This project was another square on the quilt of a world building project. My goal was to capture the ship that a Celestial King uses to traverse the universe to help others of their kind who are in need of aid. I envisioned the setting to be during a dark time in the history when the King was battling monsters with the help of three warriors, one of whom is the player character, Thuban. I wanted the starship to be a respite from the uncertainty of the setting, so my goal was to make it look impressive, which I sort of succeeded in doing, though the music is doing most of the heavy lifting.

This was my first game-like project in 3D, so I learned quite a bit from it as a result. After having only used ZBrush once over a year prior, I was shocked at how quickly I was able to sculpt Thuban, and in Unity I was grateful for readable C# code that helped me get my music working (and the music itself was composed and edited in a matter of hours). The skybox was very quick and dirty, but it looks stunning regardless, and I continue to admire the textures on everything, especially Thuban. Their armor is delightfully shiny, and their hair turned out so beautiful with the glassy texture and the light emission.

It wouldn’t be a project if nothing went wrong, and quite a bit did. The original vision for the starship involved gravity like in the Super Mario Galaxy games, and that combined with my lack of level design experience made the design itself incredibly intangible at the start. I ultimately decided to build the individual parts I thought I would need and feel out the design when I started building in Unity just so that I could have something, but the building-block nature of my parts makes the layout feel more like something an amateur put together in another game’s level editor. Finally, I thought I was being smart by making only a small handful of parts and giving them all white textures so that I could use Unity’s material editor to change the color, but that turned out to be a curse in disguise because it made adding color to the level very tedious, and some areas with stark contrast relative to the rest of the ship stand out in a bad way because it would have been impossible to get a smooth transition between the colors and it would have taken way too much time to make a transition that would have been barely passable. I thought about going back into the starship to polish it up during the break, but I’d rather build other places and start over with a clean slate on this one when I have a clearer vision and more experience to do it justice.

Links to the Windows Build and the Mac Build.