Cosmic Pirate concept art - Smaller space trucks

Archive entry by Ste Pickford on Thu, 09 Jul 2009
Subject: Cosmic Pirate

This is another drawing for Cosmic Pirate, the Amiga / Atari ST game we did around 1987 / 1988.

I don't think this was actually proper concept art, but something drawn after the game graphics were complete - fake concept art that you used to get a lot in games - or perhaps it was drawn for the manual.

In the game you had to capture enormous space trucks, which were a top down scrolling background. For some reason the theme we used was fish (or undersea life), and these five ships are some of the smaller designs. The first three would have just about fit on a single screen. The next two would have been several screens in size, and you'd have to fly around them destroying their defences before you could capture them. We were trying to get across to the player a real sense of scale. The first few were deliberately small so you might be fooling into thinking they were just big sprites (even though they were actually scrolling backgrounds), so that when you did eventually work your way up to capturing a space truck bigger than the whole screen it would hopefully feel more impressive than if we'd started with giant ones.

There were 26 in total (class A to class Z), and I think the last one was based on a blue whale, and probably took about 3 minutes to fly across from one end to the other!

Tags: drawing, promo art, spaceship, fish, level design, map

Predecessor post: Cosmic Pirate concept art - Main ship

View the softography page for Cosmic Pirate »

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The fish-shaped space trucks were one of the lingering mysteries of my childhood!

Comment by Guest Craig Timpany, added Sat, 29 May 2010 05:43:41 GMT

Really? That's brilliant. I wish I still had drawings of the other 21 trucks.

Comment by Ste Pickford, added Sat, 29 May 2010 08:14:13 GMT