Howdy starbounders! This weekend I conceived a new ship design, which will become a mod if I can figure out how to make it work. But I am still in the early stages of designing the ship. So to get feedback on the design, I want to hear from the artists and fans, so here I am. This is a rough draft of my concept for a Floran vessel. The vanilla Floran ship is made up of bits of other races' ships to represent that they are scavengers. That's fine, but it never made sense to me that they wouldn't bother to 'make it their own' with modifications to the appearance. So my ship design has the ship decorated with bones from some colossal beast to make it look scary and as an extra layer of armor. My production method is to model the ship in 3D. That lets me create a design that makes sense and then generate the 2D art from there, including cutting the ship in half to render the cockpit view from the inside. Plus I can have a cool orthographic view of the ship in my mod announcement. OK, enough intro, here is the draft design: Probably half the time spent so far was getting the skull to look organic, so I'm pretty happy with it, but the rest is still very 'rough draft.' I have a lot more work to do (refine the cockpit then light it up, add numerous details to the exterior, and then build the interior) before I can even start producing 2D side views that will appear in-game. I'm thinking it needs guns in the nose, point-defense turrets in the eye sockets, antennae and running lights in various places (which will also light up parts of the exterior), and probably ladders and a catwalk or two for occasional exterior maintenance. I invite your suggestions.
Thanks. This ship is really about the size of vanilla Tier 5 or 6. But that's part of the challenge in its draft state -- without hatches, ladders, and other details, it can be hard to tell how big it is. The glassed-in egg inside the "mouth" is the cockpit, for example. I'll be fixing those details this weekend. Edit: Here is the captain's chair and associated bits for the inside of the cockpit. I know that much of the detail you see here won't be particularly visible in the final game. Even that actual chair will be replaced by the game object. But as Dr. Horrible once said, "it's about standards." Holographic glass displays...yeah!
Here is the latest update, to which I added detail to the body plates, a pair of cannons and 3 turrets, a glowing wiring harness where the spinal cord would be, antennae, running lights, and markings (which are currently a placeholder until I decide what Floran script might look like). I still need to add more artificial details (hatches, ladders, handholds, etc) and figure out what the rear engine area should look like. A human ship would also have tons of smaller markings ("Lift Point", "No Step", "Emergency", "Flammable", that sort of thing) but I doubt the Floran shipbuilders would have such markings. I am also not sure if the wing blades should be one piece as they are now, or built from smaller bones over a metal frame. What are your suggestions?
OK, so I haven't done much with this in a while. Two things occurred to me. First , the big wings/blades on the main fuselage just don't seem plasible, at least not as a single piece of bone. Second, while the vanilla floran ship is decorated with bones of hunting trophies so the bone decor is appropriate, the 'wine bottle with wings' shape does not lend itself to tier upgrades. So I started thinking in a new direction. The vanilla floran ship is made up of bits and pieces of other races' ships. While I understand they are technology scavengers, it does not make sense to me that they would, when expanding the ship, visit a junkyard, use a plasma cutter to chop off part of a derelict, and weld it onto their ship. Imagine the difficulty of connecting all the pipes and wiring, as well as interfacing potentially incompatible equipment! So to me it makes more sense that they would scavenge design principles, modules, and parts, but the hull of the floran ships would likely be floran-built. Following that line of reasoning, the appearance of such a ship would be very utilitarian. The other thing that occurred to me was for the ship design itself. I don't need to make a new design, as the vanilla intro video provides this "flying wing" shape: So combining this image with the concept of a roughly built hull containing scavenged technology, I came up with this flying wing design. The major hull armor plates are a patchwork of unpainted welded plates. The sensor array on top is a bit rusty and does not match, whereas the missile packs and guns look new, floran priorities being what they are. The other thing I was thinking is that I much prefer the approach to ship upgrades that most mod authors take: you start with a big ship, but only part of it functions and is accessible, versus the vanilla upgrade approach in which your ship grows impossibly large by adding a few materials. So I took the same approach, that ship upgrades are gradual repairs that make more and more of the existing hull usable by gradually repairing the damage that occurred prior to game start. That led to the following layout of a tier 8 ship. Please note that the final version will be turned 90 degrees, since ships fly left to right in the game, but it is easier to work on a landscape screen until the final version. I have not yet added decorative bones, but the original bony ship model's bone objects can be used to make the skeletons when the time comes. I imagine the higher tiers will have more skeletons decorating it. So...I invite feedback on my logic, the exterior design of the ship, and its interior layout. Also, should the interior be 'bare' as shown, or decorated with background blocks, and which ones? Many 'likes' on this post will be my encouragement to make this a ship mod. Making the model was fun, but turning this model into a functional ship mod will be lot of work, so I'd like to know that people would want something like this.
I recreated the vessel's shape from scratch, reduced the size of the sensor array, and made the armor plates less prominent. So the exterior now looks like this and the ship works in game, including upgrades. But while the modeling is nearly final, the artwork is still very much a draft, so continued feedback in appreciated. Turning artwork into an in-game ship has been a journey of discovery. And now, this computer is getting packed up in a couple weeks and moved across an ocean, so I'll only have an iPad for a couple months. But it is good to step away from the problem sometimes, and I can still visit here and check on feedback. If I get this to publishable state, I will try to write a tutorial on what I learned.
Wow, it's been over two years. But I have the design working in-game with Version 1.3 now! As with some other ship mods, it made more sense to me that ship upgrades would repair successive parts of the ship, rather than increasing its overall size. Here is an animation showing the tiers (including a bug in Tier 5 that I have since fixed): After some more testing, I'll share it as a ship mod.
