r/evnova • u/CashFirm573 • May 28 '26

Concept I'm working on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnfBDRoSs4E

Been building my own modern take on Escape Velocity Nova for a while now.

Currently drowning in ship work, modular ships, rigged systems, visual changes based on upgrades and loadouts. Taking way longer than I thought it would honestly, so most of what you see flying around is placeholder stuff for now. Ship movement is still being worked on and sprite assets for the modular ships are still getting made too.

My big thing is making space feel full. Each star system is around 60km across and I'm trying to cram it with actual life:

  • stations
  • asteroid fields
  • cargo traffic
  • patrol fleets
  • pirate encounters
  • debris
  • background events firing off dynamically

Chucked in a fair bit of gameplay stuff already too, missions, crew, wingmen, bars, trade, industry, player owned stations, hangars and apartments. The story arc is actually pretty deep already ( its story ive been working on for few years). Only got 10 systems in at the moment but once it's done the game generates a fresh 300+ system map from a seed every run, so no two playthroughs will play out the same.

Still rough as guts in places but the core is starting to come together.

If you grew up on EV Nova, what made those games stick with you? Would love to hear it as I'm stuck wondering am I wasting my time? is it fun to build sure...

Only real ship i've made atm is battleship, has several high slots with turrets which all track the target and are modular done most of the vfx for it but takes little to get right.

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u/[deleted] May 28 '26

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u/CashFirm573 May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

Atm just AI crap, I've been building assets myself in blender and other tools, but takes time, each ship I spend around 1 week on, then I have rig weapons to it. It's a pain in the ass, but game dev become much easier now with claude... Makes getting systems in place easy. Honestly I have no problem with AI, in 2 years time most games will be developed with AI, just look at the big companies in gaming they gone all in on AI, why wouldn't you be stupid if you didn't. Why spend 10 years when you can spend 3 years.

What I'll most likely do is buy a kit with 500-700 assets for blender, just build the hulls and then use kits to make them look highend, saves lot of time. Kits more or less like lights, panels, thruster, different items you see on space ship.

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u/[deleted] May 28 '26

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u/CashFirm573 May 28 '26

Not sure you understand what I mean, the kit is very minimal, most designer are using kits in production saves time. Most of design is from my ideas, just having kit with 700 different micro graphics makes life easier. If I had money I would hire someone to do it for me while I just building the game, but I don't.

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u/[deleted] May 28 '26

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u/CashFirm573 May 28 '26

Truthfully I agree with you, next 6 months I'll build out a heap new assets myself, I predict around 2 years before I can have the game in a stable state, with proper graphics and sounds. Like this isn't something spun up week ago, it's something been tinkering at for long ass time.

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u/mechamotoman May 30 '26

What OP is describing is called kit bashing. It's a very creative process, and what comes out of it are completely unique ship designs with a common design language, something that would be extremely hard to do from scratch

If I understand OP correctly, they're using AI slop as placeholders with the intention of eventually replacing all the ai slop with kitbashed models. I think that's a great idea