EDIT: had some trouble with the images, fixed now

Hey everyone!

Todays entry consists solely of Mark's rather lengthy artist update, followed by a sweet looking ship he drew up. I haven't done much (ie. nothing) on the game lately, so sorry to all the people who are disappointed at my lack of entries.

Anyways, heres what Mark has to say....

[artist talk]
Artist update 11: Awesome-tacular Edition

Greetings loyal Gamedevers! I'm Mark the Artist, the artist and creative director for this here Axis Shift game. I do all the artwork for the game, as well as make up the story. I also originated the idea for this game and basically provided the base design for stuff, which we ended up modifying extensively, of course. Oh, and I'm still working on everything, and by working, I mean making sure Sir Sapo doesn't break anything important.

This time I'm going to discuss that Sapo ancient ship showed a while back supplemented by a new ancient(Ha! a paradox) ship. These things are gonna be awesome, both of the Empires get one at the final battle, and they are going to have some interesting special abilities.
Take the first ship, which is going to be named OBJECT-07, because everything actually really interesting has to have a boring name in the military, just to contrast with how cool it really is. As I said, both the Empire of Albion and the Archangelesk Dominion are going to use one of these new ships in the last battle, which will be either over the last space fortress, Odessa, or in the capital of the Dominion. I'm thinking "space fortress, but who knows...
Anyway OBJ-07 is the white ship here:
It's an ancient ship leftover from the first stellar empire that was found by the Archangelesk Dominion and studied scientifically to some extent, but its technology worked on largely unknown principles, and most of it involved reactivating it for use in combat against the Albion forces, which means the Player. I'm trying to think of some special abilities currently, but I'll list the ones I have now:

1. Teleports instead of standard movement; it moves suddenly and instantly
2. Defensive system that deflects damage and has chance of reflecting damage back at attacker
3. Attack consists of creating some sort of 'field' around a ship that constricts its movement and attack, destroying it in a huge explosion in a few turns
4. Has ability to make allied unit invincible for a couple turns(like the Iron Curtain in Red Alert)

I'm hoping to make it more of a defensive system, matching the Archangelesk stance in the battle, and in the war as a whole.

As for the never before seen OBJECT-03, it has a similar back story to the other ship, it was found floating inside a dense asteroid field around a planet in the Corsica system. Again, its technology was too advanced for useful understanding to be obtained, and the war was looming too close, so much effort was put into making it at least partly operational. So here it is, in hopefully stark contrast to the white ship:

I think it looks pretty cool, but you guys are the real judges of awesomeness. It's going to be put under your command for the final battle- you'll get a BIOS looking message saying something like

Project ARRAS completed, OBJECT-03 transferring command to 3rd Advance Fleet.
Detail Briefing attached.
See: OB-03-DB


That's another thing, for important stuff you'll get official looking messages from central command, so you won't get 'lost' in the game, and so we can script some really cool events. Anyway, here's the cool abilities so far of this ship:

1. Invisible- It's invisible unless damaged to a certain extent; until then it has a crazy red glow on your tactical screen(so you know where it is )
2. Insane attack- Right now I'm thinking of just a red beam with a cool effect(which will require some hardcore graphics programming from Sapo) that will be able to destroy large ships types in a single blast.
3. Wide-area Attack- Will be able to eminate a 'wave' similar to a ship explosion, but without destroying itself.

It should be noted that all other stats of these ships not mentioned(like armor and shields) will be much greater than normal in addition to these special things. they should have cool everything- just watching them turn should look interesting.

We may use another specific idea I had for them, but that's a ways off. For multiplayer, these could be part of a various special gametypes, or just as a crazy expensive unit unique to each side.

OK, I'm all updated out, I hope you've found this stuff at least mildy interesting, and I wouldn't mind some ideas for the ships, but Adios!

-Mark the 1337 artist
[/artist talk]

Well thats all for now, tomorrow night I'll post an entry with a cool fighter montage, but until then, you'll have to look at the spikey ship. Peace Out!