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Design blog I, weapons of war

11/29/2013

1 Comment

 
     Hello everybody, I am Pavlos Germidis, the designer of Ceres. In this blog, I will try and share with you the thoughts behind the designs of the game -be it ships, weapons, space stations, machine-monsters or just plain meta-trans-humans like you and me.
    This post is about weapons and stuff that goes zapp and boom and <sound effect for space-time shear>. The science in Ceres is both familiar and unfamiliar: this is due to the fact that machines have taken over most of the research over the last decades (or centuries?). It is based on this science that we design the weapons for Ceres.

    Soooo physics have progressed a lot in the last centuries, and the New Einstein (fancy name given to the new Indian super-Artificial Intelligence in Uttar Pradesh Science University) resolved quite a few cosmological mysteries of old. In Ceres we fight with lasers, guns and missiles but also with graviton beams, plasma exhausts and even quantum forces (or weirder devices I came across in my evening conversations with the Mothership -but let's skip that for the moment ;)  ).

    Each ship comes with a given number and size of 'slots' for externally mounted weaponry. The same with the internal weapons (see more about that below). This cannot be changed as basically ships were built around their engine plant and weapons -changing the layout of the weaponry means you have to redesign the whole ship ! What you can do is put any weapon anywhere you like -and there's a lot of possibilities in that department.

    A weapon needs something to lash itself to, and this is a turret. A weapon is contained in the turret, which itself is part of a weapon mount. You can mix and match any of them, as long as the weapon is of the same size as the turret: every item comes in 3 sizes: small, medium and large/ heavy. Of course, should the need arise, you can stick a medium or a small turret on a heavy weapon mount -say you are short of cash and you still need a weapon.

Picture
Darn, that's a lot of long and nasty pointy things there. Freud help me !

    Weapons can be lasers, guns, missiles, plasma chambers, graviton guns and the different torpedo accelerators or quantum shifters. Those two last are different in that they cannot be inside a turret, and they have to be housed IN the ship. The torpedo accelerator is a big tube lined with supra-conducting magnets that propels the multi-ton heavy torpedo at tens of kilometers per second. Each torpedo firing is an event for the ship: the vessel almost powers down, shudders, stuff falls off everywhere.

    There's a lot of variety in weapons in Ceres: currently we have about 10 types of guns, 6 kinds of lasers, 5 types of missiles, 5 models of torpedoes and couple of plasma chambers, and this is just a part of the armory of two of the many factions of the game. Each faction also has different types of turrets -although there is a lot of cross-use and breeding between factions. There should be two dozens of guns and lasers and a dozen of missiles and torpedoes to choose from in the final game, in addition to more exotic weapons.
1 Comment
Owen link
4/27/2019 03:23:13 pm

Great blog Tryggvi!

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    Tryggvi Hákonarson, project manager and programmer. Pavlos Germidis, designer and 3D artist.

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