This post is a transcript of Reverse the ‘Verse: Episode 79, material that is the intellectual property of Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) and it’s subsidiaries. INN is a Star Citizen fansite and is not officially affiliated with CIG, but we reprint their materials with permission as a service to the community. INN edits our transcripts for the purpose of making the various show participants easier to understand in writing. Enjoy!

Reverse the ‘Verse: Episode 79 – Full Transcript

Week in review, Alexis: Working with Turbulent on the Subscription page revamp, a new subscriber landing page. Also revamped some Subscriber perks as well, that’ll go live on Monday, more information on that soon.

Free-Fly kicked off this morning. It doesn’t require a code. If you log into the website, you can set up a free fly with three different ships. Introduce your friends to Crusader.

Buy-back tokens have gone live. You can reclaim one ship using store credit. [How often will they be awarded?] Once per quarter. You get one per quarter, but they don’t stack.

They’ve put the stream down for a second to fix the banner. Lets hope it comes back…

They’re back.

Justin’s been busy this week. Lots of filming.

There’ll be a Gillian Anderson interview up on the site later today. Full interview with Sandi.

Hennessy has shown up. He thinks he’s not in frame, but he is.

There was an RtV on Wednesday with Sean Tracy, it was amazing.INN Has a transcript of the stream on our website

‘the stream feeds off of Hennessy’s anger’

They’re using DSLR’s for the stream somehow.

Ben got over the flu this week, he’s not sick any more. They did some ship pipeline meetings. Not exciting stuff, but yeah. They have three ships in concept work right now; Pirate Cruiser Interceptor, Light Corvette, and the Tevarin boarding ship, the Prowler. They’re figuring out assets for those, figuring out what concept artists to assign, stuff like that.

The whole studio’s planning out the year.

Ben learnt to use JIRA. The Community team are going to start to learn the JIRA system, so they can integrate with the rest of the team better.

Ben did some interviews. Lots of positions up at the site. Looking for a Community Manager, an Editor, and a Marketing Artist.

Sandi found a stock of Wing Commander material. Ben’s been super excited about it.

Ben’s showing off Kilrathi warship concept art.

Check out Ben’s twitter for more info about the Wing Commander stuff.

Once Chris heads to the UK, they’re going to do a Steve Bender and Sean Tracy 10 for show. Should be magical.

They snuck a ‘first look’ at Hurston into an interview with Mark Skelton this week. It looks amaaaazing

It looks amaaaazing Now they’re talking about Star Wars Rebels.

Tom has taken over, and is complaining about the lack of deaths in Star Wars Rebels.

And now they’re going to question time!

[Is the Starfarer delayed?] It’ll be in hangar in one of the next patches. No release date.

There’s a patch going up today 2.1.2 – bug fixes mainly though, nothing too exciting.

For the next couple of months, there’ll be PTU patches, they did 2.1 this month, they’ll do 2.2 next month. Active period with PTU patches till it goes live, then they’ll patch essential bugs, and there’ll be a lull till they put in content for the next ‘big’ patch. 2.2 will go to PTU, it’ll get patched and fixed up, then go to live, etc…

[Plans to celebrate the package split?] Nothing in particular. Maybe something in the days leading up, but nothing exciting planned.

[Will gemini owners get the base Starfarer?] Yes. They’ll make it happen, somehow.

[More Meet the Devs episodes?] Not in the near future. It wasn’t really watched, they’re working on a way to make it more interesting.

[Was the mocap for SQ42 just for episode 1 or all episodes?] It was just for Episode 1. But it’s not like episodes of a Telltale game, Episode 1 is its own full game. It’s more like Episode 1 of Star Wars. It’s a full game.

Now they’re talking about Star Wars. Apparently it’s going to be delayed because lighting techs in England are going on strike.

Eric Kieron Davis has now arrived to answer questions.

Lando is at PAX South on vacation.

EKD has a Flux Capacitor watch.

Eric Kieron Davis will herein be referred to as EKD, because… reasons.

They’ve got lots of people visiting the studios right now, meetings with them. EKD’s been working with Randy, who’s got a promotion, EKD’s moving puzzle pieces around to optimize development, get people in the places that they can be the most effective, and the most passionate.

Also Chris is back, so they’ve been working together on the strategy for the studio for the year.

Ricky Jutley – working on the PU, visited from the UK. He was awake for 29 hours straight when he got into the building, saw the new building, and wanted to start working straight away. Apparently the new space is very fun.

[Regarding the hangar ready Idris, will it go flight ready? Or just hangar?] TBD. No call on that yet.

[Player count?] It’s been discussed a lot, but they recently increased player count on the PTU. Was a good test for how much they can add, the test went well.

Trying to do more global internal gameplay tests as well.

They’ll always be pushing for more players.

[Reliant slated for 2.2 or beyond?] They have goals for each patch, but they don’t have to be met for the patch to go out. They hope for it to be ready for the next patch, but if it isn’t ready, then it won’t be in. It’ll be in if it’s ready.

[More SQ42 gameplay?] It looks the same as AC, cause it looks the same. They’re keeping missions secret to keep no spoilers. The Morrow tour was the only thing they’ve shown. They’ll show off more later, it’ll be a more traditional game roll out for SQ42. There’ll be teaser trailers and trailers before the game, etc…

[Changing outfit in hangar will change it in PU?] There’s been a design pass for how outfits and items will be changed, done by the Frankfurt devs, so that’s in progress.

Customization, the amount of clothes and options and such, are being worked on by Frankfurt, and it’ll all integrate into SQ42 and PU eventually.

The ships available for the free fly – Hornet, Aurora, and Mustang Delta.

[Shopping in Casaba?] It’s coming. People looking thorugh the files may have seen it’s in development. But it’s coming. There’s a lot of technical aspects that have to go into shopping, and they have to identify and R&D everything before it can be released.

The system they launch now is what they’re stuck with, more or less. They’re working on systems to get them to us as soon as possible, which is abnormal for game development.

Ben’ll log into shotgun and someone’s uploaded 60 different types of pants.

[HOTAS?] They’ve been talking to Saitek about the schedule. Saitek has a manufacturing schedule, CIG would rather do the preorder closer to when it’ll ship, cause Saitek are handling fullfillment. It’ll be a bit later. They’ll update us when it happens.

With other merch, CIG control the pipeline, this time they don’t so they’re being more cautious.

[Holotable] No idea when, but they’ve got a good layout of what they want to do with it. They know it’s bad, but they’re working on it.

EKD has been recalled because the office is on fire, and Randy is replacing him.

Randy is now helping the design team with scheduling, task generation, etc… helping them facilitate things.

He’s also plugged into engineering and design as well.

[How many ships finished before the end of the year?] Randy‘All of them’ Ben ‘THAT IS NOT A PROMISE’

He’s a producer now, but Randy does still get into the game to work on it sometimes.

[How’s the Cat going?] It’s gone over to Calix now. They’ve been talking with Gurmukh, Elwin, lots of people, lots of interesting tech going on with the Cat.

[Carrack internals finished?] No, that’s slated for after the Cat.

[Do you ever get worked up with trolls questions?] Not really. Ben was thinking about this recently. The first time you encounter trolling, it’s like omg why do they hate me what’s wrong. When Ben’s stressed at work, he reads the Reddit Cat forum. He clicked on New instead of top, and he found out that there are people who live their lives to troll people who post their cat pictures. It’s not a problem with the people, it’s just that some people are just jerks, and you learn to ignore them.

People can trash your art in a nice way, or a mean way, same with design. Sometimes it’s good feedback, and even some of the trolls have points, and you have to push past the troll to read the point. It does make it a lot harder to find the concern though. Filtering out passionate people from trolls can be interesting sometimes.

Using lots of different tools; bug tracking software, excel spreadsheets, etc… They have scrums as well. Not adhering to one specific format for teams though, whatever works best for the team.

New item system is coming along, people are working on it. Hopefully they can share more when it’s in a better state. Lots of work on it.

Randy’s still most excited about multicrew, making sure all the roles on the ship are fleshed out, so that captains can set out roles, and they’re all alive.

[Sending Devs to attend GDC?] Not any official presence, but some Devs might go?

Ben’s talking about webshows now.

They’re going to do a ‘Star Trek 2-3-4’ movie day soon probably.

Real star trek.

They’re all talking over each other, it’s chaos. Now they’re talking about Adele.

[What will the main role of the new community manager be, and will the cost be justifiable?] Speaking of trolls… putting more forum management here. They used to have 3 comm managers at a time, now they just have one. As the community grows, they need more managers.

The Community team is small.