Inside CIG . Roundtable . Design

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:11

   hi everybody I am here with some of our designers for cig who tell me that they are the keepers of documents the holders of blueprints we have Nate blazel Pete Mackey Rob Irving and Blake Yates yay new guy so tell us what this means a keeper of documents come on Rob Spill the Beans everything we are thinking about well Chris is thinking about everything in his head has to be somewhere that new people can find it the artists can find it the programmers can find it so we spell it all out on paper pH in this case in Confluence um everything's documented every system every piece of equipment everything has to be written down this is a massive open world my first day I swear I panicked I looked at I'm like there's no way we can't do this I can't keep up so in Confluence how does this how does this this work

2. 00:01:00

   you talk to Chris you guys have your standups tell us how the process works we do have meetings now we didn't we're free form right I mean guys we've been working fine without a lot of meetings mate do you like meetings really sometimes sure ones but yeah we we try not to meet too much but it's it's constant interaction with one another so we all the Departments work together one of us is always moving around between desks and how do you get ideas out of Chris's head sometimes we sit down and ask him sometimes it's throw something out there and say hey Chris what do you think and then he'll tell us a lot of times there's a question that comes up that we're all like we don't think we have an answer that to that maybe Chris does and if he doesn't then it's up to us to kind of shoot ideas around and get everybody in agreement so say for example with the

3. 00:01:49

   new ship the Avenger does that start with you guys it did that was a Spur ofth the- moment five minute discussion where we were all just sitting around it's like why don't we make up a new ship while we're sitting here and so the Avenger was born 10 minutes y took 10 minutes and then we had the stats page from Ben and it was all done it's like look new ship so with the hanger app then what do you guys do on the design side it's like well we need to design ship parts we need to figure out how many ships fit in a hanger you know what the different styles of hangers are we we have a Wiki page for that which is the here's the discount hanger here's the nicer hangers how do you interface with the parts that you have and get them on your ship and stuff like that so the the user interaction experience is something that we go through fact I'm working on that right now so you have ideas you bring them to

4. 00:02:38

   programmers and the artists and then they say okay well this isn't possible or we can't do or do they always say that they always say that they're not allowed to say that well you know my experience has been that sometimes they will get an exasperated look on their face and uh say that might not be possible and then 20 minutes later they come back and say I figured out how we can do that so A lot of times you know the initial shock of like you want what uh is kind of overwhelming but everybody wants to make something awesome so they usually take it and chew on it for a minute and then figure out how to make it work it also helps to have some Alternatives in your back pocket and to present to them as well it's a negotiation a lot of times it's like well we want to go this far how far

5. 00:03:26

   can the programming team go how far can the art team go you know how much can we really do but we try to push for the more instead of the less and a lot of this is inspired by the fact that you're all Gamers you get the Geeks would you consider yourself a geek no none of you are Geeks come on please I mean look at this I I what does it say I had friends on that death star that's not geek zie B we've got we've got the creative shirt side and then we've got to kind of just Z all right so no i' just been a fan of that kind of stuff you know really just like a lot of people I think you know from the first time I saw Star Wars you know really is kind of where it started for me but then you know playing like wi commander games in the late 80s and 90s that was you

6. 00:04:15

   know that set the set the tone and then it's kind of just something I thought about for a long time so something I wanted to do should should I admit that my what my earliest memory is sure now now now you have to cough it up let's go man my earliest memory is being in a theater when I was I must have been about Oney old and seeing the whole Star Wars scene where they're or chaca is playing the game little game on the Millennium Falcon and then the jump to light speed those are my earliest memories so how much work have you got laid out right now where are we at we are running like half a step ahead of what production needs basically it's like we need to know how this works well we'll start on that right now but yeah it's it's going to be constant constant

7. 00:05:02

   pressure all the way through to keep things designed it's pretty much endless an open world so you can start with the smaller focus and just have a general broad idea of where you're kind of going absolutely a lot of times it's just one of them wondering up to my desk and going hey uh when I'm when I'm not working on what I'm working on right now can I design this system or that system like Nate you did bounty hunting so is Confluence just a fancy word for like Google Docs it is it's a it's a Wiki it's a giant Wikipedia basically of Star Citizen I I'm sure the fans would love to get their hands on those documents no keep keep her the keys that's right keep her the keys for the blueprints we may have some version of it for them when the we release the modding tools and stuff like that some edited version of it so they can see the nuts and bolts

8. 00:05:51

   and we have magic Dave to to put all the little teasers out there of the things we want to talk about cuz he can write fiction around any system we're working Magic dayve the writer man besides you guys we also have Dan Tracy Dan Tracy and and Dave hadock is sort of an honorary designer he's on Skype with us all the time I mean everything he does comes past my desk he's he's he has some really good ideas he does and he helps us to get bits of what we're doing out to the audience even when we're not ready to reveal the whole system great at keeping us consistent otherwise like threads would just start running like wild horses out and he kind of reins them in and makes sure everything like fits together so he does a really good job do we need a lot more of you then we do we're going to when we start really building stuff we're going to need an army of designers so we're just we're

9. 00:06:38

   ramping up slowly because we have to get all the tools in place before we can actually build all this stuff I know that we got some of these guys learning the engine already so we'll be ready we got a lot of missions to make and a whole lot of star systems to build and we're going to be Psy all right thank you to all our designers the keepers of the blueprints and later on tonight we're going to look at our artists see