We recently celebrated the 1-year anniversary of successfully completing our Kickstarter campaign. (You can find our campaign archive here, if you’ve joined us since then by the way: Kickstarter.com)
One of our higher tier backer rewards gave our supporters the chance to design their very own in-game block. This is no easy task but our first ‘Corporation Vice President’ gave us some great ideas to work with and over the last few months we’ve been bringing his vision to life.
Simon Allen’s Fireworks Launcher block is now usable in the main game and we’ve documented the story of how it came to life.
It may seem like a simple process to come up with a new vehicle block for the game and get it working, but there are way more stages involved than you might expect. From the core of the idea, described in an email, Simon worked with designer Kris and artist Stig to visualise a concept of how it could look and operate.
The concept stage almost always starts with pen and paper, before transferring the ideas into Photoshop to refine the look. It’s important that every new block is able to function and attach to existing blocks in a way that’s consistent with the rest of the pieces and doesn’t break any existing rules or conventions so we tweaked the design until it fitted those criteria.
From there, our 3D artist Anton took over and started to model the block in 3DS Max, not just to start locking down the look and feel, but also to start experimenting with how it will move and animate when it’s in use.
In many cases, we know which in-game corporation a block is best suited for before we start work on it, and in this case we felt that Venture was the best fit for the rocket launcher’s distinct abilities. So as soon as we got the block textured in Venture livery we dropped it into our internal R&D mode to start experimenting with combining it with other blocks and adding it to techs to see how it looked.
Our lead programmer worked his magic on it too, putting all the systems in place for it to function properly in the main game, including all the firing and particle effects that come from each firework launched.
Anton also got to work on designing and modelling the look of the actual rockets themselves, and lots more experimentation in all the game modes followed, including that all-important design balancing to make sure that it sat well alongside all the existing blocks but was still fun and entertaining to play with.
We were eventually ready to include it in the full R&D arena for our early Canary testers to start experimenting with. We tried to stay true to Simon’s vision of what the block could do, but our testing and R&D process with the community is vital for any new block we introduce.
Once we’d integrated all the community feedback and thoroughly tested it out, it was ready to go into the main game. We exclusively revealed the block on one of our daily Twitch streams and added it to the latest Steam build for the world to play with.
Every new block goes through this process and often it’s even more complicated and drawn out than this, depending on the nature of the block and what we need it to do. But that’s why we love the way TerraTech is being developed - the whole team works together to make sure that even the smallest piece of new content in the game is cool and fun. This one was pretty special though - without our amazing Kickstarter backers last summer we wouldn’t be where we are today so to finally have our first backer-designed block live in the game is a great moment.
A huge thank you to Simon again for his support of the project and for working with us to come up with such an awesome block.
Check out the full video of the process here: Youtu.be
