The Personnel Door

The next door I worked on was the personnel door. The panel that comes up has the most complicated UI of all the doors at the starport. Here, you create and train crewmembers.

The original game had images for the 5 races you could choose from. These images are very blocky due to the 160 x 200 resolution the original game ran in, so what I did was bring them into Photoshop, enlarged them, and used a Gaussian blur filter to soften the edges. Then I brought them into Illustrator where I used its nice “Image Trace” tool to produce outlines for each one of the races. After some fiddling with the settings for that tool, I was able to get very good results!

On this screen, I had to deviate from the original game’s controls quite a bit to modernize it, but this door should still remind you very much of the original game.

Now would be a good time to show you what I mean by making the game compatible with a wide range of aspect ratios. Below is a series of images showing the same screen in the remake, but at different aspect ratios.