Introducing the Next Big Thing

Today I want to present you the thing I've been covertly working on these past few weeks. To do so I first need to provide proper context.

DESIGN CONCEPT

Unless you space-game enthusiasts are living under a rock, you must know that Homeworld 3 is in development. What you may not be aware of is that the project had a crowdfunding campaign, and there is a blog sharing some bits of insight in the development process of the game. 

One of these updates presented a detailed design process far removed from my own workflow. J. Aaron Kambeitz "shape tuning" concept sounded interesting, but I was not exactly eager to try it out when I first read about it.

Then Stephmo, the dev who modeled the ships for Nebulous, talked about their design process: Given the game's damage model constraints, they usually start from the collision model and then work their way up to the detailed visual model. 

Now if you put these two together, building ships from the simplest detail level and fine tuning shapes to eliminate every superfluous surfaces until you get an iconic (literal sense) silhouette, you get a design process I was very intrigued to try myself.

THE PROCESS

Now there was a gulf between what I imagined would be a fun experimentation and the ordeal I went through designing this faction.

From the ground up I had decided to only have 3 different hulls that would get declined into different variants with different mounts layouts. I also wanted them to have front-focused firepower as a way to incentivize outmaneuvering them to take them out, taking the concept of Prism even further. Limited scope, limited work right?

I drew a bunch of sketches to rough out the basic design of the faction. That stage was much more focused on the volumes than the details. I had a few basic shapes in mind, some inspired by the new Homeworld concepts that I tried to pull into a new direction via the same design process described in the blog.

That is when I discovered that 3d softwares are ill suited for this "shape tuning" process. Every time you move a point, you bend a flat surface and you have to reshuffle every other point of that face to flatten it back to its new angle. All connected edges are affected with every change, and the fewer faces there are, the farther any change affect the overall shape. 

As you can see, it took quite a while to get to a satisfying set of ship shapes. Changes between iterations look minute (and they are) but that is the consequence of trying to keep the shapes simple and the faces flat.

These are "just" the lowest level of details for the ships. I now have to work my way up to the visual model adding surface objects, thrusters, bevels and all that good stuff.

THE SHIPS

Sitting between the volume of the vanilla Sprinter and Raines, the light class will come in two variants: an offensive one with higher speed but lighters armor, and an escort one with more mounts, slower and better protected. 

The medium class is just about the same size as the Vauxhall. The three variants are a Big Guns, a missiles focused one by way of elongated C2 slots, and a spinal weapon one. That last one having a lot of competition from both vanilla and modded ship will certainly get hefty hull bonuses or some special modules to help its output.

Finally the heavy class is smaller than the Solomon but keeps most of its firepower. In essence a Battlecruiser. It may come with a second variant with two spinals mounted in the saddles and missiles-focused C2+ mounts similar to the the medium class.

THE FACTION

Right now the faction is intended to be completely unrelated to either the Alliance or the OSP. As mentioned in the Lore document of the game, those two are but a part of a larger universe with plenty of room for something different. The cliff notes would have this faction be a single system polity that thanks to a well placed gate in the hyperspace map manages to amass a considerable wealth. Wealth it is very keen to protect thus produces ships very much focused on the defense of said gate.

If you are getting strong Honor Harrington's Manticore vibes, you are right. It is a similar setup minus the magic cats and the ability to produce a bazillion ships seemingly out of thin air. My vision of the faction is on the contrary very much working with limited raw resources and production capabilities, thus using smaller ships that can still trade blows with bigger threats.

There are a few new mechanics planned for them that I need to test first before revealing them. As I like to say, there are no "good or bad ideas", only "ideas that survive their implementation".

It took me way more time to get to this point than I expected, but I am confided these designs provide a strong foundation so hopefully the pace will pick up speed now.

That is all for today, burn bright!