Hey guys, This is Supernorn!

I thought I’d talk a little bit about what I’ve been working on for BYOND SS13 in my spare time.

I first joined SS13 development around 2009, when the game was still running with the original coder art. I had been playing on Goonstation for some years, but the game had now entered a renaissance period with the availability of the source code. People were able to fix and improve upon the game after what had been years of stagnation, under the assumption that the code was lost.

Some of you long-time players will remember the original art well, but here’s a screenshot from way back then:

I had a lot more free time back then, and decided to spend some of it respriting the hundreds of assets that made up the game, giving it a total graphical overhaul. The most challenging part involved creating many new sprites to represent the player moving in all four directions.

In 2010, Goonstation released the art assets for everyone to use, along with their codebase. For the most part, the game looks like this today:

So this leaves me to talk about what i’m working on. I’ve obviously got much better at spriting in the years since I first polished up the game – And it’s always bugged me that I never put much time into giving the game some level of artistic consistency.

I’ve decided to spend some time overhauling the tiles and objects, ensuring that the game will now have a correct perspective. The fact that the game can now optionally be scaled up to double its native resolution means I’ll also be experimenting with keeping objects relative to their size. You’ll hopefully no longer encounter pens that are the size of computer terminals, etc. I’ll also be adding directional support for a large number of the assets.

This is still a ways off, as i’m mostly busy working on Starbound and another untitled Pirate Project, but Space Station 13 will always be something I care about and it excites me that we can continue to improve on it year after year.

Here’s a small sample of what the new art assets look like: