Well, the Electronic Arts logo used on the second page of the intro screen in the original game looks like this:
Yeah.
Well, we can do better. EA has changed their logo a few times over the years, and I wanted to use the one that they were using in 1986. Fortunately, Wikipedia came to the rescue. Someone has created an SVG artwork of the logo they used from 1982 through 2000. I simply opened it up in Illustrator, cleaned it up a bit, and saved it out as PNG.
Much better.
I spent a bit of time looking around the Internet for something I could use to easily create a skybox with pretty stars, and perhaps nebulae as well. When I did this in the distant past, I would use 3DS Max and create a bunch of noise maps and layer them and fiddle with the settings until I got something halfway decent. I’m too old for that now. So, I looked around and, lo and behold, I discovered the Spacescape tool which was created by Alex Peterson. I used it to quickly create something that looks far better than anything I could have done in 3DS Max.
It looks great in Unity. Each side is 2K in resolution, which looks pretty decent on my 21:9 ultra-wide monitor that has a native resolution of 3440 x 1440.
I’m imagining that I will do different versions of this skybox, one for each race’s territory. Like the Spemin would probably have a skybox with green-yellow nebulae. Something like that. I do not know yet of Unity can blend between skyboxes, either automatically or by me blending texture maps manually. I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
I’m going to take a moment to talk about the font decisions I have made for this game. I ended up selecting two fonts that will be used throughout the game. The winners are:
I was originally going to go with just Space Age because it looks great, but then I realized it’s practically unreadable when used on anything other than button labels and titles and the like. So, I added Audiowide, which will be used pretty much everywhere that requires the player to actually read stuff without his eyeballs bursting into flames.
And speaking of fonts, I have also decided to use the TextMesh Pro plugin for Unity, which is currently in the process of becoming the native text rendering engine for Unity. TextMesh Pro uses the signed distance field technique to render fonts, which looks pretty freaking amazing.
