Shadow Star: Modular Starships for PC Game
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It's been two years since my friends and I finished the first installment of Fallout: Project Brazil, our major mod project for Fallout: New Vegas. I've been kinda aimless since then, working for small indie game companies as a 3D and texture artist, shooting events as a photographer & videographer, and a couple large studios that hired me as a freelancer for work on feature films. The jobs have been fun, but I've been missing having an ambitious personal goal to work toward.
Even through the last 12 years of games and movies, I've had this dream. I want to make a First Person Shooter RPG set aboard a Battlecruiser Simulator, where you can navigate the bridge of your ship in first person and engage in combat between ships. You command your crew through dialog, talking with NPCs face to face, then engaging in combat in extended space battles from third person and on the decks of ships and stations in first person.
Even through the last 12 years of games and movies, I've had this dream. I want to make a First Person Shooter RPG set aboard a Battlecruiser Simulator, where you can navigate the bridge of your ship in first person and engage in combat between ships. You command your crew through dialog, talking with NPCs face to face, then engaging in combat in extended space battles from third person and on the decks of ships and stations in first person.
Shadow Star is that game.
To accommodate the vision for the game, where modules can be lost in real time both on the ship's exterior model and affect the interior instanced cells, I had to design a modular approach to the ships and the levels. I decided to start with the exteriors first.
This took WAY longer to plan out than I like to admit.
The designs I'd cycled through were far too complex for anything practical, until I reached this: simple squares aligned to a grid with a branch and leaf layout.
You have a unique Bow Cap, Stern Cap, Spines, and 3 modules: flat, slanted, and Edging. There will be 3 types of module sizes - Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large - which are required to attach corresponding subsystems for the ship.
Each module contains a part of the interior instanced cells, and that will look like so:
This method provides a very high degree of modularity, so variations can be made very quickly, or even procedurally, but it is fairly difficult to concept our race variations and unique art assets on paper - especially not making it look good. So I had to dive in and fly blind, just making modules and kits based on the lore behind the series. I would love some help from a concept artist to push my designs further, or even some paint overs from you guys.
The first ships I made looked like giant flying bricks, and their textures were pretty terrible. Which is okay, because the AmMex Confederacy are supposed to look utilitarian, durable-rugged ugly, like a retro-futuristic NASA/US NAVY style architecture. I used too many baked-out textures on this race and wasn't very satisfied with the poor and inconsistent results, so I decided to shelf them until I improved on the next generation.
The second of the four races, the Serin Empire, were my next goal. This is where it gets much harder to design modularity, because their aesthetics are supposed to be glimmering imperial blades, full of gold and red facets, hard angles, and accented by swooping curves. They're supposed to look sleek, agile, and more stream lined, with an almost arrogant warlike flair. They're fission powered sports cars in space.
The Serin Frigates above didn't work out so bad. They took from the end of September 2014 to November 2014 to model and texture in and around other jobs. If I can get a month off I can probably complete a kit like this in a month. The vertex count went from 200k on the Confederates to just ~65-110k on the Serin. Way more manageable.
I settled for keeping the modules very simple, and to use modular texture sheets to apply to those largely flat polyfaces. This will keep the vertex count down in game for when two dozen plus turrets are firing, modules are getting blown off, and we need to switch between the exterior camera and the bridge, which is a very asset and code heavy scene.
There are just 2 4096 texture sheets on the Frigates, and I plan to add 3 more for the Destroyers, Battlecruisers, and Corvettes, which will all share some of these assets. Destroyers and Battlecruisers stack up a well as out, and are the next step in design.
I also need to concept out the turrets, additional game play-related subsystems, unique hero modules, and some corpse dressings for when modules are destroyed.
The Third and Fourth races, the Torlan Empire and Lantus Hegemony, I'll work on in concept, but won't make final assets until they have been further tested in a game engine.
I've also made some asteroids and comets, which will be part of the game, ans will go into more promotional scene renders in the future.
I've designed these around CryEngine Units, so they will snap to the grid in Cryengine. I'll have to adjust the anchor points if I decide to go with Unity or UDK instead. All that is kindof up in the air at this point, until I have a better foundation for the rest of the game's core mechanics and a fully fleshed out business model to pitch to a team. I don't want to jump the gun until that is more patterned out.
In the meantime, you can track my progress here and on Facebook. If you'd like to draw or model some concept art based on my Development Bible, hell yeah, totally hit me up. I'd love to see someone else jump in on this besides me.
Cheers
This took WAY longer to plan out than I like to admit.
The designs I'd cycled through were far too complex for anything practical, until I reached this: simple squares aligned to a grid with a branch and leaf layout.You have a unique Bow Cap, Stern Cap, Spines, and 3 modules: flat, slanted, and Edging. There will be 3 types of module sizes - Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large - which are required to attach corresponding subsystems for the ship.
Each module contains a part of the interior instanced cells, and that will look like so:
This method provides a very high degree of modularity, so variations can be made very quickly, or even procedurally, but it is fairly difficult to concept our race variations and unique art assets on paper - especially not making it look good. So I had to dive in and fly blind, just making modules and kits based on the lore behind the series. I would love some help from a concept artist to push my designs further, or even some paint overs from you guys.
The first ships I made looked like giant flying bricks, and their textures were pretty terrible. Which is okay, because the AmMex Confederacy are supposed to look utilitarian, durable-rugged ugly, like a retro-futuristic NASA/US NAVY style architecture. I used too many baked-out textures on this race and wasn't very satisfied with the poor and inconsistent results, so I decided to shelf them until I improved on the next generation.
The second of the four races, the Serin Empire, were my next goal. This is where it gets much harder to design modularity, because their aesthetics are supposed to be glimmering imperial blades, full of gold and red facets, hard angles, and accented by swooping curves. They're supposed to look sleek, agile, and more stream lined, with an almost arrogant warlike flair. They're fission powered sports cars in space.
The Serin Frigates above didn't work out so bad. They took from the end of September 2014 to November 2014 to model and texture in and around other jobs. If I can get a month off I can probably complete a kit like this in a month. The vertex count went from 200k on the Confederates to just ~65-110k on the Serin. Way more manageable.
I settled for keeping the modules very simple, and to use modular texture sheets to apply to those largely flat polyfaces. This will keep the vertex count down in game for when two dozen plus turrets are firing, modules are getting blown off, and we need to switch between the exterior camera and the bridge, which is a very asset and code heavy scene.
There are just 2 4096 texture sheets on the Frigates, and I plan to add 3 more for the Destroyers, Battlecruisers, and Corvettes, which will all share some of these assets. Destroyers and Battlecruisers stack up a well as out, and are the next step in design.
I also need to concept out the turrets, additional game play-related subsystems, unique hero modules, and some corpse dressings for when modules are destroyed.
The Third and Fourth races, the Torlan Empire and Lantus Hegemony, I'll work on in concept, but won't make final assets until they have been further tested in a game engine.
I've also made some asteroids and comets, which will be part of the game, ans will go into more promotional scene renders in the future.
I've designed these around CryEngine Units, so they will snap to the grid in Cryengine. I'll have to adjust the anchor points if I decide to go with Unity or UDK instead. All that is kindof up in the air at this point, until I have a better foundation for the rest of the game's core mechanics and a fully fleshed out business model to pitch to a team. I don't want to jump the gun until that is more patterned out.
In the meantime, you can track my progress here and on Facebook. If you'd like to draw or model some concept art based on my Development Bible, hell yeah, totally hit me up. I'd love to see someone else jump in on this besides me.
Cheers
Replies
I say this as an interested developer looking for a project to dedicate my monthly UDK subscription towards
I'm actually a backer for the Mandate. I love what they're doing, and they also have a sort of modularity to their ships. We are radically different in gameplay and the whole zeitgeist of our project, though. They are Top Down, we are First Person. So they are more like Fallout 1 in space, we are more like Fallout 3 in space.
The closest projects to us I've found are currently http://flagshipgame.com/ and http://pulsarlostcolony.net/ . They, like Star Citizen, are more focused on fighters and online competitive combat, where we will be aimed at a role playing aspect with rich characters and lore. We also won't have fighters in Shadow Star, since they are redundant when you have weapons that move at a fraction of the speed of light and ships that don't have shields.
Thanks for the interest! I love good questions like this.
I'll post the main two used for now. I just finished the Lantus textures the other night, and I need to make the redone Confederate textures soon. These are sculpted in NDO and some bakes from 3Dsmax & Mudbox. The rest are hand painted details.
The writing is Serinskrit, the language of their race, and has a TrueType Font made for them, so we can write their text in game in their own special font. It's great for making textures really fast, like the emblazoned script around their doors and decals.
My list of needed concept art and character art commissions can be found here. There is some money in it, if you're interested, just not much per piece, since they'd be bulk orders:
http://radianhelixmedia.com/shadow-star-introduction-post/
Here we're starting to rough out some hallway and corridor ideas:
I want to try to get away from the square look of the interiors, so I'm absolutely open to any suggestions or quick thumbnails.
For my fellow astronomy nerds: http://www.virtualtelescope.eu/2014/12/06/potentially-hazardous-asteroid-357439-2004-bl86-close-encounter-online-event-26-jan-2015/