As you develop a game sometimes features you thought would be really cool end up being boring. This while seemingly looks like a design failure can actually be a pretty common occurrence. It's hard to realize how something will feel in a game when you are talking about it or designing it.
For this reason the implementation of a given system will typically vary ever so slightly from it's initial design. This is all for a very good reason, the developer should not force features that do not work simply because time was invested into it does not make it worthy of players time.
Below we have a shot of how the space trucks energy system was envisioned to function. We took ideas from fusion reactors, stirling engines using heat transfer, pulse generators to start the reactor, drive shafts with energy being converted from various forms to another.
Even when looking at the white board for such a system it looks way to complicated. However, at this stage of development it was allowed and most of these machines got created and others are still in the game to this day. The point being that without this process of creating large systems, and then slowly trimming away the unwanted features and things that don't work it will be much harder to just create a system like this on the first proverbial dice throw.
It would be a waste of time at this point thinking about things like removing items before we even know what works. So we move onto the next part which is finding places on the space truck for all this equipment. Before plotting the rooms out find pictures of what you want the machines to look like on something like Google Images and create a document to specify the general look and feel for each type of machine and the predicted energy and or fluid requirements it might have during this stage also. Below is an excerpt from a document we used for this very purpose.
With something like that as your disposal it makes the next part much easier when you have an idea of how big a given machine might be you can see it existing in one of the compartments we created in our prototype space truck. It is worth mentioning at this point that the final ship in the game does not look this way and these whiteboard drawings are apart of the brainstorming process to help us get these ideas out of our head and into the real world.
Now we have all the systems we created above and their interactions bound to some sort of tangible object that could be modeled and gives us an idea of how big it should be in relation to the rest of the ship and the player driving it. The graphic above shows us the basic plot that can actually be used as the basis for designing an actual 3D model that can be used in the game.
Modeling starts with the creation of a floor plan based on the sketches we created in in whiteboard sessions. All of this data is now concentrated into a single design that we can use to push the development of the entire ship forward. The sample floor plan here was from deck 7 or the very bottom of the whiteboard concept. The acronyms on the various parts represent what they are such as FTL standing for faster-than-light drive.
Blueprint created we are now ready to move onto the creation of actual models based on this. When I say based on this I literally mean based on this in the sense the blueprint is designed as a per-pixel representation and is made to that scale. In this system 10 pixels made 1 meter in real life length.
Walls can placed down, doorways start to take shape, the ship really starts to become alive and you can see it happening right before your eyes and it is very exciting. However, it becomes apparent that we are going to have a problem with this ship being well... huge... but since we can use all these parts no matter what happens we keep modeling and don't stop and redo everything because that would just be a waste of time. Always go forward and never backwards!
After about a month of doing this non-stop you are left with what we sought in the first place. A unique 3D model of a starship that really shouldn't exist but we forced it to anyway because we are awesome like that. This is a space truck! The design is way to big though and there is no way we could ask player to circumnavigate this ship and travel to other places, we could make an entire level, or even an entire game exploring this vessel it was so huge.
Here is another shot with the skin of the ship removed before any texturing or UV mapping took place. You can see the front window there where the pilot would sit and a chair for scale. The rest of the ship extends outward in every direction behind them like a labyrinth of death and confusion. On the bright side those machines are really starting to take shape and look great, remember what we said earlier all of this work can be used no matter what happens. We can make this ship and then gut it for parts and use the pieces throughout the game, and we still have the ship to incase we would like to do something with that specifically in the future.
You continue the work and trust the math, never second guessing yourself and pushing forward at all times. Texturing and UV mapping of these components on the ship occur at this point. Please forgive the quality on these renders these are from early concept builds of the game and were done quickly, even simple renderings like this took several minutes to complete wasting precious time.
The ship's skin and guts are looking great though we are really onto something here. It is also worth noticing that the ship does not look like a semi truck anymore but actually like a ship. This was done during one of the re-designs where attempts were made to make the design more compact. Like GlaDOS taught us, trim the fat.
After another month of development on this concept the final image of the ship starts to come out. The one that we ended up using in the game came from a similar design process but ended up with a much smaller and compact design each time this process is done. The plus side to all this is we have the backlog of data leading up to this conclusion. The final shot here is from a hallway leading towards the engineering section where the gravity generator was in this ship design.
All of the parts in this ship ended up getting used in one way or another on other levels and components, decorations, and anything else where they could be used. Nothing went to waste and we got several unique ship designs out of it.
Thanks for reading. Next post we enter dimension 2.5D and talk about why enemies and weapons look the way they do in Space Trucker.