So for Iteration 3 the plan is to convert the world from planets to asteroid bases. This is to accomplish several things: asteroid bases are cooler than planets (in my opinion), asteroid bases achivable scale versus a ship or station is closer to reality and more pleasing to the scale of planets versus ships and stations (currently a carrier is only a few times bigger than a moon, making planets bigger would make planets too close to eachother, the sun is also only about 10 times bigger than the Earth like planet). Asteroid bases are a bit more believable to starting with low amounts of tech, resources, and people under your command. Asteroid bases would also balance out the “pirate” faction which I’ll convert to a rival base faction. Asteroid base veruss another asteroid base is a lot more balanced than planet versus pirate base. Also I can come up with some really neat ideas as to how humanity ended up on these bases in the first place.

So with the planetary system a very easy and obvious, yet neat configuration came into existance, the sun, in the middle of the game world shined a neat ligth on the planets. The planets have a light and dark side. This looked pretty neat and screamed space. Planets that were closer to the sun produced more energy than those that were further. Point being that the sun had many cool aspects. But if I go into an asteroid base type environment where there is no sun this light is gone and so is one aspect that would distinguish bases from one another (the energy production yield). I want the bases to be lit up and have a dark and light side as well, so where would the light come from? For quite a while the idea in my mind is that the game will revolve around a highly advanced piece of technology that all the sides want to posses. So I thought that this object would give off light, and some sort of radiation that the bases would harness.

While spending some time in Blender creating this object, I was basically creating a circular gate, then it hit me… I’m losing a sun, but want to add some high tech object, why not add a sort of a space station that has created or somehow contains an artificial sun. Voila, I have a high tech object, I have sun light, I have the bases power source and I’ve made something that was fairly ordinary in concept (a sun) into a some thing more an artificial sun and a space object that seemingly created it. Pretty good synergy of design right here.