Ship Art Showcase - New Ships
This is Part 2 in our series about ship art for Children of Infinity. If you missed it, check out
Part 1 which covers how we're bringing the classic ships into our 'new remembered' universe!
When approaching Children of Infinity, Melee was one of the first things we developed. Having our ships be fun to fly is essential to the experience of the game, and we started with the classic ships from The Ur-Quan Masters. Once those were complete, we were ready to start making new ships. Between Simple and Dan's work creating ship 'templates', we can prototype ships incredibly quickly. At the time of this update, we have over 30 additional ship prototypes created, including a new one Dan made
live on stream for demonstration purposes yesterday. They won’t all make the final cut, but that’s the intended purpose of our very rapid prototyping and playtesting techniques.
Designing new ships is far from the hard part. In fact, it's so fun that it's hard to stop and work on other things! We're looking forward to bringing backers' ships to life and teaching people who've signed up for our Design Tutorial tier, and we already have a ship-making community in our
Discord with motivated modders. The real challenge for new ships is asking ourselves: what do we want to do visually that we couldn't do before? How could ships express their character with modern technology?
Duo ship demonstrating its articulating petals.
One of the first things we wanted to try was leveraging a full-3D ship, complete with modeling and rigging for animation. This served many purposes: learning what the production budget would be like for our “fanciest” ships, helping us understand the workflow, and, most importantly, seeing how big an impact we could make by having a fully modeled ship. The result is what we call our Duo ship, a fully-animating, 3D ship. Its design currently involves a gradual form change with each of the petals blooming separately, and one of its abilities will let it rotate to be viewed from the top down when it performs its special attack.
Duo ship from the side and its rotated, top-down blossom view.
While having the flexibility to view it from any angle and animate lets us create some unique visuals, we also learned this kind of ship is very expensive to create compared to our normal 2D-in-3D ships. Beyond that, given the fast pace of Melee, communicating what the ship was doing when its silhouette moves creates some challenges for gameplay. It was our intent to learn about the “high end” with this ship, and we succeeded: the cost to benefit ratio was not great, so we'll be doing this more sparingly.
Minigun ship.
Our next ship was a test splitting the difference with our aptly titled Minigun ship. We combined the benefit of modeling and animating a rotating gun barrel and ammunition in 3D with our much cheaper 2D workflow to create the rest of the ship.
Minigun ship, now with twirling action!
During gameplay, you’ll never notice, but this ship is actually a mutant of 3D and 2D shapes! Talk about “make sure to get my good side”.
We swear, the hull is spaceworthy.
This ship was much more successful than the Duo because it made limited use of 3D to communicate a fun gameplay feature while enjoying the benefits of keeping the rest of the ship simple. We’ll likely be making more ships with this approach when we’d benefit from a 3D object we can turn, and we’re already using some limited 3D for other objects in Melee like our asteroids which tumble about or the Chmmr Avatar’s twirling ZapSats.
Frame-by-frame of the Symbiote's transformation.
Seeing the bang for our buck we’d get from simply being able to animate ship parts, we opted to try what we call a paper doll approach for another of our new ships titled the Symbiote. This ship also changes form between a flying ship and a turret which mounts on top of other, allied ships, and we wanted to do something cool to distinguish its different forms. From the top down, it simply looks like an animating ship.
Symbiote ship transforming between "flight" and "turret" modes.
Again, like the Minigun, you don’t want to catch it from the wrong angle! This ship and approach were tremendously successful, combining the character of rigged animation with the advantages of our pseudo-3D workflow.
More smoke and mirrors. You'll never notice, though.
We found this approach so successful and fun, we even applied it for one of our classic ships we hadn’t done yet, the Zoq-Fot-Pik Stinger, with some articulating "arms" seen below in an early version!
But what do the other ships taste like?
How do we approach our new ships creatively compared to the classic ships? About the same way! As we discussed in detail in our
previous post, our universe thrives on diversity. Ships are much more like characters than vessels. We want to fill our game out with new characters that the player is excited to inhabit, with colorful, vibrant, charming, and wildly different behaviors. The Symbiote ship, for example, is designed expressly with the purpose of having an ally in multi-ship Melee to “ride” on. We want its art to express the same thing its gameplay does: something unique, magical, and fun to play.
We’ll have plenty more ships to make, including the ships our backers are helping design. If you, too, would like to make your own ship, we still have backer slots open for our
Private Playtest & Design Tutorial! We’re excited to share our process and teach you how to do it, yourself.
As we come into our final hours of our Kickstarter, we still need as much support as we can get. You want voices. We want voices! Join our
Discord to join the community effort helping spread the word, and please share our Kickstarter around your own social networks, forums, and friend groups you have. Thank you so much for being along for the ride!
