CitizenCon 2953: Living On The Edge

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Applause] hi everyone uh my name is KH chuckit I the lead level designer for the Pu um I will give you an introdu uction to the to our locations when it comes to the design a high level overview of the design of all locations I'm going to describe you the processes of our workflow and the goals that we aim to achieve so um to break down our process a bit this is very high level but it starts out with a pre-production phase an ideation phase here we uh everything starts out in the mind we bring it down to paper sketch right formulate a plan based on our overall design

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   goals and then it moves on to the blocking stage might have heard of this like uh the white box and gr box face um this essentially contains all of the game play that you would see in in the final product basically the way it's meant to be played and we test this out with a lot of iteration and yeah a lot of testing and it's basically the white box is not in a stage where it's presentable but that comes now so on the right as you see the food cord that Adam is going to be showing you later um yeah this is the final product VFX lighting everybody had their pass on this and level design or other designer still maintain this maintains the space and make sure that makes sure that uh the systems that get created are being

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   retroactively implemented all right um so one key aspect of game development in general is the balance of narrative visuals and gameplay so all these interplay they interconnect and it's the foundation that runs through all game environments um so it's important to communicate context and here in this draw over you see that um narratively we see sort of a dangerous environment the spiky shapes here um are ort of threatening we see defensive structures we can expect some enemy NPCs here but it's also an Old Village maybe there's some exploration some loot to be found and then what's also important is communicating gos so gos can be the

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   pathways that you take uh the the gateways that bring you from one step to another and so on whoops yep there we go okay uh since we're a Sandbox game um accommodating play Styles is pretty important important so play Styles meaning going guns and blazing shooting at everything and everybody uh going more of a stealthy infiltration pathway if you wanted to but also all the social aspects that you know from um Stanton and to do this we establish so one of the core design philosophies is granting the player the freedom of choice to do what they want to do at any point uh throughout their experience and we do this by establishing uh or defining multiple Pathways of or

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   archetypes that we call primary secondary and tertiary pathing so the first one is pretty straightforward in a social setting you have the goal right in front of you and it's a single goal such as here in the Habs in a combat setting this is very exposed so it's dangerous to Traverse this uh route uh where it gets more complex is when you have such as with this Outpost here when you have multiple golds um that can be equally important to the player at any given point this is where we need to have a bit more um design put into it with for example the landmarks that serve as orientation points uh so to help you oriented yourself wherever you are in this location and leading you to to these locations by utilizing shape language

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   and composition uh the second path is these are secondary Pathways so these are are alternative routes and these are options that are offered to you as you Traverse the area on the primary path for example and so you may no this as a tourist when you go to to a new city and you look around the corner and you see an Alleyway that sort of looks nice and it evokes your curiosity and you want to investigate uh in a combat setting these are covered approaches or opportunities for you to flank the enemy to get to your goal which could be this building um on that sketch um yeah versus more Open Spaces when you have in in a combat setting on Open Spaces you tend to be a

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   bit more stationary because you uh want to feel more secure unless you're in a vehicle the third path is tertiary pathing so these are more hidden infiltration routs especially uh discoverable throughout the uh rundown stations that anim will be uh presenting later on and these are mostly discoverable to the inent ofi you can explore these find loot or different routes to Traverse through the station environment interactivity you might have seen this in a previous presentation um it's very important to ground the player to their environment offering them ways of interaction uh being able to change the state of rooms to toy with the AI or just simply being able to unblock your uh

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   pathway where it gets a b bit more complex is when you talk about Resource Network systems such as in day one when torson mentioned that we are planning to implement this as well in locations and this will allow the player to engage with their environment in different ways they will be able to power up or down uh entities such as turrets gates and doors and also alter life support systems and also this ties into security systems so being able to pour up or down certain sections of a security system and security system systems in turn will be dependent on security tokens that you will be able to grab from other NPCs in your environment to then gain access to other terminals

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   to security terminals or other areas um reputation is a big topic for us especially with Pyro so reputation what does it mean it means that it's basically your standing your relationship with factions and factions are the U in Stanton or uh Outlaw gangs especially now in pyro and this will Define your play style within this environment so it will Define how you experience the location that you're in uh in a more social context or in a more com competive context um so we talk about reputation Gates as well especially in the later representation uh presentations um so in the case of the food court in the

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    rundown station we have um multiple floors so the first floor is the gang floor and that might require you to have a better uh relationship with the owner of this location which then will give you unique Mission givers uh that you can go to and accept a mission that are offering you missions themed after the faction or the owner of this location but also give you access to uh unique gear Collectibles ship weapons and items might have seen these locations in the demo if you've played it so to close this all off and move on to the other presentations um the glue behind all of our locations is is the content it's it is the reason why you go

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    to these locations in the first place and our main goal right now is to not have that divide between social and gameplay as much as we do in in Stanton but mix it up a little and make that dependent on on the reputation that you have with the factions or the owners of these locations and yeah we're looking into more content um as you've seen listed there there's a bunch of new stuff coming as well um with the later presentations for example with the logistics hubs the second portion uh we're also looking into rids but yeah um that's it for me I will pass it over to Eddie now hope you've enjoyed this take care bye hi everybody so um I'm Eddie I'm an

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    assistant art director on Star Citizen fellations um before we start I'd like to mention that all of the footage we're about to see comes from current stable builds so all of that beautiful Tech all of those features that we've seen in the last two days is coming from our Tech development builds now all those features are going to make their way to you of course eventually uh but that is the reason you're not going to see some of them in the builds today just wanted to get ahead of the comments a little bit there um so with that said what am I going to be talking about well I'm really excited to show you that the of the hard work that um the sandbox one team of been doing to expand our new Outpost locations I'm going to start by going over how we've expanded the library and what that means we can now achieve with the new locations and then

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    how we achieve that variety from the library by categorizing our locations into both archetypes and themes and what that means for you as a player so I don't know if you remember this but at sitcom in 2021 uh we showed this new style of outpost for the first time now at this point we had our art style locked in um we' worked on our library of content to the point where we could make smaller locations like this one but with a limited amount of variety between each one and this is what that library of modules looked like at that point um we'd established our main building modules as well as some of our larger buildings and a number of smaller secondary and dressing and Standalone modules but each Outpost couldn't be too large without there been some obvious repetition between the modules used so

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    let's have a look at that library today so in order to achieve that greater Visual and design Delta between each Outpost and have them not feel like exact clones of one another we've massively expanded our module library in terms of breadth and depth and what I mean that we we go broad by making more modules with different purposes and we go deep by creating multiple thematic overlays for each of those modules as well and I'll go into that I'll go into what that means a little bit in a minute but the challenge of a Sandbox location like this as you can see it's not about building a single unique location that can be quite straightforward to be fair it's about giving our artists and

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    designers the building blocks the the affordance to build multiple locations that all feel somewhat different even if they do share that same basic DNA so it's about creating both the ingredients at the same time as the recipes and making sure all those flavors work in harmony with one another for both visuals and gameplay so every individual part has to take into consideration all those design philosophies so every single module has to take into consideration those design philosophies that K mentioned but we also have to make sure that they work with those same principles when an artist or designer combines them into any one of a number of different layouts so the more ingredients we have to work with the more recipes we can create but with that complexity Comes The Challenge of keeping everything

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    harmonious so we like to think we've done a pretty good job with that but that's me um using this expanded Library we've been able to increase the individual location size because there's less of that obvious repetition between buildings within any single location and we can't really call some of these large locations outposts anymore they become something more like settlements and imply a larger and more established community now as a player it will mean a lot more to explore and do at any single individual location with a localized and personal feeling Mission types that might see you moving around a single settlement to complete objectives or doing short hot missions between clusters of settlements on a single planet so you might head up to a ridge to repair some wind turbines you could

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    counter an outlaw attack from a neighboring Outpost or on the opposite side you might be stealing or destroying vehicles for the criminal gang that you're working for but in the art Department we always say show don't tell so let's stop looking at slides and let's have a look at some of the locations in game [Music]

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    thank you so what flavors of outpost did we just see there well we categorize them in two different ways as I said and then we mix and match those categories together to provide that variation now the first and primary category is the archetype and they provide that core gameplay hook and Define the main function of a settlement so scrapyards have a landing pit module for repairs and refueling mining operations can have a Refinery module and or extractors for resource and commodity trading and Trading Post themselves allow a broader range of item purchases through the dedicated Trade building module and I mentioned earlier some more like General Mission types that you might find that would be agnostic of

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    archetype and the archetypes themselves reflect that primary gameplay function of a settlement but there's also a middle layer of course we don't want these locations to just be a glorified shop or repair station so there be more secondary activities to do locally to an outpost that are also defined by its archetype so you may find scrapyards can offer Salvage related gameplay missions trading posts can also deliver offer delivery missions or hauling and cargo gameplay and Farms can offer crops and forer as resources for Gathering or trading so with archetypes as our primary category in addition we mix in a secondary category and these are the Thematic overlays now at the moment we have two main themes inally we call these independent and

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    Outlaw so themes offer additional variation on top of the archetypes to inform the look and feel of a location not just visually but which people you'll interact with there how they'll respond to you based on your rep what types of missions you'll have available to take on so themes don't change the fundamental architecture of a space or the archetype of a location but they do drastically alter the mood and feel as well as altering the gameplay experience significantly uh and again let's take a look at the first of our themes our independent theme [Laughter] cool thank

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    so as a neutral player the independent theme presents a much more social Visual and gameplay experience um the primary visual read across both themes so across both Outlaw and independent comes from those common architectural forms and they're generally all more rounded and soft in shape and the building manufactur techniques are more robust and primitive with single Stelling single story dwellings built from stucco and bare metal but for this theme specifically we use soft textiles warm lighting and color paletts foliage decoration that layer on top of those utilitarian structures to give that sense of home and I use the word home for our independent theme quite a lot because we really want to get that feeling that this is home for the people that live there despite those harsh realities of frontier life and in

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    contrast to that we have a theme that lies in a direct opposition to the independence which we call the outlaw theme so let's take a look at that now as well oh

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    so the outlaw theme tells that story of these ones functional settlements being completely overrun by the various criminal elements that inhabit the system and visually we have themes of a regressed and subverted civilization so we layer on top of the architecture these spiked and aggressive forms and we have evidence of a squalid living arrangements and lighting comes from fires or poorly maintained fixtures some spaces are going to be recognizable as deformed versions of the independent theme but some have been completely changed to more uh nefarious purposes um and while both themes employ all of the various alternative pathing and traversal considerations that KH deil detailed just earlier um The Outlaw spaces are weighted more towards

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    combat but just because these spaces are more dangerous and the experience can be more combative that doesn't mean that the archetype of The Outpost is lost so if you as a player choose to be a criminal working up your rep with a head hunter gang you'd be welcome at the trading post and you'd be able to buy and sell items or take on missions but you probably won't then be very welcome at the independent themed locations and that's where you'd get your combat experiences so while the outlaw theme looks very different the functional ity of those archetypes still remain so I've talked about the kinds of outpost we've been hard at work on and I hope you've enjoyed checking them out over the last two days uh in the Pyro demo it's really made me very pleased to see people playing that content at last so thank you for that uh but where are we heading from here well I hope it

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    should be obvious that we're going to get these out for the first pyro release uh we still have some final optimization and polish passes to do across the whole library and then we're also going to be expanding the amount of these locations throughout pyro and Beyond and our tools allow us to do that very quickly now and we've got the library as well to do it and the new outposts are not limited to the Pyro system they're completely um system agnostic so you can expect to see these outposts in other systems as well and of course we're going to look to add more ingredients more of those modules to the library as well to further expand the variety and depth you'll be able to see that these new locations we want to encourage more on foot gameplay within a smaller ecosystem of a planet to give that more localized and personal feeling experience our goal

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    with these locations as with many of the others we're going to hear about today is to continue to work on the game play so that every location offers a rich playground to explore and I guess I'd like to finish just by thanking everyone for listening today it's really great to see you all I'm going to pass you over to Nick who's going to talk about some locations that are coming in the nearer future thank you we are French Canadian and the here cool all right guys my name is NI P show I'm from Montreal I'm a art director and I'm here today to show you the next new the settlement we did but just before that I just want to say thank you to

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    everyone who work on that mandate it's you guys made an awesome work I'm super happy and proud to be here today to show you that all of you guys and to the world so let's go to the Chas and let me present you the new deric settlement w

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    w pretty cool guys e oh by the way we made more than four it's not just for we made more than that so we split those settlement in two categories social and our style in the social one you will have drop off Mission shops food loots and drinks and a style one usly will be more focused combat let me show you what it look like d

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    get out the way I like the end the end's awesome all right in summary guys we're going to have a lot of new location on planets links with nice Mission and good game playay and the most important all those location will be in Q4 this year's available in the game thank you very much I will let now Adam to show you more good stuff thank hi

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    everyone all right so welcome to rust stations I'm Adam Sanders lead environment artist for E1 we're excited today to show you our efforts for the Pyro restop stations so what are pyro restop stations well these are stations reinvented these have new themes archetypes and gameplay to support new and interesting experiences aside from the social aspects there is gameplay and exploration on the location I've hoped you had a chance to play the demo over the past couple of days and know I've spoken to a few of you it's pretty good right yeah it was a sneak peek of our current progress let's kick off with an overview of the Pyro system for the Pyro system release we

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    plan on six planets and 26 stations including jumpo stations that connect for Stanton and future systems such as Magnus rest stop stations are either in Rundown or abandoned States citizens of pyro the Rough and Ready Outlaws and Xeno threat May control control these our Focus today W the Rough and Ready owned pyrch Amalgamated Fuel and resource station Planet 2 The Grange point4 otherwise known as Checkmate station

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    come so you create a richer experience on rundown stations we have three key points so increased reputation gives you access to new areas unique gear and Mission givers it's Al it also relates to basic functions such as the hab clinics which need at least a neutral standing with their owners combat can take place anywhere including social areas numerous options for environment traversal and enhanced environmental interactions we aim to include new substation areas such as the workers area lower deck and maintenance

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    areas these areas will offer unique content more environment interactivity and interconnection between areas Our Journey Begins when the player arrives in the entry deck View room the entry deck serves as the first barrier between the outside world and the interior of the station some inhabitants are prevented from going inside and are stuck here with no means of getting out slums are formed beneath the bridge smuggling routs established some shopkeepers will se you water and food on your way into and out of the station let's have a look for

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    with so KH touched on reputation earlier let's see how that has applied to the stations so how does the reputation gate

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    in the entry deck affect gameplay what happens if we have good reputation so if you have good reputation you could go straight through this is no fuss and it's the quickest way to maneuver through the station however you got got to put the time and the effort in to get to this point B if neutral reputation so you might be wave through maybe you have to pay a bribe and you don't want to pay so you can have to find an alternate pathing or you can have to build up your reputation if you have bad reputation and for all you to ones out there I know some of you exist this applies to you in short you're going to have a tough time but you have options so stealth via other Pathways might be one of those options you build your reputation up from scratch or you could probably fight let's focus on those alternate

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    Pathways the modules in the station are broken up into several traversal areas as with the other location archetypes we Define these spaces as secondary or tertiary routs as opposed to the more official primary paths most modules are interconnected with vents and maintenance shafts these reward the players with infiltration and an expiration PA as well as potential Loop so what alternative routes exist to enter this access the station we'll offer the opportunity to access the station through multiple Eva points on the exterior it gives you the choice on how to tackle missions and reputation issues these alternative entries allow the player to circumvent the ATC Loop completely useful for when your reputation with the owners would normally prevent you from going through

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    more official ways these server spaces that provide content aligned or against aligned or against the owners of the station the maintenance hatch access points are a new common sublocation to the stations the stations are planned to house maintenance areas that increase the interconnection between all the different sub areas of the station they act as alternative Pathways the player can take to Traverse from the entrance area to the Galleria for example now let's have a look at our main social space the market a central location for the controlling faction it houses all their nefarious activities you can participate in their Endeavors if you have the right rep let's have a look at some of those key features

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    so the market is a Social Hub and a good example of mixing social and gameplay space as mentioned by KH earlier another reputation gate can be found in the market the ground floor is open to the common public the Upper Floor is reserved to Rough and Ready Outlaws and their Associates if you have increased reputation you can access the area you can access this which gives you access to premium items top tier Mission givers and access to new areas we plan to house Mission givers in both tiers that will give you unique jobs to further your reputation and fame across pyro now let's have a look at another theme abandoned is a new non-social location theme let's have a quick look at the current abandoned area on checkm

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    you so we have entire abandoned stations as separate locations on top of that there are abandoned areas within the rown stations much like the ones you probably SE in the demo Mo there will be around 15 of these around the Pyro system these are accessible through air loocks and breaches or other means we're a to enhance all the space locations with a lot more gameplay content loot runs exploration creatures missions of various types with PVE and PVP content just to name a few we're also laying a focus on en environment interactivity with potential retrofitting of occupied stations with the future addition of security systems and the Resource Network system we will have the means to further improve the experience Within These spaces and offer new

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    challenges with power life support and gravity playing a key role to give the player a unique experience especially in abandoned stations so what do pyro restot stations bring to the game so lots more variety in space stations with more gameplay opportunities within a station location opportunities for exploration hidden areas multiple options for Access or traversal these are faction owned and reputation will affect the location and gameplay these feature lots of new Mission opportunities within social space and multiplayer opportunities for combat on location so I hope you have enjoyed this sample of what stations will offer and had a chance to have a gone the demo the past couple of days that concludes the living on edge presentation thank you

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    for your time