The team, now joined by musician Ryan Henwood & officially re-grouped as Asteroid Base, haven’t stopped there: they’ve taken the past year to prepare the game — in which two players frantically ward off waves of enemy attack by manning various battle-stations on their cross-sectioned ship — for commercial release next year.
After we’d decided on our concept for Global Game Jam, we started thinking about visual style. Jamie and I both have an illustration background; this is the fun stuff for us.
Because “a spaceship with guns” is hardly a rare concept in games, we really wanted to avoid a default look, so leading up to GGJ, we began gathering references from outside video games. I’ve always found this keeps you honest about how much you’re borrowing from any one source. Even though at the time it was “just” a jam game, we wanted to be coming from the right place.
Since the game features a ship’s cross-section, right away we hit on our nostalgia for the sci-fi technical manuals we had as kids:
When looking for references for the ship controls, we searched for vintage music gear and came across these awesome fake retro paper sculptures by Dan McPharlin:
And finally, there were these two music videos which we just totally loved, and which inspired us tremendously.
The funny thing is, taking inspiration from all this led us full circle back to video games anyway, as all these references end up relating to Tron and Asteroids and Geometry Wars. But hey, at least we paid our dues.
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