For my previous games I’ve made cover art myself, mostly by manipulating a stock image and putting text on top of it. But Beyond the Chiron Gate deserves something better, so I commissioned artist Tom Morley to create a cover image for the game. And here it is!
This is the image that will represent the game in itch.io listings. Tom’s given me versions in a few other sizes as well, with and without the title, which I can use for social media banners and so forth. The artwork won’t appear in the game itself, although I’m changing the title screen to use Tom’s new style for the title.
I think Tom has perfectly captured the mood I’m going for. The spaceship looks like a real piece of near-future space technology, and it’s appearing in a setting that looks realistic but is clearly an alien star system, with its binary stars. It’s calm, not too busy. The colour scheme matches that of the game: black, white, and glowing blue, with a splash of dangerous red in the corner. My original idea was for the Gate itself to appear in the image, but I like Tom’s decision to put it just off-screen, so you can see its glow but not the wormhole itself. Putting the space fantasy element just off-screen means we’re focusing on the realistic elements in the game. (The Gate’s gravitational field has gathered a cloud of space dust around it, which is how you can see the glow!)
Here it is without the title so you can get a better view of the spaceship:
It turns out that when you hire someone to draw your spaceship, you’ve got to finally decide what your spaceship looks like, so this artwork also represents the final design of the ship. It’s spindly and fragile-looking, with rotating habitat rings, miscellaneous solar panels and sensor equipment, and a big engine. The protrusions on the sides of the engine are landing legs, which unfold to let the whole ship land upright on its tail. The solar panels would fold up for landing (and for wormhole travel), and the interior spaces would be configurable for different gravity directions, either out-is-down for interplanetary cruising when the rings are rotating, or aft-is-down for when the ship is landed or under heavy acceleration.
(Throughout development I’ve gone back and forth over whether the ship lands as a whole or has a separate landing module. While commissioning this artwork, I finally decided that the whole ship lands, so I’ve gone through and removed any references to the landing module from the text of old events.)
Work on the game itself continues steadily. I’ve addressed most of the issues raised by the playtest, but I still want to add a lot more content for the full version of the game. Expect a dev diary in a couple of weeks.
The new paid-for-by-patrons game Cyborg Arena (with its less good, self-made cover art) will come out on 1st October, and I’m hoping to have the full version of Beyond the Chiron Gate ready for release in December.