Minefields

Space-mines are too cool a concept not to get into Starsector at some point. We’ve talked about them internally many times in the past, and while the idea is very neat indeed, there are several design pitfalls to watch out for. What I’d like to do in this post is talk about the design process for minefields – what the impetus for adding them was, how I approached their initial design, and how it evolved during the implementation.

Motivation
First off, why add mines now? The answer is for orbital station battles – those present several design challenges, one of which is that they both need to start off strong at the lowest “orbital station” tier, and grow in power as they progress to “battlestation” (tier 2) and “star fortress” (tier 3).

A battlestation is notably bigger and stronger than an orbital station, and that’s nice upgrade. A star fortress, however… one can’t just glom on more modules and make it bigger. Having too many modules makes a station fight less interesting – the station becomes just a mass of stuff to shoot at rather than individual modules with strengths and weaknesses.

minefield

What we want is for the star fortress upgrade to make the battlestation more powerful while not compromising what makes the original design interesting. There are several components to this, and one of them is a minefield maintained around the star fortress.

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Orbital Fleet Behavior

This blog post is a bit different than usual – instead of talking about a major new game mechanic, I’d like to instead take a quick – but in-depth – look at something relatively minor, but that I thought was interesting. I will, of course, continue to write regular-style blog posts as well.

In Starsector, fleets will often orbit a planet for some time – trade fleets offloading cargo, patrols preparing for duty, and so on. The orbits of some well-to-do colonies can get quite crowded, with fleets overlapping each other and being difficult to pick out. This isn’t a huge problem in terms of game mechanics, but it’s still occasionally inconvenient and just messy to look at.

orbital_mess

The other day, encountering a particularly egregious case, I wrote a quick algorithm for the fleet AI to use to avoid overlapping other orbiting fleets  as much as possible.
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The Circle Can’t Be Trusted: Drawing Battlestations

Or: Round stations & the pitfalls of trilateral symmetry, a followup to Zen and the Art of Battlestation Construction


Herein we shall examine in detail the process of creating the Battlestation sprites. There’s gonna be a lot of Photoshop talk, so be warned. Here’s a taste of what a mess my station file is, perhaps revealing a little too much about how I actually work:

drawing_station1

Very poor layer naming discipline and related sins on display, for sure. But that aside, let’s start much simpler with a little talk about something we call composition. I’m going to take a classic ship and break down how composition is operating on various scales. Then, using the methodology explored in that process, we can examine how I built the composition of an orbital station sprite. Then I’ll talk about a bunch of random non-pixel art techniques which may be found useful for drawing large station sprites.

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Zen and the Art of Battlestation Construction

Tactical combat involving battlestations is a logical extension of the REDACTED BY HEGEMONY COMSEC most players are already well aware of despite dire warnings to avoid them from our benevolent protectors. Stations are also part of the colony-building features Alex has discussed recently, though I can’t make comment on how precisely they will play into the higher-level simulation.

However it’s going to work, we’re definitely going to need some enormous space-fortresses bristling with guns and danger. Someone is going to have to draw these things and figure out how all the pieces go together!

trikea

So let’s talk about how we developed a design for these things!

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