Dress

Most crew, most of the time, should be wearing these coveralls while on duty. Not incredibly dirty coveralls, but not immaculate either.

Officers and crew in more office-y jobs might wear uniforms, but nothing particularly showy or science fiction-y; just garments resembling regular period office attire. I have dress uniforms and coveralls I love, but I still need to come up with regular duty uniforms I don’t hate.

As for the researchers, I’ll be putting them in office wear too, or the sort of thing you’d wear to go hiking, or whatever comfortable clothing is appropriate to the climate of the location being visited. Or, you know, environmental suits if the location demands them. Not sure about lab coats for people in the wet lab. The drapery could cause problems.

(Confusingly, there are some wetsuits in the dry lab, but I’ll get to that later.)

Survey Room

So let’s start at the top of the Wisteria, where the bridge is. The bridge is… tiny.

No giant viewscreen, no special captain’s chair… just some navigation, communications and helm consoles.

It needs some chairs. I have a selection of chairs you might see in restaurants or a bar but I’m not sure if I have anything more work-like I can drop in here. I’ll have to check.

The room the bridge is in is the survey room, which has much more going on. The entirety of deck one is basically this room.

This is where the mapmaking happens. The plot doesn’t actually have the ship make it to a surveyable moon anymore, but if it did, I’d want to show that the mapmaking is a little active and physical: crew on the balcony would manually aim sensors pointing out of the windows, you’d watch map fragments get created near the sensor equipment, and the sensor people would literally pick up fragments and toss them, like frisbees, down below. The people on the bottom would catch the fragments, then move around and through the topographical map, putting pieces in place and smoothing them out with their hands as the map scrolls by.

The chances of my being able to animate all this are basically zero anyway.

But at the same time, there’s more than likely going to be an important, information-heavy scene in the survey room where everybody figures out what’s going on around them. And that scene needs to be as engaging as possible on a visual, and since this is a game, interactive, level. (For anyone out there familiar with the old Star Trek movies, think of the stellar cartography scene from Generations: a rather infodumpy bit made much more memorable by not putting it in a boring room with some maps in it, which as I understand it was the original plan.)

Maybe there’s a simpler way I can show what’s going on here and still have this feel like a high tech hub of activity.

• Crew operating scanners can use stock using-a-keyboard animation loops I already have. And never move from their consoles.
• Meanwhile. floating sensors near the top of the space (or perhaps right outside the glass) can spin and take readings (complete with camera flashes and shutter click noises).
• You could see one or more thin beams of light going from the sensors to the map on the floor, wiggling back and forth and creating new map data where the beams touch the map. Sort of 3d printerish.
• Crew on the floor could walk around randomly while carrying tablets, pausing every now and then to look at a random point of the map in front of them, then look down at the tablet and do a stock using-a-tablet animation, which again, I already have.
• Some crew on the floor could also be at the ring of consoles on the floor and do some stock keyboarding.

So… this wouldn’t require any new character animations; I just need models for the floating sensors themselves (and maybe some on the floor, too) and some simple scripts to control it all.

Also: this deck could probably use a bathroom.

Daily routine

Getting people to actually walk from room to room on the ship through a daily routine is just not gonna happen. They’ll have to stay in contained spaces, and teleport when the plot demands it. Besides, it would certainly annoy the player to have to have important characters moving around when you want to talk to them.

But I’d love it if it felt like these people did move around when you weren’t looking.

Very low priority, but here are some random ideas:

• Have all the characters you need to interact with to advance the story stay in fixed positions, but have ancillary characters teleport when you’re not looking, so for example, every time you walk into the gym or lounge there’s a different set of characters there.
• Show posted schedules.
• Have background conversations about planned activities after people’s shifts.
• A bulletin board outside of the mess with random postings (missing things, help wanted, movies in the mess hall, yoga schedule in the gym).

* * *

Next up: decks 2 and 3, where the quarters, mess, gym, lounge and aeroponics bay are. Oh, and a laundry room.