Design Studio for the July Player costume
This costume is built for the large male model, and will be available for players to use in creating and customizing their characters. We have alternative cape designs to accompany this costume, which are still in development.
This particular costume has six pieces. These are Head, Shoulders, Chest, Pants, Belt, and Feet. As is generally true in Ship of Heroes costume designs, each costume piece has a primary and secondary color, which can be controlled independently on each piece, or automatically aligned around the color choices made for the chest-piece with the click of a button.
The individual parts can also be mixed and matched with other costumes, or with street clothes. Want a different belt? You can change it. A different mask? You can change that, too. We also allow the helmet or mask (Head slot) to be toggled to become invisible, if desired.
All pieces of this costume, and all of our prior signature hero costumes, were created in-house for Ship of Heroes. This gives us better quality control, and allows us to see that the design of the clothing fits the artistic style of the game, and that it has the critical features we are looking for. Polycount on each piece is in the proper range, the design itself allows for movement that minimizes clipping, the normal, texture, and color maps all conform to our design specs, and the costume has to look good.
We’re also planning the series of costumes we will have at launch, thinking about what we will need then, and working backwards to make certain we arrive at exactly the situation we are want to achieve. This means we want to get costumes designed by more than one artist – this one is Robert Brown’s work – and that are based on more than one concept. Combined with the option to mix and match, and the three basic model designs, and the color variations, and the addition of a pool of street clothes, options for designing and costuming characters should be very exciting by the time we launch the game.
We’ve chosen to show off the new costume in a pattern of silver and blue-green. You can make the costume rotate to see it from different angles simply by scrolling over the picture at the bottom. This is our fifth costume design, and we plan to show several more through the remainder of 2017, and additional costumes in 2018. You can see our current milestone schedule for last eight months of 2017 here:
Summer 2021 Schedule
Our last newsletter talked a bit about the kinds of events we did in 2020, as well as our winter holiday content. In this newsletter we want to talk about the next upcoming event, our overall plans for 2021, and some new areas of Apotheosis City that we’ve created.
Engine Update Newsletter
First of all, we want to let everyone know that we’ve upgraded to the latest version of the Unreal 4 Epic Engine, 4.24! We spent most of 2019 in 4.21, which helped us with stability and consistency throughout the year while we developed and tested major new systems.
Upgrading to Engine Version 4.21
In the middle of 2016 we originally began the development of Ship of Heroes with the then-current version of the Unreal Engine, version 4.11.3. As development proceeded, we upgraded our engine version several times, and each upgrade brought new features, but also required a considerable effort by our coders and artists to adapt and upgrade our game code and art to the new version.