Star Citizen: Onboard Ship Combat (The Caterpillar)
This work was done as a supporting task for a big feature known as Bounty Hunting 2.0. Due to scheduling changes and reprioritization, this feature has no estimated time of release.
My goal was to take some of the larger ships in our game and convert them into working combat spaces. This task was originally about proving out the tech and identifying a pipeline that allowed the many systems present in our game to work together nicely. The feedback I received was quite positive, so I was given additional time to iterate on the level design / combat design elements of these spaces to make fun combat encounters.
I created four combat spaces and a one-hour instructional video before this feature was shelved. The combat spaces are at various stages ranging from whitebox, to designer placed art, to environment artist place art. Although these particular combat spaces are unlikely to show up in game, I take a lot of pride in knowing that my work has pushed the tech forward to a point where this gameplay is possible.
The 890 Jump is a luxury touring ship, and it has a very unique aesthetic for Star Citizen. There are several big rooms with interesting layouts, which made it a great pick for this exercise.
Unfortunately, that uniqueness turned out to be a problem later on. It turns out that we didn't have enough luxury style props to do a convincing art pass. This ship was shelved until such a time where we had more assets to work with.
The Caterpillar is a heavy freight ship, with a relatively straightforward interior layout. There are several medium sized rooms onboard, which can be filled with cargo to create a variety of layouts. This results in a somewhat cramped (but still fun) combat experience.
This ship was our chosen as our vertical slice, and it received a proper art pass.
The Starfarer is a heavy refueling ship, with a complicated interior layout. There are several medium to large sized rooms onboard, connected by a variety of ladders, stairways, and narrow corridors.
This ship has the most complicated layout out of the ships I chose. The corridors were too narrow to provide any interesting combat opportunities, so the combat ended up being more spread out than I originally planned. This resulted in a ship that felt more like a combination of mini encounters rather than a single large encounter.
The Reclaimer is a heavy salvage ship, with a multilevel interior layout. Each level has a wide variety of rooms onboard, ranging from small to extra-large. Each level is connected by the main elevator.
This was my favorite ship to work on. The large variety of rooms available on this ship allowed me to create a very unique set of combat spaces.
I used this ship to test some ideas for Bounty Hunting 2.0. We wanted each ship to come in multiple configurations, to provide things like difficulty levels and replayablity. The above video shows how I would use this one ship to provide that sort of variety in gameplay.
This is a short video showcasing how the AI behave outside of combat. Each room has a very simple set of guard points, which the AI is able to move between and idle at. We planned to setup a more complicated set of contextual behaviors for the AI to trigger, but that work was shelved.