This week was spent working through the building blocks of the geography of the Five Galaxies. Planets, moons, and stars oh my. The goal here, as it is with all models and artwork in game, is to create thousands if not tens of thousands of variants for use in the game without bogging down player machines with graphic files that are way too big. No one wants a game that is gorgeous but takes way too long to download. A case in point was a beautiful orbital station that we had developed for the game. When our project manager loaded it onto her beefy laptop, the machine took one look at the file size, then proceeded to lay down and die. (We do define that as taking too long by the way. In fact, technically we are still waiting.)
Demi, our lead modeler, is working over the first Meta Tank, giant armored vehicles the size of three football fields. (When I say work over, I mean beat the living crap out of it. What do you expect? The guy is Russian and his catchphrase is “the punishments will continue until morale improves.”) They are brought to a planet by space faring drop ships that can carry two Meta Tanks at a time. The drop ships can enter atmosphere, land on the surface to deliver their cargo, and then return to space. The modelers under Demi (the poor saps) are working on additional starship frames and a new Briddarri vessel is due to be delivered soon.
So, what does this mean for players?
The work being done now will ensure that players have tremendous diversity and utility in client side assets and interfaces. Also, you’re going to have great big Meta Tanks that can smoosh things…and shoot things…generally blow things up.
Note: Sam, our Marketing Lead, never seems to be happy with our concepts. He is always asking for more guns, more weapons, and more things that go “boom.” What do you think?
-End Transmission-