Namely, an external program that generates all the ship graphics from a list of parts, that you can choose yourself, and then add in rooms, systems, starting loadout. Perhaps with a budget.
Either way, the basic premise is simple:
- The schematic is split into two parts - front and back, both of which are either split into top/bottom, or not. Perhaps I could add an extra middle section.
- You choose from a list of prepared graphics for each of the pieces, for now, I'm gonna extract and adapt/create some graphics out of ingame ships, that are all standardized in sizes and aligned to the room grid.
- After that you lay out the rooms, or let the game do it for you, and add doors, and systems.
- It's all done on a budget, out of which you can run out.
So, the programming itself will be fairly simple, so long the graphics stick to a standard - pixel art, with a fixed list of colors. I'm gonna use three main palettes - hull and hull2(think hull plus the Engi A/B or Mantis C stuff that is darker and sort of "below", both 8 colors each, like standard ships, except no gradients here), and a 3 color detail palette. Plus you can draw paint on top of the hull while preserving the shading(including flood fill and stamping logos).
Well, as you can guess, that's gonna be a bit of work. Not hard work, but nonetheless, it will take me time.
So, I'd like to know if anyone would be interested in helping me, namely with the art. Both drawing new art and making some out of the base files.
And in general: Would anyone be interested in playing a mod like this? What if I had daily/biweekly/weekly/monthly random ship challenges?