UTOPIA : The Creation of a Nation, The New Worlds, K240
Foreword
Once upon a time there were a game for the Amiga called Utopia. Back then, they were kind of still experimenting with the RTS genre, which I think was a good thing. Utopia was interesting because it was not all about building tanks to send to the enemy base, you also had a colony to care about. I wish there were some more stuff to do in RTS games different ways to play them, such as caring for your base, find diplomatic solutions to conflicts, go for scientific progress, experiment with various goverment styles, or my favourite: Turtling! Turtling like there's no tomorrow! I can't really think of a lot of open ended RTS games. Alpha Centauri perhaps.
There were actually two Utopia games, Utopia, the creation of a nation (Along with an expansion called The new worlds) and Utopia 2, K240, which was a bit different from the first game. I've put up some more more info and screenshots over at GreatGamesExperiment.
If something has gotten better in modern computer games (much thanks to hardware developments), it's the user interfaces. To be frank, Utopia was very cumbersome to play, bringing up menus wasn't... 'snappy', and there were loading times involved for some rather mundane tasks. The tanks and turrets were controlled via unorthodox methods, requiring much micromanagement.
On the plus side: Cute graphics, sandbox gameplay, a nice atmosphere and lots of alien opponents (rather than just the usual three archetypes). Also, there are no real rivals in this area of gameplay space, which incidently makes this the best game in the genre!
Redesigns
The bulbous War ship, Fusion Cruiser, Combat Eagle fighter and some tanks are somewhat close to the ones in the game, but most of my designs are elaborations. I tried to cover civilian, construction, fire dept. and security vehicles aswell.
Click to enlarge >
Misc: Pencil scribbles done while playing. | GUI mockup.
The player doesn't actually play earthlings, but a coalition of several alien species, earthlings included. It's a bit unclear, but the enemy aliens seem to be allied aswell. The alien names are a bit difficult to memorize, I think they made them about the same length because of how they were inserted into the static parts of the story texts. I'm trying to h4xx0r and cr4xx0r some info from the .adf files. So far only text though, the graphic is probably RLE encoded, but I'm working on locating it. I'm logging my progress on that little project here: Utopia Aliens.
The game art and text are sometimes contradictory, so my redesigns are 1/3 ingame gfx, 1/3 text description and 1/3 uh, redesigns. Some aliens are from the New Worlds expansion disk.
Eldorians
Some tall insect thing. Cannibals. One of the 'noob' species. They will eat your penis. No, I'm just kidding, they won't eat your penis, they're just characters from a game.
Soomanii
(So many bugs?) I'd like to think that these ones can shoot lasers out of their eyes, cuz it sort of looks like they can. I made 2 variants since I enjoy design relations like that. Nothing irks me more than when there's no homogeneity seen in related designs.
Kal-Kriken
I took the liberty of making these arachnids into quadpedal thingamajibs. They are intelligent, although hampered by the fact that their hatchings eat their parents, thus preventing effective cultural inheritence. As they discovered other ways to nurture their children, and to defend themselves from them, their transcendence into a technological species could begin. They use wind power and build gigantic suspended (in spiderweb) structures. I need to figure out some good vehicle concepts based on that.
Catalytes
Described as smooth, whiteskinned, featureless, big eyes, tall, worships triangles. Then the art contradicts that with a pic of a robot. I tried to make some streamlined thing with a DrDoom mask and Tron markings (triangles). Rather inconclusive concepts so far.
Pascalenes
Fairies. They inhabit a world with mystical canals and strange monoliths, which possibly are silicate lifeforms. Maybe they are playing TRON, moving incredibly slow across the grassland landscape, giving rise to the canals...
As for the fairies, the seem to be strangely scalable, from bat size up to full scale human. I liked how they have these balloon warships, so I played a bit on Montgolfier/Blanch/Lunardi era of balloon design, then migrated that design think into the ground units.
Tilikanthua
Scary amoebas. They grow in size as they absorb their prey. Deadly tentacles can form shoot out long distances.
Vanacancian
These guys are sinister, robed, mutated undead-ish lads who apparently have at their disposal a large combat mech, which I have never seen as I haven't survived that long. Yet.
Lucratians
These reptilian-labradors have no feelings and are generally unsympathetic. High tech level. They looked like a purple laborador dog in the game, so I tried to make something more menacing and 'superior' looking out of it.
Foralbos
10 meter long caterpillars, not quite as menacing as the Ur-Quan though. Since they're so large, the head might need to be scaled down to suggest this. Colored concept is too whimsical to be final.
Chevanno
Knights, fantasy, their skin is their armour. 4 arms. I made a variant with japanese-style-long-tank-tracks-for-arms arms. They wield huge swords.
Sal-Kadeems
Carefree cheerful kamikaze dwarfs.
Parrilatians
Victorian tech steampunk furries. I tried to make something less... plain-catface-on-human-body of it. Even though they just attacked me with steam engines they managed to wreck much of my colony. So much for easy turtling.
Rako Gorda
Insect guys. There are different variants controlled by some larger ones. The smaller ones are not very intelligent but I still gave them a rifle. I toyed with the idea of a rolly polly cuz there's something mentioned about thick back armour. There's a large scorpion variant which seems to be controlling the smaller ones over great distances, so I added an antenna thing on the small soldier.
They build mud shelters in a desert terrain.
Key Guardians
Planet builders, degenerated into something else.
- Niklas Jansson 2006-2007 - This page is a subpage of PSG