Re. Bird of prey names:
Well, you can't very well call a carrier the "Shrike" you know? Doesn't feel right. Plus I can't get the Hyperion Cantos Shrike out of my head when I see the word ...
Would it be possible to make a timelapse video where you record the process of drawing the sprite based on the concept?
That'd be really cool, actually (and my computer is finally good enough to run video capture!). I've just ... never done this before and totally suck at video. Will see what I can do.
Heron #1 simply doesn’t scream “Hegemony” to me
This is confusing, the Hegemony doesn't use any of the midline ships the Heron is derived from. Why would it need to scream "Hegemony"?
Hah! Good point. There's a bit of disconnect between the actual ships used by factions in the game and my (personal) take on the narrative. I see the Hegemony fleet being filled with stuff between low and mid-tech with occasional specialist high-tech ships, the mid-tech being the upper end of military deployment from the last days of the Domain. I think this may be a matter of shuffling orders of battle around a bit -- say, give the Hegemony garrison and assault fleets a higher load of heavy-gun low-tech ships while their patrols and convoys would focus more on mid-tech cruisers. And
then there's the question of whether this deployment would hold up in the actual game.
David, i wondered: are you taking inspirations from some of the mods around here? I found the Heron to be pretty similar looking to Kadur's Theocracy mod's ships. Not saying it's a bad thing, far from it! Even if it's just an alpha, Starsector's modding community already pooped an awful lot of ships, which some of them even rivaling quality with your own (shots fired!) so it wouldn't be surprising if the modding section was a source of inspiration for you.
Also, while you commented about pixels noise on your ships, will you eventually rework some of the currently implemented ships? Right now i'm thinking about the Venture, when you look in the modding section, there is actually very few Venture kitbash due to the big amount of pixel noise on this ship, making it fuzzier than the other vanilla ships. Perhaps smoothing it a bit in the future when you'll have some free time?
As said, I do glance at the mods from time to time to see what people get up to but really try not to think of them when drawing. It doesn't feel right somehow and, ultimately, drawing these spaceships is about what I want
Well, Alex too. He does pay the bills, after all. But it's just something I love doing in my own little world in my head so I embrace that creative indulgence which I don't get very often in my day job that involves a lot of management and artistic compromise.
Regarding revising old ships, it's not something I want to think much about unless I see glaring problems. It is better to have a less than perfect but complete set of game assets than to have a more perfect but incomplete set of game assets. I try to keep in mind that the goal here is to make a game, not to make the perfect game asset. Forest, trees.
