As we mentioned before, player-built ships are a big part of our plans for Solaro. You’ve probably noticed that the other builds feature a stock ship model that doesn’t look particularly configurable.

So we wanted a really flexible way to let players make ships. We rejected just giving out a set of prefabricated hulls, and letting players attach things on them. There’s still a creative process there, and a sense of ownership, but you are limited to what you’re given, and you can never create anything really unique or identifiably different from that hull piece.

So we’re taking more of a building block approach. We provide modular pieces and let the player add them wherever they want. Initially we thought about a grid based system, but this wasn’t quite flexible enough from an artistic point of view. It was very limiting to see pieces that had their connecting faces constrained to a grid.

So this is what we have:

Comments on the blog are open- we’d love to see what you’ve made. We’ve only got a few test pieces right now (and a few aren’t quite set up to rotate correctly), but we’ve found we can make some interesting stuff. Feel free to share in the forums as well. You can use Upshot for taking and sharing screenshots of your creations!