10 for the Developers: Episode 02

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] hi and welcome back for another edition of 10 for the developers we've got two such devs here but before we get into it I would like to start off by thanking all of the subscribers out there who make this content possible all the extra shows and written material that we can release every month is thanks to their generous donations we couldn't do it without them so thank you we're here inside the brand new cig Los Angeles Studio which is coming together really nicely it's still under construction but every day it gets a little bit better and it's incredible the space we have now very

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   exciting and uh we're in the fan cave yeah look at all this neat stuff how much do you want one of those I really want one of those going to find out maybe we can put a link down here this isn't going to happen but right here this is where you can get your own just right now put it in there do it so to introduce ourselves we're the ones who are going to be talking uh I'm will Weiss swam I'm the senior writer for Star Citizen and with me is I am Jeremiah Lee the concept artist for cloud Imperium games in Los Angeles so shall we get into it oh it's great yeah let's do it so the first question comes from Perry hope how do you writers approach a new detail for yourself yourself is it more like bam something comes in your mind and the creativity starts or do you guys have epic discussions with good old scotch and a

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   massive Churchill Cigar involved also I'd like to see more stories about relationss between the races when will be your next stories or do you guys get authors to write about in-game stories so to start off um I think the inspiration comes from a lot of places a lot of times you'll just be driving home and an idea will pop in your head and you'll come in really Jazz and it'll just flow from you but a lot of times having a creative job it's the job portion of it where you are actually you know you have to have the discipline to come in and write and generate ideas on demand and that's kind of the difficult part um we all have an office together and it's really helpful to be able to turn around and toss out ideas so sometimes we'll sit around and do

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   brainstorm sessions or we use like share documents to share ideas with each other and and that's a lifesaver I don't know how it is with you know kind of as an artist having that Force creativity come about yeah I mean it's it's pretty pretty similar but uh the difference would be is the writers would come up with kind of a a backbone for the visuals right for the concepts and so um but we have to flesh those Concepts out um and sometimes the the def uh how do you say the definitions of a character or an idea are very kind of broad so we'd have to fill those in and that's where the creativity comes in which is very close too we since we work so close with other artists we kind of bounce back ideas sometimes like um for the John ree Davies character you and I we

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   we chat chat it quite a lot actually regarding just the the outfit yeah yeah it was pretty fun coming from it from his background and how that translated into the materials or designs right so I mean art is pretty it's pretty much similar I mean sometimes uh we do have artist block we're like oh no what do we do it's do in two hours but we don't know so how do you get past your your artist block um for me it's research okay um there's a plethora of just information out there and so like if I'm designing a leather jacket I don't just type in leather jacket on Google like I might you should that would probably be a good point yeah that would be but like if I want to something original um I'd come up I I'd search for things that might be related so I might do like maybe like motorcycle outfit or like I don't know uh World War

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   II and maybe if I see some Cool Shapes I might implement it into like a leather jacket or something so that's my way of kind of getting around the artist block yeah research can be very helpful to kind of take a break and do it up I I find myself getting caught in research Loops though because I love learning so I'll start looking up stuff and then like 10 minutes later you're somewhere completely different on Wikipedia and you're like okay I got to actually go back and then probably the the biggest thing I would say is you know it took me a while to learn is even when you don't feel inspired or you feel like you don't have a good idea is just to put out whatever you do have in your head and often times just dumping out that first pass will let you be like well that's stupid but this would be cool and then you can revise from that but staring at that blank sheet or blank canvas is the really daunting part so if you could

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   just start filling that in with whatever that's a huge grab um and so uh uh stories about the relationships between the races um yeah hopefully we're we have a lot of discussions going on behind the scenes about the races and how they're going to the different alien species are going to interact with each other and so we're planning on how we're going to roll out that content um and we are still working with different various authors to generate material for um the jump points mainly right now so that's been a lot of fun working with those outside authors and getting their takes on things so to to one of your questions okay um our second question is from Johnny 71 uh I'm hoping to be a battlefield Medic in game as I understand it the

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   different armor types each have their own Loadout maximums similar to ship hardpoints will a medic have any type of visual identification that designates them as a medic a medic variant if you will um so we do have currently uh a concept um and it's still still in production uh for a uh a Navy Corman so we do have a medic um but I think this I think Johnny is more talking about like uh like in the field type of medic yeah when they're flying around cutless red or right right that's what I'm thinking so um so far we do not but we do have the we did design the insignias for the Medics and so we might it could be a possibility of just slapping that that

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   texture on I mean I think there's been discussions about having some customizability in the textures being able to decorate your armor in certain ways so you know definitely a good option would be to have that kind of Red Cross Insignia or whatever the version in the universe is so that you can role play as a medic and you know hopefully people won't shoot you or I'm sure a lot of people will try to wear that armor and pretend they're a medic so they won't get shot but then go around shoo other people anyway right which just be really bad don't do that I mean I don't I don't think we'll have like uh like Starcraft their Medics are like white yeah right but that's just for a visual cue but in real life a lot of the medics in the field they wear the the regular bdus and they wear the regular uh gear that a regular Soldier would wear right um just because

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    we don't want the Medics to stand out so they might have a patch uh on their left arm I think um but they don't look necessarily any different so well with well I'll address I kind of It kind of uh Segways to another question so I'll say that for later but we're planning on having our Marines very modular like our ships so we could easily just swap like a shoulder piece out and be like put like a medical Insignia on it so it's in it's it could be in the works not currently cuz we have a lot more uh important stuff but it is a cool idea yeah yeah I mean taking a look at what would make an armor set better for a medic right like maybe they have more smaller compartments on the suit like it would just be a general armor that can hold smaller things like metens at the sake of carrying around more weapons so you're giving up the weapon slots to

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    carry more medens and maybe that would be but it wouldn't have to be medens because of how flexible the system is supposed to be it would just be that size storage so it'll be interesting to see how it develops and giving people the flexibility to kind of design the armor they want to wear right question number three comes from Perry hope we got tngs and we will get TNG star Marine very excited about that are you excited about super excited I would like to see the next great Star Citizen writer I think we have some real talented writers upon us um I think that's definitely true I've been really enjoying the fanfiction that we get uh on our side and on sister sites like Inn and we have a lot of fun reading through those um I don't know if

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    there'll be something like the next great Star Citizen writer because but we already have in place uh a system in which people can submit work to us for consideration inclusion in various things such as jump point or the site um we're in the middle uh on our end talking about how we can clean that up and make it a little more friendly for people visiting the site so stay tuned hopefully for some word on that as as we work through it on our and but we definitely enjoy that engagement with the community and drawing upon the awesome Talent that's out there um yeah and just really getting the sense of what you want to role play and what you want to see in the universe so we take that into account yeah I mean you can touch on the

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    next great star Marine I mean we're going to have all these backer submitted armor I know which I'm super excited about I like I see a lot of I remember I don't want to no I'm not going to say it okay I'll say it so when we had that massive leak of all like uh somebody got a hold of our link stuff I saw there was a fan and he literally just textured the Bengal carrier and after I saw that I was like oh that sucks but it's so cool so every time I see the fan base come up with some sort of art it just really uh really puts a smile on our faces especially the artists because it's just uh it motivates us it motivates us to um also make it better of course because we can uh we have to live up to the hype and everything and we want to make it uh

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    we want to step up the quality bar uh every time we see fans do really great artwork it's just really uh yeah I mean with the amount of talent that we ended up being able to hire from the next great Starship that'll be kind of cool to see what influx of character artists we get from the next great star Marine so all you all all right so next question um from Kiran aari uh in the early descriptions of potential armor classes it was noted that Pilots do not wear the heavier classes of suits are there any plans to make heavy armor prohibited for flying a craft or Staffing other stations yes um currently for our game um I think it's the light Marine is stationing a lot of the stuff a lot of our ships and the reason why is um just the size

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    uh the pilots not the pilots the uh the light Marine is pretty much our almost our base male and so when we when we design our seats and everything there's a specific size right and so a heavy Marine will have a lot of gear and he won't fit in those specific uh those chairs and also I was talking with Randy I think a couple days ago and he was saying that a light Marine is a certain height and the heavy Marine is literally almost touching the the ceiling of the the cutless I think or or or some ship so um there will be limited access to pretty much the size of your armor um so we you won't necessarily see uh a heavy Marine driving a Merlin cuz we have like flight suits distinctly designed for Pilots that don't have as much

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    protection and are more flexible so it might be the kind of thing that you have to literally suit up before you plan heading into battle right or carry people who aren't pilots on your ship who are suited up to protect you cargo and I think we've talked about like potentially maybe uh limiting what you can physically sit down while you're wearing like if you have a giant gun strapped to your back you might not be able to get into certain seats anyway without taking it off and putting it storage before you go in so that kind of role playing elements is pretty neat right right so to answer that question it's really depends on the size of the character and depends on uh the pretty much if you have giant stuff on you can't sit on a chair um it's like yeah once we start allowing the mixing and matching of different pieces it'll see

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    where that kind of breaking that's the scary part is it you'll have to figure that out I know we'll figure that out later um yeah really beefy legs and like no shirt that's how I'm going to fly how come I can't sit we'll have to see what we'll cross that bridge when we get there next question from Perry hope uh thanks for all the great questions per they're great uh we heard about the citizenship after finishing Squadron 42 will the citizens have other clothes than civilians so the really short answer is no uh citizenship doesn't really denote that you're in a separate economic class or you're separate apart from the rest of civilians they're very much part of

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    the same group it's you know a registered voter doesn't wear different clothes than a non-registered voter except for on voting day where they get the little sticker but other than that it's pretty much straightforward so um You' probably expect uh did we mention that we're still under construction here oh yeah so you would expect them to be shopping at the same kind of stores and buying the same clothes probably the biggest influence on what you're going to wear is you know or or at least as far as NPCs is seeing where they live that's kind of where we're going in like different styles coming from the cities where they're hanging out the the weather there and the economic standing there um like you would expect people who live in New York

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    City to dress differently than people who live here in Los Angeles so that kind of thing yeah I mean I was talking to will outside it's like uh even the off duty uh Soldiers the Marines they don't wear their bdus um when they're off duty um they have to wear civilian clothing so um that's why you see all those videos about Stolen Valor and stuff like that but like there is a purpose for that and so um especially when we're uh tackling like military uh type of roles um we're going to try to stick to kind of real life uh references and so no short answer no um next question

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    so uh hi jere from Daz C hi Jeremiah can you tell us a bit about the power armor in terms of visuals and function also how do you design it so it doesn't become the goto endgame armor okay so the first thing I would like to kind of clear up is Star Citizen is not like World of Warcraft it's not like oh we're going to do this raid and then you get this raid armor it's it's it's a completely different type of game um so um we kind of the way we're going to build our armor sets and our items and our clothing uh which kind of ties into another question is uh there's going to be different item slots for specific armor and so for instance like the heavy armor will have a lot more slots more item slots compared to the medium or the

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    light and so it really depends on kind of what you decide to wear but thing is the heavier armor you are uh the slower you might be the less visibility you'll have so there's always a pro and con so there isn't necessarily the best armor suit but there is the best armor suit for certain situations so that would be I think a better ter uh explanation of what the armor power time of things so also in terms of visuals and functions so we currently as Chris mentioned um I think two 10 for the chairman ago or three when I don't know when this airs um he was talking about just the Marines and having like an UND suit and having items attached and so we uh I just finished I've been working on the Marines for like I think a month or two

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    and so without any without spoiling anything we have a suit like an UND suit and we have um items attach to it so like pieces will literally be attached to the unders suit and so in terms of visuals I concepted it so it looks like things can come off and on kind of quickly um it's almost like uh you're literally just attaching it's not like Lego no it's like the centurions right as we were talking earlier pretty much bonus points reference there you go um so that's how that's how I designed it and I had to also take consideration of what type of item attachments they'll have uh because that determines kind of the the forms of the shapes and also the rigging um how

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    the character will move I can't just put like 200 lb armor like shoulder pads like World of Warcraft or or like um or like the Space Marines or like you know I can't I can't do that because it restricts our movement um so I had to take those into so a lot of those basic anatomy things and movement kind of determine how I shape these things so so do you get like a breakdown from design on like what a piece of armor needs to be able to hook into item wise or like carry or um well for the this character what they kind of did was they gave me the basic requirements of this is what the suit is supposed to do or this is what the light or the medium or the heavy will have to have and I had to fill fill in a lot of those stuff cuz a design they can they give us as much information as they possibly can but

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    sometimes they can't give you the right answers because they don't build it right and I build it myself I Look Under and Over and around I'll be like hey we're missing this and so um and also in terms of visuals uh a lot of reference it's a lot of current day military and also uh a lot of cool shapes like um movies like Blade Runner um aliens that type of stuff so a long-winded answer but yeah next yeah yeah definitely that balancing thing so that everything has positives and negatives to it that you know it's you're really strong and really protected but at what cost right so so our next question is from as chatos sorry if I butchered it um and

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    also uh it's almost the same qu question as far Seeker so um I'll just read far seeker's question um I know it has been mentioned that clothing character equipment will have an item Port system somewhat similar to ships can you give us any examples using specific clothing and other equipment for examples will pocket service item ports not just speak cosmetic uh we wearing a pocketed vest over cover us space you increase the number of items small enough to fit the pockets of course one can carry also can one have a holster for a pistol siiz weapon not just on a belt but between a shirt duster trench coat or strap to a spacit thigh so the way um I hope I'm right but I I know I'm right I think I'm right well this is your current thinking on the subject subject to change um yes but um from

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    what we have currently is that each suit or each it each uh clothing have a specific item slot now we can't say that oh if my heavy Marine chest piece chest plate has eight slots and I can stuff eight pistols like this that's not how it's going to work right so each item slot will be specific for a specific size or a specific type of item so for instance um instead of having six magazines maybe you want uh six Med pens for instance for like the like the question that Johnny 71 asked right for for in case of a medic right so that's how're we're going to do our item slots and so um when it comes to layer clothing though it's still in the works so that's not what um we're not quite sure how

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    we're going to tackle that necessarily like dusters and stuff we don't have space yeah trying to figure out the how Pockets were going to work I mean it would be nice if there was a reason why you change out of your T-shirt and jeans into work clothes because they provided you with extra storage for you know to put on that tool belt before you went out to go do your repair job right so I mean I think that's kind of an interesting layer and you know hopefully factoring in possibly how NPCs react to you based on what you're wearing is something we've started to look at potentially so walking around town in your full armor might get you slightly different reactions than you know walking around in your sweet sweet leather coat and I don't think we're going to necessarily approach it like kind of how uh uh m RPGs kind of treated

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    like you have 36 item slots and so you can carry six Bazookas and you're only wearing like a jacket like I mean like it that doesn't really make sense so um we're still fleshing that part out but I think the vision that we have is um those item slots are kind of locked for specific item types and sizes cuz the way you're designing it like is everything visible right now yes so like if you're if you have three grenades you can actually see those three grenades on yourself so I think that's going to carry over into a lot of things like maybe you'll have a backpack then if you want to sh around a lot of stuff right but um that's really I'm really excited about that that you'll be able to like see it being depleted on a guy or be able to ey check an enemy and know if they have grenades right do you have any weapons on you have like six six grenades

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    no like the way we have our Marines set up right now is we have the magnetic attachment points and you can actually see those magnetic attachment points um it was so hard to place them in the right areas but and to look cool too at the same time but literally we have specific magnets to uh match specific items so um like for instance we might have uh grenades on the right side and the magazines on your waist and like a holster for your gun on your right thigh I think so we have specific magnetic points for especially for the military yeah it's interesting something that looks kind of neat and futuristic in real life like you know a gun being stuck onto a chest or stuck onto a like looks really kind of fake in video games because it's so easy just to stick junk onto a character so like when you see so

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    it's definitely a careful balance make it look feel feel good exactly um okay um so our next question comes from farewell red did you correct Mark Hill's nose as a character artist you could also feel like a plastic surgeon um no we did not uh this that is an actual legitimate Mark Hill scan uh the texture to the the Geo that is straight up Mark Hamel U we wanted to really capture the soul of mar Hamel and like I tend to see a lot of games when they kind of fix scans and make it symmetrical and everything they don't look as real yeah yeah you need you need that off that asymmetry um and sometimes those weird

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    things like uh Owen Wilson's nose like he won't look like Owen Wilson without that nose so like there are specific things and uh but yeah we we kept it the same and as a character artist you could also feel like a plastic surgeon I'm a character concept artist and I do that all the time and actually that might not be a good habit but like for instance the John ree Davies character I made him a lot Slimmer initially I think right I mean he's a very husky guy but I made him look like an abchomy model and they're like no no he's bigger than that I was like all right so um I I do do that cuz um I've been trained to draw like uh visually more idealized I mean I mean Society I anyways that's a whole different topic but um yeah as a concept artist we try we we want to make the images look very um sexy um very

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    visually pleasing um so sometimes I do fix a lot of the imperfections but specifically for the scans no that is actually are we going to be like doing stuff like adding scars onto people and messing them up a little more um I uh don't quote me on this but that is the plan I think yeah and so what what we're doing is kind of uh which kind of ties in to next question from am monato will you be able to Leverage The assets you've captured created for your hero characters into the player player character customizations we know that we'll be able to blend between various predefined faces in order to create our own for instance will these predefined ones include the heroes faces that you've made for Squad could you have Mark H's no so uh the players will not have

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    access to the uh uh celebrity alist characters from this what I've been told um so no but we have scanned hundreds including me yes hundreds of individuals and so you can blend between those so potentially you could Frankenstein a Mark Hamill's no together if you want I guess but uh you would have to you can't just be like oh Mark H SS you would have to constr structed together with your creativity it I have to say it was really awesome being able to be head scanned it was one of my favorite experiences so far when I was out in uh England I got a chance to sit in the chair and have all those cameras go off and it was it was really cool and really creepy to see a 3D version of my head rotating around so hopefully all of you

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    will be able to play using my enchanting eyes bunch of bunch of mini Wills SP running around the universe yeah but like uh I think uh Metal Gear phantom pain they had a similar customization type of thing um can I do spoilers well that depends on what they are for the game not for our game oh it's not for Star Citizen feel free oh sweet all right I mean maybe I would say like hey you know I'm about to spoil we'll put a spoiler tago probably there will be nothing here again okay so spoiler figure um spoiler uh for Metal Gear phantom pain there is a scene where uh um snake has to have plastic surgery so that uh the enemies won't recognize him right so I literally flipped the

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    table I was like how dare you do this to my snake um and so what I did was I customized the character for him to look exactly like the original s anyway so I literally spent like 3 hours I printed a picture of snake slapped it on my TV and made it almost exact so you so kind of how that lead into your question is you could probably Stitch something together with our our with our big database of scans to make the face that you want so you might look like Mar Crown but we won't be giving you those that specific asset for we want to keep those reserved for the special characters that's correct I mean it would be weird wouldn't it if like in Squadron 42 Mark Hamill is you know mentoring you and you look like Mark hls well then you would

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    just assume that he went to the same plastic surgeon as you you did especially picked out nose number four Mar HL is a robot everybody he's a clone uh spoilers great now for the last question SB spu spru yeah spu spru when did the UE move away from paper money or do they do they still use some paper money is the star syi economy tied to a gold standard so ueec stands for United Earth credits and so that came among in The Messer era um and I we haven't quite know this time but I believe it was always a a digital

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    currency first and foremost not attached to a gold standard uh gold standard has been kind of abandoned for a long time there's not that much gold around to support an economy Bitcoin a little bit like most people are are are you know need to we've done stories about this about how the difficulties of tracking digital currency across um the systems when we have that lag in Communications where you have to send the comma rate so if you buy something at this convenience store in this system to notify your bank that you've spent that money that kind of trip that information has to take and how they handle it with local um you know relay stations so you know we've been talking about you know what are those kind of currency chips may look like what are you collecting when you find currency so there might actually be

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    physical currency that you come around which are basically non-transferable data things that get stocked around versus kind of wiring and and those would be potentially more reliable in systems without com relays versus kind of the more Central areas where you can hook into the Spectrum and be able to do transfers that way that is interesting like what if I bought something but it's literally like maybe 30 solar systems away and so by the time the information reaches another solar system there might be inflation well we did a fun story about this bank robber who is basically going to all her Banks and withdrawing money in each one and racing faster than the com relays could go and so they didn't know that she hadd already withdrawn her money in the previous Banks which was kind of really fun um so we have built in safety so that you can't do that now but we're going to

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    have to explore that hopefully you know with 2.0 uh the social module and the alpha getting some form of expenditure once the stores are online we can start seeing how currency Works more from the design aspect and then we'll update the lore uh to address the needs and concerns of how people are interacting with the credits um in game so something you'll have to think about from a character design standpoint is all those Pockets to keep your spare change are we getting a a fanny pack is that is that in the pipe that's what it is the official Marine CDs fanny pack to hold your extra clips of ammo approved by me well that wraps up this 10 for

40. 00:31:42

    developers we answer 10 questions with 10 answers I think that worked out pretty well sometimes more I'd say we were about like 15 answers to be honest yeah and we have to thank once again all the subscribers for not only submitting these awesome questions but for donating to make this show and others like it possible as well as to thank all the backers really for letting us work on this Amazing Project thank you so so much it's been a dream come true so far and I'm really excited about this game yeah thanks see you around the verse hey he guys thanks for watching um temp for the chairman uh if you guys

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    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 this video made possible by the ICC Stellar surveyors and subscribers like you