The Space Truck

Ludum Dare 37 Main Game Scene Asset

Description:

Congratulations on own your very first Space Truck! With this, you are now able to launch yourself into the exhilarating career of space trucking. Make a living exploring the galaxy by shipping an eclectic collection of goods to a myriad of star systems. The universe awaits you! Report to your home station to pick up your first contract load and let’s get space truckin’.

Idea:

It was December 2016 and I was finishing my last final for the quarter. With the holidays rolling around, both myself and a collection of friends from our online community, Pixelated Pickaxe, found ourselves with a rare abundance of free time. It was around this time that one of my friends proposed we take a stab at the Ludum Dare game development jam. The people of Pixelated Pickaxe (PPX for short) often played games together. We were collection of creatives and enthusiasts. A couple of people, me included, were artists, others were coders. None of us till then ever thought of trying to make a game together.

So in the run up to the 48 competition, we all decided apply ourselves and take on the game jam together.

At the start of the game jam, we received the theme. It was “One Room.” The first few hours were spent laying the fundamental groundwork from which our game was to be built around. This included the overall concept, general gameplay, basic concept art, etc. We eventually settled on the idea of top-down task manager type game. The player would run around to different areas in a singular space and perform a myriad of task to keep their ship-er-truck running.

After our initial meeting, we divided ourselves into our respective roles. I was in charge of creating some of the in-game assets. Because of my interest in technical art and spacecraft, I was given the task of making the Space Truck itself. One of my other friends was in charge of the UI, another in charge of character sprites, coding, etc.

What you see here is the finished Space Truck. While I was able finish the main asset, the rest of team eventually stalled on the project. We only had a single novice programmer and development became slow-going.

We ultimately didn’t make the deadline, but the Space Truck is a least a shining leftover from the attempt. Sometime, the people of PPX look at this work, and for a fleeting moment, the thought of rekindling the flame of development flashes in our collective minds.

Perhaps one day, the fire will be relit.

Process:

The Space Truck was created with modularity and mod-ability in mind. As the player progressed through the game, the player could upgrade parts of the ship or change sections between contracts for specific missions. Because of this particular requirement, the ship had to be designed in distinct layers.

Both Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop were used to make each asset. Most of the illustration being done in the vector illustration software.

Each component of the truck was its own distinct layer. What you see here are the components around the main ‘floor’ of the spaceship. The other components have been given their own pages which you can go take a look at by returning to the project page.

Here, the main body of the spacecraft has been separated into three distinct sections. The exterior, floor, and consoles. Together, these make up the hub and main component of the space truck. The player would run around to each console and manage the ship through them using a unique type of user interface for each one. Over time, you, as the player, could modify and upgrade this section along with other components which would change the layout of the space truck.

The interact-able consoles were color coded to make the game more player-friend and gamify the process more.

The rest of the design was ornamentation to sell the visuals of the space truck.