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Announcing the Manta Update!

We are excited to announce a major update to Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy on PC and Mac!

The Manta Update features a new ship, the 'Manta'-class light cruiser.

Sometimes you just need to zero the hostiles completely; demolition, destruction, absolute tactical oblivion. That’s where the brand new Manta-class light cruiser comes in.

Four dedicated missile launch bays means the Manta can ruin your opponent’s day like nothing else in the fleet. Either let the guided payloads find four different targets, or focus fire on a single mark for scorched earth tactics.

Also featured in this update are a host of new balance updates to the campaign mode, various graphical improvements, new maps and hi-scores in skirmish mode and general bug fixes.

Get 10% off until the end of the week!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/337680

Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy is coming to iPad!

Like the title says. We are looking for beta testers. You can sign up here : http://slitherine.com/beta_test/shvp_ipad

#ipad #strategy games #star hammer

"I was pleasantly surprised by Star Hammer, and highly recommend it if you’re a fan of strategy."

Take command of Naval Strike Group 7 and lead your fleet to victory in full 3D tactical space combat. Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy is a sci-fi strategy saga that will test your skills as both capital assault ship Captain and naval fleet Commander.

Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy has been released! Get a 10% discount until June 11.

The Art of Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy - Part 1.

In part one of this two-part post, Art Director Anthony Carriero discusses the inspiration and approach he took in designing the Coalition Navy ships and stations for Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy

Ideation

A sweet piece of alliteration I have always had a fancy for is “Form follows function”.

This little phrase has stuck with me as a key factor in designing things which do not exist but could feasibly be made with the correct technology, materials and constraints.

The practical application of “Form follows function” in designing for games or film is a common one to ensure whatever you put up on the screen can be identified for its purpose and intent, and not so far out that the audience or players see it as too unrealistic, or even worse, cannot associate with it.

Saying all that, reality can be a little boring sometimes, so a hint of “over the top” or stylisation is often in order. After all, we are designing for entertainment, not NASA. This general rule was applied to the design of the human ships and the nautilids.

The Inspiration

From the beginning I had an idea of the feel of the ships I wanted in the game. This may sound strange to some but it started with a clear vision of a material surface.

A worn metal surface with access panels, lights, rivets, scratched paint and a healthy dose of engine emission grease and burn marks.

This material surface would have to work for war-scarred hulking steel behemoths, sleek battle damaged fighters and flying automated coffins with lasers.

Given these requirements, I referenced a lot of World War Two Naval vessels and construction and excavation vehicles.

These vessels and vehicles had it all, war paint, large turrets, riveted hulls, diesel grease and most importantly for the audience; a recognisable and imposing presence - that and the fact that these ships had to be repeatedly manufactured on a budget and a stable design, an important factor I tried to imply in the design of the Star Hammer ships

The Design Influence.

A lot of great artists and designers have produced work in the Sci-fi genre, but two of my favourites were my first port of call for inspiration when I initially started work on the project; Syd Mead and Ralph McQuarrie.

These names should be recognisable to Star Wars , Battlestar Galactica, Aliens and Blade Runner fans.

Their handling of geometric forms at a large scale with recognisable purpose is nothing less than mastery of design.

I deconstructed their approach to function and aesthetics in concepting most of the human ships. Of course the end product is original and for the majority represents my own personal style, but I like to think of the final designs as a sort of humble salute of gratitude for the work they have done for the industry and the genre.

Two good examples of their influence in the game are the Kraken Dreadnought; with its large cylindrical drone bay and the space station Delta Mark 3; with its vertical aspect and intersecting shapes.

The Execution

A ship starts its life with a purpose and design description. From there I create thumbnail sketches to get a sense of the ships scale and complexity of shape. Once I land on a shape I like, I develop it further.

Next comes a more refined 2d concept art piece. Digitally painted and detailed, this showcases the complete form, paneling and key features.

Around half of the more complex ships and stations in Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy, I rapidly built into 3d concepts.

From there I could make very fast design changes and paint over the renders from different angles to really nail the design and get a better sense of how lighting affects the hull and general form. This was also much faster than manually rendering out 2d concepts from different angles.

The final stage is to send the designs and models off to our 3d modeller/texture artist; Mark Smith, who did a great job of creating the final 3D models and textures to sign off stage and exported them for use in the game engine.

For a more in depth look at this end of the art pipeline , check out our previous post on art process here

Coming soon: Part 2 of the Art of Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy. The post will focus on the design and creation of the games main enemy Units; The Nautilids.

Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy will be available via Steam, Slitherine and Matrix Games on June 4th 2015.

#star hammer #games #games art #scifi #science fiction

The "Kraken"-class dreadnought is a commanding presence on the battlefield.

This is the shield of Humanity! Whatch the video! http://bit.ly/1H4EJJw

The ‘Triton’-class battlecruiser wreaks havoc on the battlefield.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/337680

UGDB Preview

UltimateGameDatabase previewed Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy.

“..while Australian Black Lab Games isn't the first studio to make a fleet-based game of tactical space battles, they may have made one of the deepest tactical games that solely focuses on the fleet battle experience.”

You can read the full preview here

Surtur from Slitherine presents a Twitch stream with over 1 hour of gameplay footage from Star Hammer: The Vangaurd Prophecy

Unlocked

This week, Lead Designer Anthony Sweet and Graphic Designer Richard Kong have a look at the achievements available for Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy on Steam.

Getting Along

Anthony: The crew system in Star Hammer is a unique beast all of its own, and it allows a clever captain to manage their crew in ways that result in explosive victories on the battlefield. It will take patience and negotiation, but a crew that works harmoniously together provides far larger bonuses that a team that doesn’t co-operate.

This achievement is a reward for patient captains who take the time to figure out the personalities of their crew members and finesse their moods to create a tight-knit team.

Richard: As Anthony mentioned, mastering the crew system in Star Hammer requires each of your crew members to work together. The basic premise then was to create a sense of partnership, a camaraderie if you will. The idea that at the end of it all, they will have forged a stronger bond because they helped each other to survive.

No Time For Orientation

Anthony: Reinforcements take time to build and fly to your fleet; smaller and faster ships will typically reach your position quicker than larger cruisers and destroyers. If you haven’t used all of your Command Points for the current mission when the reinforcement completes, the ship will jump straight into the fray and join you. Even a late Raider can swing a losing battle back into your favour.

Just spare a thought for the poor pilot thrown into the deep end against an entire pod of disruptors.

Richard: In one of the particularly hard missions when I was playtesting the game, I was down to my last ship because of some bad turn of events and outnumbered by my enemies. There was little hope for me to actually win and then when I clicked end turn, I saw this one new raider reinforcement that I had ordered a few missions back appear on my screen, right in the middle of the enemy swarm.

I was thinking of the pilot's face while I was drawing this one. How he would be looking out his ship, then at his radar filled with red enemy triangles and wish he were back at base right now.

Preventative Measures

Richard: Missile counters are sort of strange because they are a bit like underwater mines but instead of damaging your ships, they prevent them from turning to bits of rubble. I drew on some inspiration from mines as well as the icon that is used within the in-game interface to make sure players knew which one it was.

Trust me, you'll want to remember that icon and place a few of those strategically around your ships. When the missile is on its way, it's probably too late...

Anthony: The frigate is a favourite of a number of Star Hammer’s developers - the countermeasures and huge shields are so useful! It may have been one of the hardest ships to balance, but in the end the weighty Albatross frigate is a fine example of utility and durability.

Preventative Measures is an achievement for players that like their tactical defences, who savour the visual feast of enemy explosives prematurely detonating to a well-placed sentry countermeasure.

Remnant Bane

Richard: The remnants always came across to me as semi-religious fanatics. The kind that would spraypaint their insignia on walls or vandalise other peoples property in the name of their cause.

For this achievement I was playing around with the idea of smashing their symbol which is, in a way, the source of their power.

Anthony: The Remnant are the first enemy players come across in Star Hammer, and continue to remain a thorn in Valeron’s side as Second Contact with the nautilid ramps plays out. This achievement is the first you’ll receive, and hopefully it’ll serve as a reminder that you can’t always be certain of who or where your enemies are.

Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy will be available via Steam, Slitherine and Matrix Games on June 4th 2015.

Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy is the next installment in the Star Hammer universe (which began with Star Hammer: Tactics, which I sadly never got around to plating). In this game, you lead a small naval space fleet reacting to threats both human and alien while protecting our homeworld. In

Space Game Junkie preview of Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy

#star hammer: the vanguard prophecy

Prepare for Landfall

If you’re a fan of lore and world building, then this week’s blogpost is for you! Lead Designer Anthony Sweet takes a look at crafting the world of Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy.

When we first started designing Star Hammer, there was very little in the way of a plot. Missions were likely going to be systemically generated, with procedural characters and ship names and a string of dissociated objectives to tackle through. The team quickly realised however that although this sounded fun, it didn’t help to convey much of the experience we want people to feel while playing through a Star Hammer game.

Much of Star Hammer is about balance and the choices made during conflict. Beyond these goals, we also wanted to tackle themes of environmental degradation and colonisation, among many other things. For these themes to resonate, we required consequences that mattered to the world where the player spends their time, even if the consequences don’t have an immediate gameplay impact.

There are two key events in the lore timeline of the Star Hammer universe; firstly, a fortunate fragment of humanity were able to leave a heavily degraded planet Earth and travel to a new home in the Gliese 581 star system, and secondly, that the new settlement had a violent conflict with another intelligent life form. That First Contact War was won by naval officer Fredan Dyce, and his daughter would be the protagonist of Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy. These are the two key points that went on to inform the entire writing process of the game.

Gliese 581 is a real star located in the Libra constellation. Novus, specifically Gliese 581d, was considered a confirmed potential human-habitable planet. (The existence of 581d has since been cast into doubt, but we won’t let something like the reality of an actual planet get in the way of science fiction!)

The distance between our solar system and Gliese 581 is approximately 20 light years, and we wanted to assume that faster-than-light travel would not be possible by the 22nd century. This might seem like some arbitrary points of science lore, but these two factors came to greatly influenced whole swathes of world building. Sub speed-of-light travel meant that I could pick some average speeds for the transports that would result in a relative journey of 150 Julian calendar years. This means that our Conveyance exodus event is facilitated by generation starships, which require drastically different design proposals than ships that reach their destination within a couple of years. The design of these intergenerational ships then became the foundation of the technology that forms the Coalition Navy and the orbital stations of Novus.

Beyond space ship technology, intergenerational travel means that social, linguistic and political cues develop in a very different fashion. The settlers that touched boot to Novan dirt never knew what Earth looked like; their grandparents did not ever known what solid ground felt like; entire generations of people were born, sustained, and died only ever knowing a black, endless space with no horizons. How do people who have never felt the sun talk about shadows? How is literature interpreted by someone who has never seen a forest, or a mountain, or a car, other than through video and pictures? And when these people do eventually experience their new home world, how does that change the way they talk and react to these sensations that they could only talk about as abstracts while hurtling through cold space?

Each Conveyance transport ship was an individually funded and staffed investment by separate Earth governments and corporations with vested interests and specialties in interstellar colonisation. All of these considerations led to the formation of a branched government that maintains democratic process, but values the economic growth of individual nation-states. The Executive Board, made up of the Directors of each ruling Ministry, was originally formed of the seventeen ship captains who survived the Novus landing; only eleven seats remain as a result of mergers, buy-outs and insolvent dissolutions.

All of these details were formed from just one of the two aforementioned significant timeline events in the Star Hammer lore. All of our locations, characters and plot points are heavily influenced by the world that has been created during the design process. Not all of it - in fact, not much of it at all! - is directly visible in the final game, but the influences of these world-building decisions are present in every word choice, ship concept and level design that the player experiences.

In case you would like to further explore the world of Novus, the Star Hammer Data Archive wiki will launch side-by-side with the game in just over a month! Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy will be available via Steam, Slitherine and Matrix Games on June 4th 2015.

Infographic preview of some the capital ships and nautilids in Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy

There is no up in space

Very early in the planning for Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy, it was decided that battles should take place in three dimensions. There are a couple of reasons for this.

First, space is three dimensional. It's vast and empty, and limiting space ships to a flat 2D plane felt needlessly artificial. Whilst Star Hammer is a strategy game, every other non-strategy space game I've ever played - whether it's a combat sim, like Wing Commander or X-Wing Vs Tie Fighter, or a sandbox like Eve Online or Elite - all use 3 dimensions.

The second was a review on the App Store for the iPad version of Star Hammer Tactics. I forget the exact wording, but it was something like '2 stars for 2 dimensions'. Star Hammer Tactics' limited movement to a flat plane (for the sake of simplicity), but this unhappy customer clearly wanted another dimension to their space combat. Well buddy, thanks for the 2-star review, and here you go!

Combat in 3D presents a number of opportunities, and some challenges.

One of the opportunities is that we can now have shield and armour on 6 segments: forward, rear, left/port, right/starboard, top and bottom. For nautilids, we have given each variety its own armour setup, meaning that some sections are better to aim at than others. So for example, a 'sprayer' has a soft squishy rear, so hitting it from behind deals extra damage. A 'leviathan' on the other hand has armoured sides, so an attack to its broadsides will do less damage. The key to success on the battlefield is good positioning.

The biggest challenge was how to implement an interface that allows a player to move in 3D. Most strategy games are set on land, so only have to contend with getting from point A to point B, and maybe moving around an obstacle. We quickly found that whilst it's possible to move from point A to point B in 3D, the orientation of your ship at the end might not be good for firing at targets, and that it was possible (even easy) to end with ships twisted into all sorts of crazy angles that didn't make the game much fun. We iterated on the UI and also the movement system a lot until we finally got something that was easy to understand the tactical situation, but still allowed for interesting and plausible combat.

The solution was to simplify the movement, and introduce the idea of "height planes". When you move a ship to a new destination, you can also specify a "height". Whilst it's true that there is no "up" in space, we found that we needed to pretend there was to make the game manageable, whilst still allowing for the strategic and combat options of a 3D environment.

We’ve started brand new chapter challenges with our beta testers to see who can best survive specific campaign missions each week! If you want to see how your command style stacks up with other Commanders, sign up for the beta here. Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy will be available via Steam, Slitherine and Matrix Games on June 4th 2015

#Star Hammer The Vanguard Prophecy #3d #strategy games

Ship Profile: ‘Hammerhead’-class Destroyer

Continuing a series of posts outlining the ships you will be able to command in Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy, today we present the formidable ‘Hammerhead’-class Destroyer

The Hammerhead class destroyer is a single-shaft assault ship that foregoes independent broadside weapons for fixed central turret installations, and a fore-mounted single-focus DEW beam weapon. Uneconomical energy core conversion and additional stability dampeners means the Hammerhead is light on shield capacity and hull strength, but when well supported, it has the ability to punch a hole through almost any fortification.

PROFILE

The Hammerhead class destroyer is an evolution of the single-shaft frigate hull archetype, with a focus on accuracy and firepower over fortifications. Hammerheads are deployed as problem solvers, snipers of high-priority targets, and are normally deployed with corvette and raider support as a strike group.

Four Biswell T4i heavy turret installations line the shaft’s topside, providing the broadside firepower of capital ships twice its size. The assault capacity of the ship is further enhanced by a single fore-mounted “Mangonel” DEW beam, powered by a Kola-Tendit modal transducer core that allows the beam to bypass all shields produced by any conventional field generator.

Only a single Hitashi MKII defends the ship, however an assault class propulsion system allows the destroyer to manoeuvre around the opponent and best use its extensive firepower on high priority objectives.

The Hammerhead is one of the newest hull designs active in the Coalition Navy, and as a result has seen a high uptake in recently promoted captains choosing their next bridge assignment. Many experienced captains distrust the lack of stability in a single-shaft hull, leaving only young officers with more confidence than experience to command these weapons of honed destruction.

Data:

Class: Hammerhead

Hull: Destroyer

Length: 225m

Shields: Hitashi MKII Kinetic Field Generator

Weapons: Fore-mounted BW “Mangonel” DEW, Broadside BW T4i turrets

Munitions: N/A

The Star Hammer beta is still in full swing, and we need you to help us test the game! You can sign up here via Slitherine’s form. Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy will be available via Steam, Slitherine and Matrix Games on June 4th 2015.

#Star Hammer The Vanguard Prophecy #ship profile #strategy games #science fiction

The Balance of Command

This week, Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy Lead Designer Anthony Sweet discusses how the game will watch your every success and failure via the War Scale, and what that can mean for our hero, Lieutenant Valeron Dyce.

No one likes a backseat driver, even if they are entirely correct when they tell you the road you’re driving down is one-way and your choice of direction is the wrong one. When this happens, all that’s left for you to do is hurry to the next exit and hope that no one judges you for your road safety transgressions.

In video games, however, we’re used to the idea of an all-knowing, all-seeing eye watching and judging our every action. A game should know of every success you’ve achieved, so that you can be rewarded; and of every failure, so that you can be punished or supported as required. If we were allowed to sneak by obstacles without the game knowing, that would end up a very strange game indeed.

Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy tells the story of Valeron Dyce during the Second Contact War. Despite being the daughter of the Vice-Admiral, Valeron is not a high-ranking officer in the Coalition Navy. Once the war starts in earnest, Valeron finds herself at the helm of her own flagship leading a naval strike group, but she does not have an overarching reach or understanding of every facet of the war. There are many things that go on behind the closed doors of the Coalition Naval Command that she is not privy to, and as a result, her experience of the war - and yours! - is that of a single soldier, not an all-knowing supreme commander.

All of this is to say that while playing through the campaign of Star Hammer, you will find yourself acting in part of the war, but not in control of the entire series of events. Other characters will have their own agendas, the enemy will attack locations where you are not, and the people you choose not to help immediately may die. The game will note all of these successes and failures, and will judge your ability to command on the War Scale.

The War Scale is a binary scale that represents how aggressively or defensively your play style is. Keep your shields up, use tactical missile strikes and successfully escort civilians to safety, and you will find you gain more Defensive War Scale; alternately, if you find you rely heavily on your turrets and sacrifice safety for more firepower, then you will find yourself sliding more towards the Aggressive side of the War Scale. Your position on the War Scale represents the type of presence Valeron exerts during the Second Contact War, and it can result in drastically different outcomes for both herself and the characters she comes into contact with throughout the campaign. If you play defensively, Valeron will likely gain favour with the Admiralty; alternately, an aggressive play style may put you in disfavour with certain superiors, but can open up opportunities outside of the naval chain of command.

As well as determining what chapters and missions are available to you, War Scale also has an effect on the development and logistics of your fleet. Defensive players will find they are able to recruit more ships to their fleet, and their fleet captains will develop at a faster rate. On the other hand, aggressive players will find Valeron’s personal flagship crew develop more quickly, and new reinforcements will be inspired to reach the action faster, thereby lowering the overall time it takes reinforcements to reach your fleet.

The Second Contact War will continue all around you. What matters is the decisions you make in battle, and how you will leave your mark on the War Scale.

We've started brand new chapter challenges with our beta testers to see who can best survive specific campaign missions each week! If you want to see how your command style stacks up with other Commanders, sign up for the beta here. Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy will be available via Steam, Slitherine and Matrix Games on June 4th 2015.

#Star Hammer The Vanguard Prophecy #strategy games

Work On That Core Stability

If you’ve seen some of the recent gameplay screenshots of Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy, you may have noticed the peculiar triangle in the bottom left corner. This week, Lead Designer Anthony Sweet is going to tell you why that little triangle can mean life and death in the Coalition Navy.

I’m not a physicist, nor do I pretend to be one on television, but I do know there are certain immutable absolutes in this universe that I cannot argue with; the sun rises in the east, chocolate is delicious, and the total energy of an isolated system remains constant.

Coalition naval ship design starts with that first law of thermodynamics. Combat-ready vehicles require multiple capabilities to meet any threat in a hostile environment. If these capabilities exist in individual closed systems, it would mean at any given moment the ship could not run at 100% efficiency; while you’re busy redlining your turrets and nothing else, your engines and shields would have all this excess potential energy not being spent to help ruin your opponent’s day.

Introducing your Coalition Command sanctioned Tendit MKII energy core reactor!

Every ship in your strike group is fitted with an energy core reactor that balances the energy needs of its captain. The core represents 100% of a ship’s energy consumption, and has outputs across three sectors: Shields, Engines and Weapons. By default, the core balances the output equally across all three sectors, but as a Naval Strike Group Commander, you can override this default and divert the energy to wherever you most need at any given time.

While planning out your strike group movements, you can click on the energy core triangle to bring up the energy redistribution panel. From here, you can drag that centre point to anywhere within the triangle, and it will alter the percentage of energy diverted to each sector accordingly. If this particular ship is pursuing a weakened enemy, you won’t need your shields so much, and can push more into Engines for speed and Weapons for firepower. Alternately, if you’re coming under heavy fire from multiple hostiles, divert more energy into Shields to decrease the amount of damage your defences take from enemy fire, and hopefully you’ll survive the onslaught until help arrives.

Diverting more energy into the different sectors can provide additional benefits beyond pure speed or firepower. If you route enough energy into Shields, the ship’s shield generator will start to replenish lost shield strength across the entire ship. Alternately, increasing the energy into your Engines not only increases your potential movement distance, but also the turning circle, greatly improving your maneuverability in combat.

To be a successful Commander in the Coalition Navy, you will not only need superior tactics and strategic planning, but also be able to manage your individual ships through the varied hostile situations you are thrown into. Careful manipulation of the energy core can be the pivotal difference between one ship’s survival and bitter defeat on the battlefield.

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