Let Me Draw You A Starsector Ship, Part 2

Now where were we? Oh, yes, Drawing A Starsector Ship Part 2 (read part 1 here).

I believe I was fretting about the back of the ship, those engine pods and such. Let’s do another sketch:

rear_sketch2

Hmm. While drawing this, I kept thinking “I’d rather be doing this experimentation on the sprite itself”. That, and I rather like the idea of echelons of squarish angle-corned thrusters for the primary drive with “barnacled” pods for the maneuvering jets. Well, let’s go back to the sprite and give these engines an overhaul, shall we?

(Also considering a comment from the forum thread noting that I’ve concerned myself a lot with asymmetry at the front of the sprite but little with asymmetry at the back. Interesting. Though I don’t especially want to have asymmetric engine pods for obvious reasons unless the mass of the ship was wildly skewed to one side. Which might be neat, but … this is not the time for something as off-the-wall as a B-Wing.)

— To the pixels! Jumped in with doing some pixel-brush painting, blocking out a base area with a 100% brush then doing detail and texture with 1-2 pixel radius brush set to very low opacity, sampling bits of colour from around the sprite as needed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let Me Draw You A Starsector Ship, Part 1

Due to popular demand I’m going to give a go at documenting the process of drawing a ship sprite for Starsector. Haven’t made many new ships lately as there are very interesting larger-scale developments going on, but I find that drawing spaceships is always nice to revisit. And about time I do this again since my methods have certainly changed since the early days.

So what kind of ship shall we draw today? Nothing too big as I ought to finish this post in a timely manner, so let’s go with a frigate. And lately I’ve been more excited about ships that blur the line between civilian and military which evoke a sort of post-apocalyptic can-do spirit so this one won’t be a sleek high-end Tritachyon thing. In fact, I’ve got a good weird idea in mind to fill an unfilled niche: a tiny frigate-sized carrier! This would fit nicely as well with some of the setting development we’ve been up to ( “very interesting larger-scale developments” ): one of the new systems going in — Magec — is composed largely of a giant ring of asteroids, dust, ice, and general chaos swirling around a young blue star. There’s a significant planet, but civilization has collapsed and no major faction has stepped in to take responsibility for what’s left. As one might imagine the place is lousy with pirates, profiteers, mercenaries, and adventurers. A combat-converted miner drone-tender would fit in perfectly!

Read the rest of this entry »

Starsector Sketchbook

It’s been a bit quiet so I figured I could show some of the in-progress illustration work I’m doing for Starsector to flesh out the world of the game and events therein.

So let’s have a look through my illustrations folder, shall we? Do note that most of these are very much in-progress, though of course I’m not going to show you any of the truly failed compositions. Still, I do hope you find it interesting to get a glimpse into my process here.

“Put it in Bay 12 and be careful – those uranium rounds are hot!”

Now these illustrations are intended to be shown in-game as an accompaniment or decoration rather than used as promo art so they’re much smaller than earlier work I’ve shown on the blog here. This has the added advantage of making the process of creating them much faster than full-sized drawings. It’s more interesting for me, too, because I can experiment more with theme, composition, and technique.

Read the rest of this entry »

Painting the Hound and the Hangar

With Alex’s dev computer in dry dock due to a flux overload*, he asked me to jump in and show off a bit of what I’ve been drawing for Starsector. Spoiler alert: It’s spaceships. But not as you know them.

* He actually got it sorted out pretty quick. No need to panic. I just have to express everything in terms of Starsector, eg. my first tech advice was “Transfer command!”. We have fun!

So yes: I’ve been digitally painting some large scale illustrations for use in Starsector, both as promo art and cropped down to little scenes to show for game event choices and so on.

Above: the final painting of the “Hound Hangar” faded into the first sketch.

Read the rest of this entry »

Celestial Spheres

The world of Starfarer has lovely 3d planets which roll beneath whatever chaos you are sure to wreak out in space. It is only right, for what good is space without planets to fight over?

Below: Flying an absurdly over-armed frigate past a jungle-covered planet.

Read the rest of this entry »

Forum Blog Media FAQ Features Digg it! Del.icio.us! Share this on Facebook Reddit Stumbleupon it! Technorati Tweet it! Download Starsector for Linux Download Starsector for Mac Download Starsector for Windows Preorder