Starfarer by Fractal Softworks

Published November 20, 2010
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The game "Starfarer" by Fractal Softworks has just been publicly announced! It's a sandboxy spaceship combat/strategy/roleplaying game and is still in production.

Oh, by the way - all the graphics are by me! (And the lovely background is by NASA, I should add.)

Art for this have been a ton of fun to draw. It's been really hard to keep quiet about this but now I can spill the beans, so count on me writing more posts about how I approached the ship and weapon designs, drawing planets, and everything else graphical.

Starfarer will be released sometime in 2011; be sure to follow development and release news at the Fractal Softworks webpage.
0 likes 4 comments

Comments

LachlanL
Looks pretty sweet! I love the highly detailed style. Reminds me of the old shmups.
November 22, 2010 08:30 PM
dbaumgart
Thanks :D

Totally going for something between old schmups and games like Master of Orion, probably a lot of influence from science fiction movies' spaceships - Star Wars, Dune, Alien, designs by Ron Cobb...
I swear, this is the game I was born to draw.

(One of 'em, anyway!)
November 24, 2010 04:25 PM
swiftcoder
The graphical style reminds me heavily of Gratuitous Space Battles - not that that is necessarily a bad thing. Given that the game seems to be using a similar system of ship construction/hardpoints, though, you may want to put thought into differentiating the graphical style.
November 28, 2010 02:15 PM
dbaumgart
I have indeed looked at Gratuitous Space Battles - the similarities are there, but I think this is mostly a function of both games being top-down OpenGL-driven space fleet battle games done in a similar visible scale. The big difference, I think, is that if you look closely, GSB uses pre-rendered (and they are pre-rendered, right?) 3d models while SF uses pixel-artish ships.

But yeah, the comparison is inevitable, but I think that ultimately the gameplay has a very different focus in each.
November 28, 2010 08:28 PM
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