ITCHIO Spaceship for Any Genre

Free to Use Spaceship

The Itchio  (Unless a better name comes to me)

I.IO = 110ft

Design Background: Ever since I was young, I was into space ships and fighter jets, so I would naturally be drawn to video games like Raptor, Gradius, R-Type, Starfox, Star Wars, Wing Commander, Gundam, F-Zero, Terminal Velocity, StarCraft, etc. and I've played around with some concept designs over the years as random art projects but never took them beyond that. I find myself in need of money as always, but don't have any spaceships to sell, so using free game assets on itch.io game me the idea of producing a free to use game asset with optional donations to support my work as I work on it further. The general planning and research behind concept building took one week, although that's also built upon my years of interest in military and space vehicle technology. All I have left to do is produce the game assets themselves.

Instead of jumping in to produce a fast Vic Viper or Arwing clone, I decided to build up a design from the inside out to add some substance to the spaceship. It would've been more classic for me to make something very small like an X-Wing, but I didn't like the idea of having such a small craft for exploring outer space. This was when the Su-34 came to mind, a fighter-bomber jet aircraft with a bathroom, plus semi trucks with their small sleeping room behind the seats. When dealing with a spaceship that has anti-gravity technology and ion engines, this suddenly removes the need for storing large fuel tanks, wing struts, and air intakes, and so I began looking to boats and RVs for reference. You still need life support systems and storage space in addition to your bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and workspace, so I wasn't sure how much I could given my self-imposed limit of 110ft x 80ft x 36ft. But I managed to make it happen. I knew if the space shuttles could have a massive empty bay, I could fit an RV inside. If I play around with the deign some more, I can make it a little more sleek, but it's not too bulky. It was originally supposed to be more in the style of Wing Commander, but ended up looking like a fat Jedi Starfighter / Blue Falcon hybrid.

The energy, engines, and weapons were supposed to be closer to current real world technology to have some tangible forms and figures to grasp onto. So it's a bit like a Su-34 mixed with a Jedi Starfighter if it had a Yamato Cannon. In outer space, you can save missile space by removing fins, but I wanted this ship to be like an Arwing or Vic Viper that constantly goes in and out of planetary influences. I took this one step further and made my spaceship submersible as well. The cannon ports and missiles have locking door, but can only be loaded from the outside. I almost added an inner autoloader but went against it to save space. Trying to find a reasonable power level to the plasma weapons is not easy to find numbers for, but the main plasma cannons on the sides are roughly the equivalent to a strong bolt of lightning in terms of megawatts, although more thermo-electric than electromagnetic. It's difficult to find parallels to compare this to, so it could be too weak, but you can always change it for your video game. I'm thinking the outer hull could be a ceramic composite metal alloy that doubles as a photovoltaic capture skin, which could provide a nice little boost of kW energy near stars. As time goes on, if there's a demand for it, I can always make new open source spaceship designs for people to use in their video games.

List Done:

Concept Art and Design converted into Pixel Diagrams 

To Do:

Basic Sprite Sheets for Top Down and Side Scroller

Cockpit Sprites for Space-Sims

Special Effects for above sprites

3D Models (I'll probably just hire someone to do this for me)

Sound Effects (I'll definitely hire someone for this)

Theme Song (Maybe, silly idea, but could turn into something)