My ideas for the Hero Building and Street furniture go as follows:
Hero Building: The Ward Ship. A massive, city like 'mountain' of metal that contains thousands of Forge Fathers and is the seat of power for a clan. Of tremendous scale and greatly imposing.
Street Furniture: Elements of the background scene that a Ward Ship may interact with. This includes a planet, which could be used as a framing device, as well as smaller ships and asteroids.
The game I am developing this illustration for contains elements of resource management. One section of this subsystem would be that of gaining resources through the exploration of space: this may include landing on planets to create quarries, or through mining asteroids and other debris floating through space. Though the Ward Ship is the home base for the clan, it does not have all the equipment to carry out these tasks, and as such secondary smaller vessels may be needed to carry them out. These vessels, which I have dubbed 'Frigates' may be sent out to mine individual asteroids, which could be a dangerous operation that could risk the lives of the crew onboard. As such, deciding when to risk crew to gain more resources would become a considerable challenge in gameplay.
Thumbnails
When developing thumbnails for the scene, I placed the brunt of my effort into designing the silhouette and shape of the Ward Ship, looking to the design conventions of the other Forge Father designs whilst molding them to fit a wider spaceship aesthetic. I found this difficult as there is no art I could find of the Ward Ship, and as such I had very little to go off, save for a few descriptions. One of these, found in the lore book for Deadzone, described the Ward Ships as looking alike 'mountains', and this is an avenue I explored in my designs, giving the ships many peaks and troughs and pointed, pyramid-like shapes. Nevertheless I also tried to keep the designs blocky in form, as this is a tremendous part of the Forge Father;s visual language, and also tried to keep them symmetrical, which is similarly a common design convention.
I also experimented with the idea of having the ships comprised of multiple overlapping plates, which is another consistent theme found across Forge Father vehicle design.
In these thumbnails I tried to get an interesting silhouette shape down for the ship, and then built up the shape of the vessel itself around that. I did not particularly develop the planet or the asteroids, as I found these to be largely samey in nature: I instead tried to focus on how different ship designs, at different angles, could use the planet as an element of their composition to help push the ship forward and put focus on to it. In this I particularly tried looking into the planet's circular silhouette and how that shape could be broken by the inclusion of the Ward Ship.
The final element of the scene that I drew thumbnail designs for was that of the frigate: the smaller distant ship seen mining asteroids. As the frigate is distant, I largely focused on the silhouette and shape of them at such a distance, with the shape itself being a more basic version of the Ward Ship seen in the foreground. I also included a small undercarriage on many of the designs, which would be the port in which the mining laser sits.
Ideas on Level Design
One consideration I made when developing ideas for my final piece is that of the level design, or the in-game area that the environment piece represents. Though, in my mind, this piece would key art similar to the character scenes I drew previously in the project, perhaps being shown on a loading screen or codex entry, I still want it to represent an aspect of the game as a whole.
As such, I considered how this scene could be represented as a level in the game. Taking inspiration from some benchmark inspirations such as Stellaris and Star Control, my game may see significant portions of play time occur on maps of solar systems, where the ship and frigates could be moved in orbit around stars and planets to harvest asteroids. As such, the design of this scene is not a level design in the traditional sense, not necessarily a map of the region that can be explored but instead a series of points of interest that could be investigated by the player: I want my environment piece to represent this, with the ship and friagte elements in orbit around different components of the scene in the foreground and background. I also believe this would make the piece more visually interesting and help in the expression of depth across it.
Final Design Key Art
At this point, I was comfortable with the designs for all components in the scene and created a piece of gresycale key art showing how the final scene may look. Clearly this is a simplification of the scene, yet I felt it would be good to show for feedback on composition and design. I also created an incredibly rough side profile of both the ships, which I would use in the 3D blockout process. In terms of colour, I planned on using largely bronze and brass tones for both the ship and frigate: H plan on having sharp differences in the sun-facing and datk sides of the ships, as the colour palettes are otherwise very uniform, using a similar set of amber metallic colours that I used on the armour of my Forge Father character. This is to show the faction link between the ship and the character, as both are Forge Father in nature.
Feedback:
Feedback indicated that the overall design seemed strong, with good shape language on the Ward Ship. This could be improved with smaller details such as doors or windows, and other details should be added showing how the ship may move through space.
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