Book of the Week: The Art of Homeworld

11 Jul 2015

Homeworld is one of my favorite computer games. It is a 3D real time strategy game set in space that won game of the year when it was released. The Art of Homeworld accompanied the recent release of the remastered version of the game. I bought the book to use as a reference for my space pirate game. Limited Resources [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrG23qWYG4A&w;=560&h;=315] Since they didn’t have enough resources, they used animatics, which has become part of the signature style of Homeworld. An animatic is made up of hand drawn still images from the storyboard that are animated with sound and dialogue on top. The cut scenes made you feel alone on a journey in cold space. The beautiful backgrounds are also a consequence of having constrained resources. They didn’t have enough texture memory for a background, so the background is all geometry with vertices colored and positioned by hand. Making video games is about being creative and pushing as much as you can out of technology. Spaceships The most amazing part of the game is the sense of scale with the spaceships. You can zoom and track everything from individual fighters and the capital ships. During the game, you can position your fleet in 3D and take advantage of different formations. Sometimes I would just camera track a fighter during an epic space battle. Sometimes we only see the end result. This art book tells you why and how certain choices were made.