks for making this possible guys so first question so Mac V1 R Us regarding the player reputation system Beyond basic good and evil alignment will career choices actions also play into their reputation and the way they interact with NPCs and the rest of the universe and if so to what extent kind of like a a big part when we were approaching how we were going to be handling the reputation system is the like as the writing team we kind of didn't really like some of the way other games handled

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   alignments with having it be very binary um where it is good and evil and it feels a lot of times in games like that that you're only making one choice you make a choice at the beginning am I going to be good and good or evil and after that you're not really making choices you're just sticking with that initial one so we're really big fans of kind of gray alignments of in every situation you're in you're asking yourself what is my character going to do in this situation and not knowing a clear result of your actions like you know if you want to slap someone because they're acting crazy then maybe they'll thank you for it or maybe they'll be really pissed and try to stab you but but like that kind of thing so I think that that'll tie a lot into the way the

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   reputation system works where all these different organizations that you can work with or against will have their beliefs and their moralities and your actions will either get them to feel more positively towards your character or more antagonistic and that's kind of how the reputation goes it seems like we want the uh the scale to be more Dynamic than just a a simple bar as to good or towards bad you know and we that can definitely be affected much like how we have multiple ship companies and multiple weapon companies like and they all have their own goals and the same thing here when you have different guilds when you have different you know things you're going to be interacting with you know like they're all going to have their own scale to a certain degree that'll that'll kind of factor into this so uh the end goal is to to definitely

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   make it more Dynamic than than than we've seen in in a lot of games and at a certain point when your reputation starts getting high enough hopefully we can uh we're still working all this with design hopefully start incorporating things where the NPCs are reacting to you appropriately like if you get really uh High reputation with the bounty hunting guild you're a really well-known Bounty Hunter then criminals will start being aware of that reputation and start acting accordingly and being more antagonistic towards you or avoiding you altogether depending on their own personality so there's kind of all these interesting dynamics that can come out of the reputations and how they play with other groups that if we can pull off it'll really kind of neat so we have a lot of work to do but it's very exciting it's it's definitely something

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   we're we're looking forward to digging into and and really getting the the details figured out for that yeah yeah we've been really flexing our muscles on this in the start in the Squadron 42 and hopefully we'll be talking about more of that conversation system and then really seeing these initial faces and how it's just going to explode wildly when it gets into the persistent Universe in an awesome way very cool okay from Andy hey guys will we be able to interact or EAS drop on NPCs in areas like pubs to gain information about current events happening perhaps use that info as a quest invitation yeah it's it's something that uh will definitely be be a parent or be be around in the game and in in lots of different uh in a lot of different areas so yeah we're looking forward to being

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   able to have the players go out there and you know just through the daily course of running around doing things have have little things waiting for you uh in different parts of the verse yeah Discovery I I think will be a big part of it I I think we want to try to obate a little bit of the classic system of guy standing there with an exclamation point over his head so it'll be more about you know being in that bar having your drink and over hearing two guys talking about this huge run that they're making to a system yeah and what do you do with that information do you try to undercut them and deliver Goods like quicker than they will do you try to Rob them and kind of kick off it might not be like you know we we'll have to figure out how the exact you know Quest system is going to work when it pops up on your thing but hopefully it'll trigger at

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   least that information into the system we have where things just spiral out from that one little tidbit of information yeah try to make it a little more immersive a little more uh you know engaging so that players that do take the time to pay attention to those small details can you know get the drop on certain things like that and and use it to their benefit slando Malian asks we have already seen a hint of Galactic gear and commercials for various ships will there be infiction TV and radio programs that keep up with the everchanging persistent Universe other games did this extremely well helping to make the game world that much more immersive so yeah I I mean we've already started kind of laying the groundwork in a lot of our dispatches and now on around the verse we have Empire report and so those are

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   kind of our dipping our toes into this idea of these ongoing fictional pieces so hopefully when the persistent Universe goes live you'll be having semi-regular Empire reports that are commenting on what's happening in the in the game at that moment or kaizen's giving the latest Financial update about how so and so company is doing really well and it's going to be a Monumental task and we're going to have to really figure out you know how much we're going to able to iterate and how quickly and really streamline that process so you know in our Ideal World we can record stuff and get it in very fast at least that's the end goal so I'm very hopeful yeah and I know um again from just my brief time here that the that there's a very conscious effort especially from from

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    Dave in making sure that the personalities Behind These shows the personalities that are leading the discussions are more than just kind of like you know vehicles to get information across he wants them to be real living breathing people with viewpoints with certain angles on things and with even some kind of like long-term kind of like perspectives so it's it's it's good to know that he's thinking about that already that he's that that we're we're trying to think of these people as people that will be affecting that verse in in many different ways going forward when that when that came up it was it it's good to see that and to know that that's you know definitely something we'll be we'll be working on and digging into yeah totally I mean it's just from the heart of Chris's vision of of the players and star s and having that impact on the universe and part of that will'll be seeing you know their actions hopefully influence these programs that they can watch and listen to and then hopefully

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    not everything will be a new show too hopefully we'll got to do some fun kind of infiction fiction shows which would be kind of neat to do finally write that Noir romance mystery G to get my hands on next we've got noo 1977 hi writers has Sig ever considered adding an Intergalactic Red Cross to the SAR citiz lore and ultimately the Pu NPC driven agency which would generate humanitarian and disaster relief missions throughout the verse including SAR medical assistance and evacuations yeah no there was there was a lore post which uh recently kind of touched upon this briefly about uh about uh uh you know a non-governmental or a agency going to provide aid for the I believe

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    the fora system so yeah it's definitely something that's in the back of our mind and it's uh something that excites us to be able to have that be an element of the game too um so not everything needs to be government driven uh not everything needs to be simple kind of hunt bad guy bring bad guy back it is a bigger Universe there are bigger problems and other questions out there so being able to do humanitarian Aid um medical relief stuff like that to to the various systems I think is something that uh we would definitely like to make sure we incorporate going forward yeah that famine post was a great example and then there's also the Kon 3 Civil War we talked a little bit about like you know the ships trying to run the blockade there so I think the idea of uh players being able to help people in a positive way is really kind of fun and refreshing and lets them feel more noble

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    and it isn't always like you say about about killing the bad guy and then you know and then even on a smaller more personal you know level we're gonna have people who get their ships blown up and are sitting there in little Escape pods that need to be picked up in those search and rescue operations going around and helping your fellow player out and bringing him back in like that that I think could make some really strong connections between players floating in this big dark scary universe so that'll be really nice yeah so it's something we'll hopefully Explore More as we go for it and it's a really interesting part of the verse for us Aragorn BH asks is there a plan to dynamically record player activities in a personal journal and then he goes on

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    to some more details from that but at the basic point of it yeah we're definitely going to have kind of a running log hopefully I say we definitely are going to have the hope and talks and kind of going on right now is that we're going to have a running tally of all the exciting things you've done in game all the systems you visited all the people you've interacted with uh how many miles You' flown and all that and the personal Journal aspect of it is something we've touched on it gets a little complicated dynamically creating emotional entries based off content because we really want the players to uh have their own sense of personality so if the stuff that we're um generating for them doesn't quite line up with how they're feeling then it might be a disconnect there so we still have to do more experimentation

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    to figure out uh if something's going to be on that level but I think probably the most exciting thing about is we have Mig glass uh as a way to ground all of that information in lore by using the mobiglass apps and there'll be a bunch of different ones to track all the different sorts of information about your character so maybe all the places you visit will be tracked in a travel app on your Mobi glass and stuff like that so theming it that way I think will help immersion a lot for players and Star Citizen so we've got next question from foxy Fritz I know it's very far off but will the political situation ever change in the Pu yes that's definitely

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    something that we're uh going to be digging into into the future um it's something I know when I was first talking to Dave about uh about this project uh the idea of having elections in the in the Pu was exciting to me the idea of kind of like having having a campaign or having to kind of like uh you know see that that go about and how how the the players would actually react to that and react to the message put out there I think was was very intriguing so it's definitely one of the things I'm looking forward to digging into uh once we get to that step uh once we get to that stage yeah the the franchisement that you know comes from citizenship and either getting involved that way or you know we have this uh Taran candidate who's running right now in the dispatches for Senate and kind of thinking of oh how will the players be able to influence that campaign or

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    affect the political issues and then on top of it based on their feedback on who they want to see elected when that person does come into power to kind of have it feel like it made a difference like that person coming into office changed the universe in some way so that's something we're we're definitely excited about and it should be really cool so kit bash asks writing scripts for interactive conversations must be hard can you tell us a little bit about how you approach it also some RPGs tend to fall into dialogue trees whose branches all just loop back to the same options and only amount to skipping or reordering parts of the conversation you can keep asking questions about different topics until you've caught them all is that something you're looking to avoid in favor more natural feel flow in Star Citizen conversations so Chris's you know marching orders from the get-go has

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    always been immersion and being able to go back and Reas questions all over and just having these kind of looping cycles of narrative definitely break that so from the GetGo it's always been you know if you miss a conversation you miss it you can't really re-trigger them and you know if if there's a branch and you choose one of the branches you you don't get to see the other one that's that's your choice and you kind of have to live with that and putting those Stakes that high and knowing that is these conversations are kind of delicate flowers for you to experience I think gives them more value and weight and hopefully will will make them more engaging in that and then if you want to find out more about characters that you really have to actively engage with the NPCs rather than just you know clicking

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    on them and going through these big cycling Loops so we're still definitely you know fleshing out the whole conversation system and we've been doing some awesome stuff at the Squadron 42 shoot that's going on right now and I'm really excited about uh so yeah it's pretty cool I I think yeah and the and just the first question the process behind it I haven't done as many interactive uh conversations yet as as he has obviously doing a lot of the Squadron 42 work but um I I do think the process of actually writing branching conversations is really interesting at least from a writing perspective and it can be difficult but if you know the character you know if you know who's saying it then it's just about modulating their responses based on based on the way it goes so it's uh it's actually something that's a that I find a lot of fun to do and is kind of

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    interesting to do to be able to to really understand a character by getting not only one view of their uh relationship to a subject or an answer but a stream of them so it's something that you know when I get a to do it I I definitely definitely like doing it yeah yeah it's it's kind of the the process at least how I approach it is when you come to that question of when it feels like um the player has two possible things like it makes sense for you to be able to go in two different directions like it's not a clear kind of answer that's when we say all right this is the perfect place for a branch and we try to come up with kind of really like two big differences if both answers feel very similar then it's kind of like why are we doing the branch we might as well

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    just have the answer be what it is so it's kind of the first step is thinking of all right what are the two things you can say in this situation and then like you said thinking about the NPC's reaction to those and where it goes off from there and then you know further branching and it can get a mess really fast um right now we're using traditional screenwriting software to do kind of the branching dialogue stuff which which has its own sort of problems uh it's not really built for nonlinear conversation so we have to use all these kind of headers and stuff to know if this is option one and then it goes here and little arrows to point where it's branching back to and all this stuff but we have a crack team of programmers and stuff who are working on exploring options to help us kind of write these

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    more in kind of a tree node flow mode um which is coming online so hopefully that'll help us do more and more complicated stuff that would be great next question is from Commodore what is it like to write for a game that is actively being created or changed for example the star map and jump mechanics have not been narrowed down how do you take this into account when you're writing so yeah it actually explains part of the reason why so many questions are asked of us that we need to kind of soft pedal around to a certain degree you know it's a lot of stuff is still the details are being figured out but from our perspective um sometimes details are good and sometimes being able to kind of you know it it makes you more creative is to figure out a way to explain the emotion uh or the character

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    without getting into that you know necessary specific specifics that said you know there there are some aspects of the game which are internally there we have a little bit more advanced but maybe isn't confirmed isn't isn't quite done so there's we need to make sure that when we do put any kind of information out there we just make sure it's uh it's something that should be getting out there and that it's confirmed and that it's something that we can actually deliver for you guys so it's something that we're always conscious of and we have many layers of people looking at it just to make sure that wait wait wait we can't we need to be careful about that quite yet there's definitely times where you wish like everything was locked in so you could just have answers but that kind of open-endedness uh can be fun to explore sometimes and not getting bogged down in specific mechanics when we're doing our stories and really focusing in more on feeling and emotions of the story of

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    like right it's not about the landing it's about the exhilaration of the experience and that's where we can add in from a lore perspective and also it's this real interesting triangle of development as far as you know this kind of in progress Works which makes it a really fun project to be on where you know design art and narrative are all working and and it can start in any one of those points art can come up with a cool piece of concept art that then design takes and tries to make functional and then we have to explain or we come up with you know this idea of you know the cargo Olympics was something really silly that we thought of but design really liked and is like looking at possibly making a thing and so it it kind of all feeds into each other and it can start anywhere and it's really neat that kind of organic

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    creative process yeah it's nice to have people from other departments walk into our office and be like hey we had a great idea and kind of be able to hear that and uh be able to like oh we should that that'll be perfect to kind of incorporate in or you know kind of play around with with so it's good to have ideas coming from all different directions daoi guy asks does CR approve every piece of lore or have style guides and preliminary World building guides giving you more autonomy since rules are in place I am consistently Amazed by how on top of everything Chris Roberts is he he reads almost every piece of lore that we write like you'll think like oh this was just a small thing that I scribbled down and then he'll mention it like a few weeks later and he knows it all by heart I mean this game seems to be his lifeblood and it's

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    kind of a inspiring to work with him in that matter so uh he sees everything in the day-to-day sometimes he's not giving direct approval a lot of times it's the larger kind of tonal pieces he's given us marching orders on and then Dave is kind of the stop gap for the approvals of all the narrative stuff and then you know it's up to his call if he think something's more controver IAL or maybe steering away from something that's already been established he'll run it past Chris and C but those guides that we're all agreed on you know we keep going back to to those as our source of fiction you know and and you've probably had this experience even more so than mine from starting off more recently with so much more content in place but about having before you write anything going and doing research on our already

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    written material yeah yeah it's it's been uh it it's it's been a huge learning curve and I I read all the lore before I before I started day one too I was was already felt like I was you know up to date like you guys are and then I came in and I saw the internal website with all the stuff going on and I was you know so it's uh but it's been fun you know luckily uh Sherry our archive start started at the same time too so we've been going through the the same process and I've been able to talk to her about about stuff like that but um yeah Dave has been in the ground floor with Chris on on a lot of these kind of like creative decisions and the L decisions from day one so uh he is very good about kind of like you know being just the the database of like making sure that anything we write if if there's an issue if it needs to be more specific less specific like he's he's on top of that and he he knows that and

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    yeah obviously Chris has looped into all these conversations too and uh very Hands-On with with with every aspect but Dave is very capable of uh you know kind of like keeping the the lore portion uh in check that's for sure okay uh so uh cyberwolf asks will we be able to play flashbacks of historical missions and single and single player Mission packs or other characters perhaps Through The Eyes of an ancester Allah Assassin's Creed or famous military hero like we play games that feature the Battle of Britain or midm or Midway today in our Sims uh I would love to be there during the last tar and War watching the suicide run or even first contact with the Banu man you wouldn't wanted to be there at the darar war that stuff was messed up

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    uh um it's it's it's definitely an ancient idea and it's something that um you know I I think is kind of built into the the way the the game is so far is that we do have S pods we do have ways that even in the in the context of this world like you could get in a s pod and maybe there's a company in the verse that creates a game like that which we may then be able to kind of like step out and then have you go back to um so it's definitely an interesting idea and there's I think there's a lot of fertile ground for us to be able to explore stuff that's that's that's already happened that's for sure yeah I mean Dave has established so much great history over these 900 years and there's all these awesome big epic battles between all these species and it would be really pretty neat to be able to go and have full out Wars you know and

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    experience those historical moments so I'm hoping that it will be something to do and it's definitely something we've talked about be really fun yeah maybe one of them is a simul of you being mess and having to give a speech like a speech simulator like PRX to like R up everyone exactly exactly it's like Guitar Hero but for imperators and then it's just you taking a bath as him for a while the ultimate mess over simulation uh cool well thank you so much for joining us here on another edition of 10 for the writers as always again thank you to the subscribers and not only thank you to the subscribers but thank you to all of the backers for making this incredible game possible it wouldn't be here without you so thank

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    you yeah it's been an honor to work on this it's fun to be a part of this uh so yeah keep the questions coming and uh we'll see you again 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 we'll see you in the verse