TL;DRRothery wanted to be a comic artist, but as the comic industry shrank and games boomed in the mid-1990s his illustration skills carried him into games, eventually to what he calls a dream job on Star Citizen.
Well, originally I was wanting to be a comic artist, so my background is in illustration and graphic design. So that was my degree, graphic design specializing in illustration. And what happened was I originally wanted to be a comic artist and I grew up reading 2000 AD, Judge Dredd, Rogue Trooper, all that stuff. And I graduated in 1996. And around that period, the comic industry was really starting to scale itself back because Sony launched PlayStation and games were cool again. And you had things like Wipeout and stuff. And games just got really cool. And next gen, everything moves to 3D. Your Super Nintendo is starting to look a bit dusty. And the game industry was a very natural place for me to roll into because all of the skills that I'd learned wanting to draw for 2000 AD were super applicable to the games industry, all the design skills. All that stuff fit really well with the games industry. I fell into it, basically, and never left it, really. I've been in the games industry since 1996, so I've worked on all kinds of things. I've been around the block a little bit. Right now, where I'm in my career, Star Citizen, when I look back, it inevitably pointed me in that direction because it's all my favorite things combining. So I feel very fortunate. I think I've got very lucky along the way, but this is a dream job basically.
I think it was. I was sat at home with a pregnant wife, about to make a child, going, oh my God, I've got to get my life together. I'd been working in the advertising industry for a few years. After Moon, I spent three years in an ad agency, and then I left that to get back to where my heart was, which was science fiction. And I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do. And honestly, Star Citizen just kind of appeared like destiny manifest. It was awesome.
TL;DRRothery and Jones recall the Gladius as the studio's first ship together, built before the studio's processes were set, with early concept images they now find rough compared with the beautiful finished build.
I'm just going to do a share screen then and I'll show you a few bits and pieces. So this was the first ship that I did working together with Mr. Jones. So what you're seeing on your screen now is one of the earliest attempts at what a Gladius might be. So obviously it looks a bit hacky looking at it now. I've got to say as well, this is what, six, seven years old, Paul?
Pre-knowledge, we were just discussing, weren't we? I thought I knew spaceships because I'd built some previously, but I really knew nothing about spaceship design at all. So for me, it was a real trial by fire. But Chris was just like, you need a ship for Squadron. Just get one built, like a medium fighter, a light fighter, the Gladius.
So you see it quite quickly starts to get refined as we're working together. And you can see even right back at the beginning, the Gladius had a certain manifest destiny right from the beginning. But you can see the shape coming together quite quickly. I think one of the things I always loved about working with you, Paul, particularly, is that whenever we get our teeth into something, we get a lot of progress quite quickly, it feels like. We move when we work. And I always really appreciate that.
I mean, I think we have a good understanding now, basically. So it's like a support system. Obviously Gav does most of the heavy lifting and I sort of come in and just zhuzh it along in places.
It's a little more than that. This whole thing was pre-promo piece too. So when we were doing this, we weren't doing promo pieces. It was just to get a look at the ship. So my deliverable, I mean, it still is, but back then, my deliverable was these two images, this one and this one, to get a look at the ship. These look so bad and old now. I've got to apologize. I feel like I've grown a lot over the last six years.
No. I delivered this and also the 3D concept mesh for the build team, because all this comes from a 3D model. But this is back before we did promo pieces, right? So this is just images to see.
No, I mean, I took this piece because there was a point that we did need to do some promo for it. But I think I did two images. It was almost like an old war piece, like a collectible you'd find on a desk and it'd be worn. It's got a coffee stain on it and stuff like that. I think that was probably the start of the promo.
That was the studio's first ship. Once it got built, once it got put into production, that had a lot of love. There was at least six to nine months on that ship.
I think this is one of the things about it that bugs me too. The end result in the game came out so beautifully that I don't feel like my concept art shows that off. So I'd love to be able to go, look, I've got all my Gladius work, it's so awesome. And I've just got a couple of really cool scrappy little images to show. And the end ship's beautiful. And when the build was finished, it was gorgeous.
I'm just going to keep showing images as I'm talking. Again, same kind of thing I just mentioned with the Gladius. These are almost the same images for a different ship. They look so old and rough now when I look at them. There's a lot of techniques that I use now in my work that I developed through working with Paul and working on Star Citizen. So if I was going to do these images again now, they'd look completely different, obviously, and 100 times better. But it was the same deliverable at the time. It was two images of the ship and a 3D mesh.
It was at first because I was picking it all up as I went along. I mean, to be fair, there's been a lot of that on Star Citizen. It's such an ambitious project. By far the most ambitious thing I've ever worked on. And it's constantly growing and developing and evolving and just getting better and just blooming like a big tree. So there's always been a lot of additional information to take on and get through. One of the things about this stuff that I enjoy so much, like I got to do a Crusader ship towards the end of last year, and it was just... I've seen the brand and I've been busting to do a Crusader ship. So when I got the chance, those kind of things just brighten your day up.
TL;DRThey say they never drag an old ship forward, but they do experiment with many variants at the start of each ship, which Chris expects, and he then picks pieces from different versions.
I mean, we do occasionally. I think really whenever we start a ship, we've never gone back into previous versions of things and just gone, right, that one, and just dragged it forward. That's never happened. But we do experiment quite a bit, don't we, Paul, at the beginning of a ship? Especially now that we've got our groove on, we'll do quite a lot of versions of things.
Yeah, definitely. And it's part of the process now. That's the expectation from Chris, is that he wants to see those variants, and my job and Gav's job is to basically provide variety. And then some bits he might really dislike, some bits he might really like, and he'll sort of pick a bit of A, bit of C, bit of D. And then we move forward. But when it's the new function stuff, I don't know, I find that the scariest time because I'm just like, I don't know what Chris is expecting.
TL;DRRothery and Jones recall the Prowler as a complex, intense ship with a new alien art style that several concept artists worked on, with Rothery doing the mesh and one image before the work moved in-house.
This one really sits with me because my girlfriend's Australian and I was about to go on one of those massive, cool, big holidays. I've only ever had one of in my life, this one. So I was about to go to Australia. So I remember when I delivered this, I basically dropped this ship and jumped in a taxi and was off to Heathrow. So I've always got really visceral memories of finishing this ship. Plus, when we did this ship, actually, let me just do a screen share. When we finished this ship, I recall, I'm not quite sure what was happening, but I remember I took a break after this. We had a little break from each other, Paul, do you remember?
It was a pretty intense ship, this one, though, because I threw quite a few concept people on this, not so much a shotgun approach, but just working with different strengths because it was just so new and so alien. So there was just a lot of stuff to figure out, wasn't there? And it was complex as well. All the things that had to shift out of the way and move, and just brand new art style, brand new interior. But this is without the cockpit as well, right?
This is the only image of the Prowler that I did. I remember I put the mesh together, got all the mesh work done, fired that over, and I did one of the interior that wasn't quite finished, I think. I remember I passed it over, do you remember?
Oh yeah, that's right. So we brought it in-house and continued with the promo in-house. So basically everyone had a bite of the cherry right at the end.
There's a little bit, I guess, from the cockpit. Do you remember, Paulie? We went backwards and forwards over these angles and lines on the ship, didn't we? Things like the engine intakes, really complicated ships.
But I guess it's not so much of the Gladius in there. I guess it was more Sabre. It was sort of heading in that territory. But then it's a stealth bomber. So that was heavily influencing it.
It was one of those things where I remember when we were designing the vehicle in its entirety, Paul, right? We started with a chassis, didn't we? We were trying to take the proper automotive approach, the design engineering approach. And we spent quite a bit of time on the chassis, and the wheels, we just had blocked out cylinders for wheels for quite a long time. And I always just wanted to do some signature stuff that just stood out a bit and looked cool.
No. At this point, I think me and Paul had been around the block enough to just get into things. One of the things that is cool about doing the bigger ships is they tend to have quite different interiors. There's a lot more going on in the interiors. And one of the things that I always appreciated about being able to create these ships for Star Citizen is the level of detail we get to go into. So with something like the Hammerhead, the interior was like a whole runaround. It's almost like a level of a traditional first-person shooter, interlocking corridors and stuff. So I like a big ship, and I really like to get into the guts of the interior.
TL;DRJones says the central hole came from the rule of cool, with the silhouette resembling two joined claw hammers, and that Chris later wanted the guns to converge on one point, which changed the shape.
I think that was me. That was the rule of cool. Do you know what it is? It's really funny, actually. It's basically a claw hammer. You look at that in silhouette, and it's basically just two claw hammers joined together. So it creates a double hammerhead, and then you've got two shafts. It was as simple as that. And I guess, like we were talking about before, there's always that drive to create something interesting. And I don't like doing stuff that's already been done.
I remember the early thing with this, Paul, I thought I'd nailed it straight away. I was like, they're basically after the Blockade Runner from Star Wars. So I did this. Hang on, I'm not even sharing my screen, sorry. Okay, so this is the first version I did, which was like the Star Citizen Corellian Blockade Runner, basically. You've seen this, yeah? And so straight away off the bat, I was like, I've got this. This is going to be the quickest one ever. I know exactly what you're after, and I put this together. And then I remember we chatted about it, Paul, didn't we? And Paul just went, far too obvious. I'm not even sure I showed Chris. Well, we quite quickly got to the, I'll just show you the next version we got to quite quickly. So this was somewhat of a compromising version. You can see the DNA warping from one to another over these images.
TL;DRRothery and Jones recall the Kraken taking months, ending up based on Jones's rough sketch of a boat on its side with landing pads like paddles, shaped further by feedback from Chris.
This was a big one, wasn't it, Paul? What was this, four and a half months or five months or something we spent on this thing? It's a long time. It was hefty.
I used real world reference, which then I half drew over, but basically it was a ship. It was a boat that I put on its side, and it was just a top view, wasn't it? So I drew in the shadows as if there was a really strong sunlight. So you could see the verticality of it, and then just put some landing pads on the whole thing.
So I was working from a more abstract point of view of looking at it like a Kraken, essentially. So having eight paddles of some sort, like there was some vague representation of a Kraken creature. And that's what the landing pads were. And so Gav was trying all these ideas and I just had this one little image just sat waiting on the board. And so he went through his process and I was like, hmm, let's just try this one. Let's just give it a go.
Sometimes these things get quite conversational, don't they? And we'll have a steer later on. And we've already started and we're already exploring some things. And then it's like, oh, actually, can we bring it towards this? And all of a sudden, it'll just click.
I guess in the early days, it used to scare the hell out of me because I'd just be like, I don't know what Chris is going to say. But now it's just like, we're just going to give him cool stuff and then just see what he says. There's always that difficulty where you're not hitting it and it's just like, no, no, no. And then you've really got to put on your dancing shoes and do your pivot and just do the 180 and figure it out.
I think they change when I look at them. I don't have a constant favourite. I mean, one of the ships that we've got that we can't talk about just came out so nicely. Nobody knows what this is, but it's something you haven't seen yet. Let's just say that.