Team Size: 1
Role: Designer, Sprite Artist, Programmer
Starbound, created by Chucklefish Games, is one of my favourite games thanks to its expansive, procedurally generated universe, the level of exploration that it offers and the customization that’s available. The game has very solid modding support, and I decided to build my own mod for it.
The Elithian Races Mod is an expansion to the main game which adds several new playable races, along with a bunch of content themed after these new races. The mod adds new weapons, new armour, upgradeable ships, well over a hundred decorative objects, new crafting materials, a new progression system, procedurally generated villages, new vehicles and much more.
Most of the work on the mod is divided between writing JSON files and drawing sprite art, although more recent content also includes some LUA scripting. JSON files are used to configure almost everything in the game: weapon stats and abilities, armour, objects, crafting recipes and much more.
All sprites and animations in the mod were hand-drawn by me in Paint.NET. This includes animated objects, as well as sprite sheets for character animations and much more. An effort was made to keep the mod’s art as close to the vanilla art style as possible – I spent much time studying vanilla sprites to see how perspective, lighting and colour were used.
The mod received a positive response from the modding community and was praised for the hefty content in its first release. It currently sits on the front page of the game’s Steam Workshop, and has over 65,000 subscribers. To see the mod in more detail, or read a more detailed description of its content, visit the mod’s page on the Steam Workshop or the Starbound Mod Repository.
To look through the files of the mod yourself, visit the mod’s GitHub project here. There you can inspect all sprites, config files, LUA scripts and more.
My responsibilities:
- Writing JSON
- Configuring weapons, NPCs, object behaviours and much more
- Drawing sprite art
- Hundreds of static and animated sprites
- Writing LUA scripts
- Weapon, vehicle and status effect behaviours
Screenshots of work: