SQ42 Update & The Briefing Room Introduction

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:04

   [Music] so the elephant in the room finally the

2. 00:01:27

   squadron 42 video is here so uh um you know can we brian we want to do i mean i'm probably guilty for for one of the reasons why it's finally here as opposed to a uh you know a much simpler shorter thing that uh we were uh playing around with an idea earlier um but brian do you want to maybe yeah we initially planned to absolutely we we initially planned to you know me i was just going to call up some of the guys as i kind of casually do from time to time record it talk about our progress and see what was going up um it ended up being really you know good discussion and we'd go in depth on some design stuff in our choices and so on but when we looked at it and kind of showed it to chris at the surface there really wasn't visuals

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   attached to it and didn't really kind of show off her progress so when when chris dug into it a little bit more and he said wait you know let's see how we can give this a little bit more life let's look what we can do um at that point one of the areas that we're working on and talking about was aseato and i i worked with nathan dearsley and uh talked about the progress of where we were and he's like hey give me a couple weeks and it's basically gonna be done right so we said okay wait hold on it went from this casual small conversation that we had recorded and we were all proud of and thought was good too you know what no we're going to do a bigger thing and then once we looked at that we said wait why don't we actually look at a larger wider amount of progress across multiple

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   disciplines um and and see if we can put this show together on a quarterly basis so this first one's a little bit longer than it they may be moving forward we're not sure how the length is going to be moving forward but uh you know we dig into some guys you get to hear some history you're gonna see a certain level of detail you'll hear design choices um uh with nick and a couple of the other guys and i i think you know i think people are gonna like it and i think it's gonna mature the show's going to mature before and i i think the other the other thing i would just add to it is that you know the other you know everyone's super busy we want to make the game right so we don't want to spend a huge amount of time generating assets just for a show so one of the focuses of it is is well why don't we

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   sort of look at what we've got planned for the corner and you know like so in this particular case asiato is the location that we're going to deep dive into we've we've shown teased a few elements of it before like you saw a little bit of it in the the teaser we did uh the end of last year um but actually finished game ready was this quarter and so instead of you like just talking about it which is what was happening much earlier on when we did the sort of an initial thing we said no let's have the art department like finish it properly so it's getting ready and we can also show it as we're talking about i i think that's you know one of the keys for us is we want to update everybody on our progress but we don't want to spend all this extra time just doing work that's only going to go for the show it really should be mostly about hey let's show off what we've achieved

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   as we're moving forward finishing out squadron 42. plus this works really well because it's early on in the story and as the idea isn't too much of a spoiler for anyone i think internally too i think you know we we will treat squadron different than we will um pu or star citizen in the sense of of what we're showing in updates in progress um you know the pu it's it's it's it has these quarter releases that that we go out and and things get updated and things get improved along the way right so showing things that are work in progress i think work with that model and that's fine and you get to see really early examples of it you know going on that i think you know like what's interesting is one of the things that you know people say oh i enjoyed the atv shows

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   you know back in 2017 but what they don't remember was we didn't really release an update for the pu for almost a year because we were trying to get the planet tech in and all the rest of stuff and then it finally came in with 3.0 so we had this huge gap where we could we were had stuff that you know people weren't getting as a build say every three months and so they would see this something oh i'm seeing all this really cool stuff now one of the actual problems we have with the pu inside star citizen is that every three months they're getting a lot of this content and drops everything so it they're like well that's boring i've seen it because they're just they're getting to see it and play it whereas squadron's different than that i mean obviously we can't show all of all of what we're doing in the squadron because it will definitely spoil some of the you know the the story and the surprise

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   and there's a lot of really cool moments that we have in in the game that i think is going to be very powerful and effective for people but we certainly have stuff that you know yeah you don't you don't have that you're not you're not running around for instance at the audio station you're only ever going to see that in the pu after squadron's out you're never going to see it before then uh and there's plenty of other stuff that we're doing that you don't see like there's a lot of sophistication and the ai and the social ai that you don't see in the pu because we're not implementing that yet it will be stuff that we can use later on but the the bleeding edge of it is definitely squadron and so i feel like you know yeah we can really do a sort of more chunky dive in squadron every quarter and we would also combine it with a sort of report of what we've done that what we've completed that quarter and have some visuals to show

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   so you sort of have a visual video company almost like three monthly reports all rolled into one plus the deep dives and i think that will be a a really fun uh and interesting way to get sort of your update and information on squadron while you're waiting for it which you know i guess gets us to the other elephant in the room brian yes yes yes the uh the road map um roadmap is roadmap is not done yet it's not done it's not going to be posted tomorrow but we are actively working on it um it's it's a bit it's an involved process um we're not just you know putting something together quick that's here's some text that we're throwing up we're actually creating a system to where um internally it's a tool that we use or it can feed into the tools that we use on a daily basis

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    and it's something that can then get pushed external and be updated as close to real time as possible so it really is a gauge when when when devs finishes work and they tick it off within our software that information gets fed all the way through what i can say as far as and there's been really good progress on it right now it's just not at a point where we can actually get it external i believe the last road map we had did say we were going to be beta this uh this calendar year we will not be beta this calendar year that's one thing that i absolutely know um and once we do have the dates that us internally and leadership and the team are confident that we have dates that that we believe we can hit with all the data that we have together we're going to we're going to share that to with everybody as soon as we can

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    yeah i mean i think that's i mean you know back on the roadmap aspect of it you know one of the big focuses is the change from just the goal which is like okay this feature done or this piece of content done to also what all the teams are working on and you because a lot of times we can have teams working on something for six months or a but the feature you may not even see or the content you may not even see because it's not currently on our roadmap because it's outside that scope of a view and so that's why a lot of things shoot up on the roadmap now oh look suddenly this feature shut up well no we were actually working on it for quite a while so one of our big impetuses is like what it would be much better for us to shift the visibility for everyone to know what everyone is uh working on what their priorities and then you sort of understand because

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    ultimately there's a you know we've always got you know ten things that we want to do and only enough time to do five at any one time so you've got to make or actually small like a thousand things you want to do and only tight enough to do a 10 or 100 or whatever of them at the same time so there's always a priority call but at least with this visibility you you can see oh yeah you know there's people working on this you know working on something like i don't know um salvage right so you know we have people that will be working on elements of that before but you don't see salvage right now at all on the current uh pu road map and so you'll sort of see the allocations the same for people working on squadron as it will be for the pu and so you sort of feel like it's better to communicate what people are working on and you know when they finished it is it

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    falls out of that of course but it's not just focused on the end goal of task because a lot of times those will move you know because sometimes the team will you know they'll they'll be things they just haven't realized or there's a problem they've got to fix something or maybe there's bugs in a system they wrote previously they've got to go and help fix for a live release but then that's going to eat into the time they were working on that new feature that you were hoping to get by this date but now it's going to go back because they have to spend an extra couple of weeks bug fixing and so what we want to do really is have a system that we use internally to manage uh and visualize all this that also we can use externally so we don't have to do a whole bunch of additional sort of interfacing and management of the data to get to um you know all you out there right or

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    everyone that is interested in this is because the problem is once we do that it just it becomes an extra effort and extra and then when you you know need to change things people don't like to change them until they've got enough to change or they want to know a little more information before they change so we're just like oh let's not worry about how how how it goes what you're going to see is basically a version of what we see i'll be a bit more sanitized you won't know the individual names because obviously we don't want to get into the oh well you know nick elton said he would do this in two weeks and it's taking them two months fire nickel um aspect take it into it uh but i think it'd be worth it and the other thing that's important to know is that this isn't just about giving someone a spreadsheet right this is we've got a full sort of jira system and also

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    it's like building an app on our web platform that interfaces with this and displays it it's a whole engineering initiative and that again like a lot of stuff that we do on a web platform like you know building the communications the forum system spectrum um the various like iea pages or all the sort of stuff that we do or even those sort of fun games that we do when we do a spaceship or something sometimes that all requires engineering i mean you know there's a pretty large team at turbulent i think we're close to 50 people you know focusing on just our stuff there and you know we've got to fit them in the priorities because we've got a whole bunch of stuff like do we want to you know improve uh you know finish off spectrum properly do we want to uh make the um you know how you you you do a pledge or shop make that flow

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    better or or how about the ship matrix make the ship matrix work better or display better so all those are sort of engineering and our tasks have so you've got to fit that in so it's so like just you know when you say roadmap sounds simple but it's not there's a lot of stuff yeah and that's one of the reasons why i think attack not that people aren't focusing on doing it but we want to do it we want to do it right we don't want to we don't want to sort of half-ass it we're also always even internally trying to improve our processes right so we're constantly seeing how we get the teams to run better how uh you know how we're structuring yeah because we're a big company we've spread across quite a few studios and you know just decided i mean i i had a spectrum post where i was answering uh a question and i sort of went into a little bit of you know just the sheer size of of what gets management development like we've

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    we run an agile process which you know we focus on sort of uh development doing things in sprints but you know we have 58 sprint teams right 58 you know a lot of studios only have 58 people each one of our sprint teams and this is just development it's not you know the rest of the company the marketing the publishing the operations all the rest is qa all that sort of stuff each one of those teams can have four to 20 people on them and they've got their producers and uh you know the product owner you know the the lead or the director and so it's a it's a it's a huge amount of uh you know people to sort of manage and try to keep under a certain vision and communicate it and make sure everyone's on the same page and so it just it takes so it takes a lot to to make sure that we're doing that well

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    we're always trying to make it better how we're managing how we can see it in a global scale but also down to the granular scale and see both those so so it's something we're trying to solve for ourselves as well as solve for everyone out there to sort of see publicly and i think you know it as in everything you just you get better and you tweak things as you go along and so that's been a big focus of us we're never satisfied we're never going oh yeah it's good enough we're always like how do we make this better how do we communicate how do we talk better it's become heightened because of the situation we're in you know now everyone's working at home probably going to be working at home you know pretty deep into next year i would guess and you know that just means you have to communicate more right so you can't walk over someone's shoulder and you know see what they're doing and give them a little bit of feedback or run into them in the break room and have a little chin wag with a cup of tea

19. 00:14:52

    so i feel like you've you know you spent a lot of extra energy in communicating and so that's what we've been doing internally we've opted out communication since we've been working home we weren't uh stopped by what happened but i definitely don't feel like we operate quite as quickly as we did because we have to spend more time talking and communicating um but we're also thinking about how we can also take that and turn it outside and communicate better with everyone out there as well i think that's just a lot of videos being compiled by people who sent you know three or four gigabytes every day relying on people's internet speed have you got it yet i get a lot of that it takes a little more you know a little bit more time than it did but you know we are the team's healthy and people are moving forward and you know we're still getting builds out for for uh the pu

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    and we're still hitting milestones in squadron so you know yeah i'm not saying that it's something that makes us think twice what i'm just saying is we've had to transition to focus even more on really being good with our communications because you sort absolutely came when you're approached and we're also thinking about how we can do a better job of communicating externally too we've been actually upping the internal communications uh you know both executives to the staff the various project management to the staff to make sure that uh you know we're trying to keep people up to date and we also want to do more of that externally um for everyone out there that's one of the point of this show um so you know i think you know long term uh it will it will be uh it will be all stuff that you guys will enjoy

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    and um you know i look forward to seeing you having you guys uh look at some of the very cool stuff that we're working on so i will throw this to a earlier version of brian in the daytime yeah so here you go take away your briefing hope you enjoy you