Star Rangers
Star Rangers is a fast-paced space fighter game based on the original Atari game Star Raiders. Back when I launched my Atari computer magazine, ANALOG Computing, we were huge fans of Star Raiders. In fact, so were a lot of other people and that game single handily sold more Atari computers than anything else. So, when mobile devices finally had larger screens and fast processors, I brought some of the ol’ team back together to create Star Rangers. I handled the game design, marketing and testing. Tom Hudson, who was the creator of 3D Studio, heading up programming and Jon Bell rendered the graphics. Jon previously did work for James Cameron on the Abyss, Discovery and History Channels. They have been long time friends and both work for Autodesk now. Star Rangers won huge accolades from players and great reviews.
These images are from the tablet version, the smartphone version looked just as good, but the controls were crammed into the smaller space. The forward view above has the displays for fuel, number of enemy ships, timer, throttle, scanners, etc. They had to be far enough apart to prevent accidentally hitting the wrong control. Notice we arced the throttle on the left since that’s how your thumb would move when holding the tablet. We used large buttons for the functions on the top and bottom rows. At the time the game had far more sound FX than the average game…over 120 of them! Each class of every ship had its own explosion sound and there were 3 versions of each of those, so you didn’t hear the same sounds over and over. I made the heavier ships explode with more bass and the crystalline ships sounded similar to shattering glass. While flying the ship there were background sounds like on the bridge of the Enterprise in Star Trek.
I worked with composer S. Christian Collins to score some cuts for the game. I had him listen to some Japanese turn-based games I liked for the Main Theme and Victory tracks. For “Game Over: I wanted a dirge. The “CGI Cut” was the first take on a theme but it sounded to 80s-ish, so we used it for the video demo and CGI cuts. (Click on any of the links below to hear the soundtrack.)
Star Rangers “Main Theme“
Star Rangers “Victory!“
Star Rangers “Game Over Man!“
Star Rangers “CGI / Disco Cut“
Wire frame model Jon Bell worked on. I asked him to try and animate the ships under translucent skins and this was his first take. I liked the idea of mechanisms moving around inside the ship, like engine drives.
The following link is for the CGI-opening cut video. Everything looked pretty good except there were to many asteroids and the lighting needed some work. This and the wire frame model were rendered by Jon Bell with 3D Studio Max, which Tom Hudson, the lead programmer for the game, created.
“Star Rangers CGI / Opening Cut” (no audio)
