Subset Games Forum

Very nice. What are your plans for Incursion? Your artwork and music so far are phenomenal.

thashepherd wrote:Very nice. What are your plans for Incursion? Your artwork and music so far are phenomenal.

Well, been mostly keeping that under my hat since I don't wanna get anyone's hopes up if I don't finish.
That said, it's a TC that takes place a few decades after core FTL - the Rebels lost the Flagship but won the war, and almost every other nonhuman race was either wiped out or marginalized to where they're no longer relevant to the galaxy. As the saying goes, "Karma's a bitch" - the Incursors, as they're called, are humanity's comeuppance.

so its an expansion pack....AWESOME. Seriously the mod makers need to team up with game makers to create a real awesome expansion

PvtVain wrote:

BrenTenkage wrote:so its an expansion pack....AWESOME. Seriously the mod makers need to team up with game makers to create a real awesome expansion

Why?, developers are more experienced than modders. So that would be useless and the modders would be dead weight.

While that may be true, a lot of the modders here (shark, kieve, grognak, myself) program for our "day job" - we're devs in our own right. There's not much mod-dev communication right now, though; they add functionality, and we add content.

Kieve, I'm glad you're working on this! Art assets have always been the most time consuming for me, especially the ships. I don't know how you and drktemplar crank out so many! The devs gave us a reasonably flexible events system for developing a story; I'm excited to see the direction you take it in.

PvtVain wrote: Well, I never said modders weren't developers. But you don't see many or any modders at all being hired, mainly for the sole fact that they're inexperienced. I mean yeah, we can develop fan-created content and such, but that is no where near what actual developers have access to, or what they can do.

Again, I'd hesitate to make that assumption. Look at the BF1942 "Desert Storm" mod team, for example - they actually DID get hired. In many cases - FTL being one of them - modders add content in exactly the same way that developers do. So while we may not be familiar with the source code of the game itself, we do still have experience developing for that game.

Having said that, I would be extremely surprised if ANY of the modders on this forum are just modding because they're hoping for a job. That's a shit motivation for any programmer worth his salt. We (I) do it because it's fun.

thashepherd wrote:Kieve, I'm glad you're working on this! Art assets have always been the most time consuming for me, especially the ships. I don't know how you and drktemplar crank out so many! The devs gave us a reasonably flexible events system for developing a story; I'm excited to see the direction you take it in.

I've always been something of a creative hack - writing, artwork, 3D, animation, and as per above even a little music (though I feel audio to be by far my weakest). The problem is, I'm also subject to the whims of my muse, who is a flighty, inconsistant wretch, and a total flake. I'm enjoying working on bits of this now, but muse = inspiration, and she has the attention span of a goldfish on crack. Once she loses interest, I have a hard time plowing through anything without the inspiration to back it, and I've got a long list of failed or abandoned projects as proof of that. If I get get anything playable out of this, I'll consider it a success.

PvtVain wrote:Well, I never said modders weren't developers. But you don't see many or any modders at all being hired, mainly for the sole fact that they're inexperienced. I mean yeah, we can develop fan-created content and such, but that is no where near what actual developers have access to, or what they can do.

This isn't a resume, it's just something I'm working on because I feel like it. And the reason our "fan-created content" is nowhere near what Matt & Justin can do is because a distressingly (un)healthy chunk of the game is hardcoded. You'll find in games with legit editors (the more open the better), modders can often equal or surpass the developers in many ways.
That's not a slight against our devs, as they've built the game they intended to and it works beautifully. The only one it hamstrings is us, the little hobbyists.

i love how it looks but i was expecting the ship from EVE.. the Archon is a carrier class vessle in that game

Donorak wrote:i love how it looks but i was expecting the ship from EVE.. the Archon is a carrier class vessle in that game

Never played EVE so I wouldn't know, but it doesn't surprise me either.
No matter, Archon is simply the working title for the thing - my photoshop-file saves for the Obsidian are all titled "Dark Crystal" for the same reason.

I'm not entirely sure as I've never messed around with them, but the grid-overlay I use is 35x35 pixels. Kind of an odd dimension, but that's what FTL's using as frame size for rooms and character sprites (per frame).

Looks really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really... REALLY COOL!!
Looknig forward to the final mod!