So…I am a little confused. In Bill’s Stratosphere lounge streams he shows a space animation with ships and people in suits. Is this a video game he is working on? Or a movie or short series? And where did he get the art assets to make it all?
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11 replies on “Bill’s Space Story”
He is looking to make a teaching mini movie or two. Liberty in space. The models and assets are freely or cheaply available on several sites that supply game content including Art Station. Some assets are not so cheap.
I’m doing something similar with mere pixel art on deviant art. https://www.deviantart.com/wesbee
The story I’m telling there is a little more suburban and less revolutionary frontier. Australia outback was a little more organized that the American cowboy movies depict the US wild west. In reality the wild west was also much more lawful than depicted.
Most don’t know Billy the kid was not an outlaw. He was a hired federal security guard. The federal officer he was protecting and the mans family all died in the shoot out and fire. The kid got away but was caught later and killed. It was state government on federal government. The winners wrote the history in that case.
Still, I like Bills script ideas.
I know Bill was playing Star Citizen, I can’t remember if he also played Elite Dangerous, that is another cool space game
I’ve never heard Bill say anything about Elite Dangerous. I suspect it was largely because he was all about “the total package” of Sci-Fi with human scale adventures as well as spaceflight. And Elite was (until recently) entirely and solely about the spacecraft.
After Elite: Odyssey drops and a few of the inevitable bug passes take place, I think someone should drop Bill a line and point him in that direction.
Also – I’ve been hearing nothing but good things recently about No Man’s Sky. It started off REALLY rough but Hello Games atypically did the HONORABLE thing (rather than take the money and run) and buckled down to FIX THEIR GAME. And boy have they, by all accounts!
I don’t think No Man’s Sky is the art-style and experience that Bill is looking for though. It’s a beautiful looking game, but it’s much more fantastical and looks more like world realized by animation than simulation.
Elite dangerous was never meant to be first person with human avatars, then a fan made the ship models, internal lay outs and created the humanoid avatars. He became so popular the game company had to add it to the game.
In one of the films by Clint Eastwood, Bird, Charlie Parker comes into town for that gig he was offered late, and is told that they’ve found someone else, someone “half as good who shows up on time”.
How many gamers end up going for games that they know are not the best produced games but are reliably produced?
Is Bill maybe going down the wrong path with all the obviously love he is putting into the craft?
I like the idea Bill has.
I would like very much to see it played out, with the results come what may.
I do not myself like a lot of Science Fiction. It is too often produced by people who do not understand you have some of almost any flaw in a story EXCEPT a failure to be able to present characters genuinely worth caring about, even to the point of not wanting to see them die.
It is a mark of success in Soap Opera actors if when they leave the show the character has to go someplace far away from which they are not likely to return, or die on screen.
CGI will be replaced just as it replaced earlier Special Effects techniques, but having good characters news gets outdated and replaced.
It’s work on an idea for a film. He purchases the assets and then implements them within a 3D engine (Unreal I believe).
I don’t know if this is the primary source of the images and videos Bill likes to show us. But there is a game – a sci-fi spaceship simulation and potential MMORPG that is in pre-alpha development called Star Citizen. He plays the game and tests it and it has provided at least a repository of screenshots for him to use in developing other things.
Bill is of the opinion – and I tend to agree – that the gaming world is one of the last hold-outs of potential conservatism in our youth and that a fair bit of recruiting can be done there. At least if you tune the message correctly. But I think the window for that sort of thing may be closing as the SJWs are trying to infiltrate the game industry just as they have with movies, TV, comic books and sci-fi novels.
As for his choice of game, I personally think he’s wasting his time on something that is likely never going to be officially released and that he’d be much better off with something like Elite Dangerous. Which is a working game and is soon going to have a major update that will add many of the same things that provide player experience outside of the starships.
These two are, I believe, unrelated. He does have a story in mind, and has talked at length about the lore of it (most recently in the choice for slower than light travel).
Also as a fan and fellow player of Star Citizen, I will hold out hope. CIG is employing a lot of people who are actually producing assets and code for a company that has no intention of releasing. I may be wrong, and they may just poof one day, but I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of it already and it has provided more enjoyment than many games that I have payed more for.
Bill came from and invested heavily in Star Citizen.
He got tired of, like most everyone else, of the founder of Star Citizen demonstrating that you can spend 10 years on the pot and not produce even a mini-turd.
It is a beautiful game, Star Citizen is, but sooner or later even the most patient patron gets tired of waiting for the painting to be finished and finds a lesser artist who can actually finish the portrait.
If I understand correctly (only seen it a few times) it’s something he’s had in his head for a while, a Sci-Fi script turning into a movie as we speak.
As for the assets, I’ve not been on when he explains where he gets them, or if he’s modeling them himself. He is animating it all though, quite impressive. I was a Blender beta kid and I’m loving it! xD