Inside Star Citizen: Brand New Episode | Summer 2020

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:01

   [Music] yeah my favorite brand is of course origin that's a very difficult question i have to think about this cds which is clark defense systems let me think what else is a good manufacturer would be argo drake what's what's good other than drake though no surprise surprise my favorite manufacturer is an fps no right now the narrative team is managing about 250 brands that cover a wide variety of areas from consumer goods to government agencies to service providers the reason there are so many brands in

2. 00:00:49

   star citizen and squadron 42 is that it helps the developers and the players distinguish between the form and function of an item basically help provide color and context for location and it helps inform the the overall history of the entire star citizen universe let's take origin for example if you see that ship coming at you it's gonna probably have these sleek and elegant lines that's very visually distinct if you're flying one you know it's gonna be high performance and probably cost you a lot in development let's take for example argo which up until recently only had one small little ship in its entire line but they wanted to expand upon it when it came to argo we did work on a another ship it was massive i mean it came before the srv

3. 00:01:38

   and it came before the mole and even though it was never fully realized there was a lot of technology and shape language came from that ship and so it was super useful that basically is informed a lot of the srv in the mold so everything is slightly exaggerated everything feels like it's got thicker skin we've introduced um some big chunky vetos it's not like it's not paper thin metal we keep it orange so it's still got that sort of industrial vibe and so you have a cowling of general sort of cleanliness and then under underneath it's just hardcore high density mechanical tech so there are all these sort of things that starts coming in they're very influenced by the name

4. 00:02:28

   in development uh brands can do more than help an artist determine the visual style of a ship they can also help designers figure out the balance of items like fps weapons so one of the things that we're looking at doing this quarter is um putting all of our fps manufacturers into what we call a bounce triangle a bounce triangle is used in a lot of different industries actually and it's more commonly seen in stuff like product design um where you're looking at you've only got a finite amount of time and money so you're trying to decide if you want to make it quickly if you want to make it good or if you want to make it on the cheap and you're essentially trying to pick this point on the triangle in whichever direction you go in it comes at the cost of two other things so when we're talking about manufacturers for consistency we want to

5. 00:03:16

   make sure that they have their own identity and that's where the same balance triangle comes in so the three points that we chose for our weapons that made the most sense to us were power um which generally translates into the amount of damage it puts out per shot um speed which is just translates mostly to rate of fire and how fast it can get bullets down range and range as well so essentially how steady the weapon is is in the hand if it loses much energy over time as it travels and essentially just if something is skewed towards range then obviously it can fire more effectively at longer ranges so the way this ties into the bigger picture is really especially with it giving us more consistency across the brand you need something that's going to tie everything together narrative art and

6. 00:04:04

   essentially design than the way these things work and we need them to be identifiable for everyone kind of upon first look so if i for example found a a kasdak shotgun i know it's going to be about the power and i can see it on the floor it looks like a cast back weapon it is a cast like weapon it's going to be about power and all of that ties together um but as we've identified on a weapon to weapon basis there are some manufacturer outliers um like say for the gemini s71 it's a marksman rifle and that will never fire faster than the assault rifles that we've got so we're quite okay with having the odd outlier per manufacturer kind of like a car manufacturer award where they might try something a little bit different and it either works out it doesn't uh but at their core they're still making weapons that are skewed in one direction brandt also extend

7. 00:04:54

   past items though they can they can be groups of people they could be something like let's say nine tails outlaw pack if you see a nine-tailed symbol on a ship or on a piece of armor or even spray painted on the wall in a location that may tell you to either avoid that area or head on in depending upon whether you're friends with that group or your enemies with it and and we're going into this level of detail because it it really will enrich in the game make it feel more alive and lived in it'll help provide context and color it'll it'll deepen the history to help explain how we have gone from here to there so by doing this we hope to make the the world more familiar and relatable to players and just in general more immersive

8. 00:05:44

   because really what what's more immersive than seeing brands everywhere you look with more than 250 corporations currently spanning everything from vehicle components to financial services to food and drink and more you can learn all about the brands being used to inform nearly everything in star citizen and squadron 42 by checking out the portfolio articles in both our monthly jump point digital magazine for subscribers as well as the weekly lore posts found on the robertsspaceindustries.com website both of which have archives going back to 2012. but up next let's look ahead at what's going on in development now in this week's sprint report putting a button on this week's brand theming directors recently reviewed logo

9. 00:06:32

   options for four brand new brands being worked on including spearfish a maker of emp rook heavy metals a direct supplier of metals and custom alloys to the uee military and advocacy galavan publishing the terran-based publisher of whitley's guide for vehicle enthusiasts and the navy surplus brand offering bdus jackets pants and more that have been retired from active service building blocks the all-purpose ui system that allows our systems designers to prototype and iterate on everything from heads up displays to kiosk screens to vehicle dashboards and more continues to be improved on like this recent work adding drop down and scrollable menus to its array of tools now it may seem like a simple thing but making features that scale

10. 00:07:20

    both visually and contextually for the tremendous volume of different screen types in the verse is no easy task and before anybody goes reading too much into the text that you see here this is all just a collection of random terms the folks in ui use to fill out the various spaces there's no info to mine here work also continues on the layout transitions and drag reordering functionality that will serve as the basis for managing players physicalized inventory when that's scheduled to come online later this year and after seeing the prototype iterate there's also been some discussion about other systems this tech might also be used for now who wants to take some guesses as to what members from the environment art team are continuing their work adapting the

11. 00:08:07

    gas cloud tech originally developed for squadron 42 to be used in the persistent universe like this test for the space scaping of service stations that sit along lagrange points throughout the stanton system now work like this will not only be used to bring added texture and visual breakup to the system but it's also anticipated we'll add a fair number of new gameplay opportunities as well as we continue to explore the various ways we can incorporate this tech across the breadth of stanton's various points of interest work also continues to pace on the upcoming cargo decks which aim to bring new depth to cargo and player to player trading when they come online later this year and while there's still some time left before players can jump in and explore for themselves we'll continue checking in on their development via sprint reports

12. 00:08:55

    as we have since they were merely concept paintings finally before we let you go some very early updates for one of star citizen's original five spacecraft including work on the constellation taurus's expanded cargo bay and early prototyping of an automated docking process for the merlin and archimedes into the constellation's custom docking port it's early days yet but the promise of being able to launch parasite craft from the constellation just got one step closer so what we learned this week well we learned that brands can help artists develop a consistent visual style as well as direction against the challenges of blue sky development that they can form the basis of balance decisions for our designers while being used by players to inform

13. 00:09:44

    about innate functionality at a glance and that brands can be used to add context flavor and history to a universe making it seem just a little more lived in and recognizable for the players within for inside star citizen i'm jared huckaby we'll see you next week you