Tetra here, writing about... whatever comes to mind? All related to development of Shiptest, of course. So what's there to talk about?
How about my favorite subject, sprites! (and more broadly, aesthetics, visual cohesion, artistic guidelines...) This devlog features a lot of commentary from Any%, co-headspriter.
SS13's visuals are something special, brought about by the unique conditions of Space Station 13 development. There's over a decade of assets made by contributors of all skill levels following different aesthetic preferences. The result?
It brings a tear to the eye.
Admittedly, I'm cherrypicking an egregious (well, readily available) example from a server that doesn't prioritize aesthetics, but it demonstrates exactly the kind of mystery soup that SS13 has evolved into aesthetically. There are sprites that date back from and before r4407 right alongside a (poorly) modified version of Tau Ceti's tileset! What's going on?
Lots of legacy sprites tend to be legacy for a reason. We should look at replacing them eventually, but knocking out primary visual offenders is our priority – Sprites that give people the wrong idea about what this server is. — Any%
What did she mean by that? Well-
Sprites like the retro laser gun, air alarm, APC, and other things that don't fit our aesthetic, but are so ubiquitous they comprise of their own aesthetic that runs counter to our current one.
That's not to say these sprites are bad in any objective manner. A lot of them are Bad, but others are serviceable, even great. In a different context, on a normal Space Station 13 server, following the Space Station 13 server Aesthetic, they fit in perfectly.
The problem comes when you try to diverge from that.
Currently we have the strange blessing of, honestly, not all that many glaring stylistic clashes- But you can definitely tell what has and hasn't been touched by skilled hands in the last actual decade.
Of course, the problem goes beyond just skill. If you told a dozen of Space Station 13's most talented spriters to resprite the entirety of the game, your end result would still look like chunky visual mystery soup without any sort of guiding principles for aesthetics and visuals. Servers with strong visual cohesion like Goonstation and CEV Eris have guides on how to make sprites in their style, such as Goonstation's Spriting Guidelines or Eris' pre-made palettes.
We could do that.
We could, and should, get our standards for spriting down somewhere accessible; I'd even entertain a standardized palette for Shiptest at some point. However, before any of that, I want to clearly define the aesthetic our server is actually going for. It's been in somewhat in flux for a long time. We've always had a vague idea of what we want in the back of our minds, but we've only recently taken the time to really discuss what we want Shiptest to look like.
I won't go into the topic of visual direction too deeply here (this dlogpost is mostly just me getting used to writing posts like these), but I've discussed the matter with Any%; we both agree that we want industrial environments that remind you that you are on the Rim.
There's something rugged about the idea of everyone happily going about their day ready to come face-to-face with hard vacuum, and our design should capture that.
That's something to apply to the setting as a whole, and deviations from it should be done with intention, to highlight some kind of difference. Factions and cultures will get their own design addenums or even separate style guides to keep them cohesive yet distinct.
Those style guides aren't in this dlogpost (sorry), but progress on them is being made, and they'll arrive alongside major resprites and lore refreshes. Until then, trying to aim for an industrial style works, for now. I do fully intend to write another post dedicated to the topic of our aesthetic in the future, once the aforementioned style guides are complete! Stay tuned, and thanks for reading.