Good idea on the Homeworld 2 stuff as a reference. I'd not seen their remastered version in particular (I played Homeworld 1 a fair bit, ultimately didn't like it, and gave 2 a pass).
This is gorgeous, though:
And definitely an impressive remastering:
A lot of what they're doing is stuff I had been thinking of, although they went a bit fully cel-shaded with some borders there in some cases, perhaps. Anyhow, that general style is something that I think would work well for this game, too.
No doubt you don't need to hear it from me again, but I'll say it anyway, since 99% of AI War 2 is gonna be combat, combat is what has to look the most awesome of all. Doesn't matter how anything else looks, as long as combat has some visual oomph...
The core game mechanic is war. It has to look as awesome as possible, that's the main game feedback loop. Need the right look and the sound variation to back it up.
Right, exactly. We've learned a ton on sound any of our games prior to Raptor, honestly, so there's a lot we plan on doing with that.
Regarding the visuals of the combat, I have a million awesome tools with the upgraded particle system here, and I'm excited to use them. I'm not worried about that bit, it just takes time and fiddling to get the optimal performance out of it.
Regarding ship graphics, which really is the meat of the game, there's the far-zoom and the zoomed-in bits, and to me that's what has to look super awesome. More time is spent in far zoom mode, so that has to get a whole lot of love.
Actually, a lot of time is spent staring at the space backgrounds and the planet and the GUI, so those need the same amount of love.
With sprites that pretty, why are we bothering with ultra-close-zoom 3D models again? I hardly ever zoom in close enough to see the 'actual models' in AI War Classic; the sprites pretty much ARE the ships as far as I'm concerned.
Because sex sells?
More seriously, there's a lot of stuff that we can do with the 3D stuff that we can't do with the sprites. We can do various animations and rotations and so on that you won't see on the distant sprites. We can represent really huge structures. We can do cinematic-ish effects. And so on.
Plus it's fun, we're good at it, and that's not remotely where the bulk of the time or cost on the project goes. The 3D models will be the quicker-to-create side of things compared to the GUI and far zoom ships, I feel pretty confident. But those are also the pieces that help to sell the game the most, I think.
