T w e n t y S i d e d

You may have noticed that the same vessel has been showing up a lot in the past few articles. This isn’t because I’m lazy. Well, no, that’s not true. It isn’t entirely because I’m lazy. It’s also because I spent months developing this particular vessel some years backThe Fall of 2012, and it would be a waste to not use it to demonstrate some of the principles I’m talking about, and improve the design, all at the same time!

I’ve been calling it the “Tramp Destroyer” because, hmm, where to start.

Visual Inspiration

I saw a piece of barkfrom a pine tree, I think lying on the ground and thought to myself “that looks an awful lot like a spaceship.”I never properly captured the layers. I’ll have to try again some time
So I picked it up and took it home and did some sketches.

Paul Spooner likes programming procedural content and gaming when he's not busy with his day-job and family.

I’m attempting, in this series, to program the computer to make space ships. So far, I’ve manually generated some blocky ships, and some roundish ships, and done a little exploration of hull plates and a few sub-systems. There hasn’t been any procedural generation yetunless you count the starfield in the background but I’m not too worried. I want to be comfortable making all of this manually before setting out to tell the computer how to make things. I could start doing the programming already, but I’m enjoying this whole manual exploration thing, so let’s keep going with that.

Last time I mentioned, near the end, that the morphological metaphor for space-ships is shaping up to be more along the lines of bugs than bears, but on reflection, the broader categories of invertebrates instead of vertebrates seems more apt. However, as much as I’d like to careen off on an Anthozoa-inspired tangent, let’s stay on the path I indicated last week and start by talking about: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Procgen Bug-Ship”

Paul Spooner likes programming procedural content and gaming when he's not busy with his day-job and family.