Hey, I’m Iain, an artist at Bossa Studios. I have been really excited to get to work on Worlds Adrift as it offers such a large variety of things an artist can make, the world itself being the biggest of those things!

However, as a player, you’re not going to be able to get to see that world if you don’t have a ship, and especially if you don’t have a helm to pilot that ship. So first things first, we needed to make our helm.

Our previous helm was exactly what you’d expect it to be – a large wheel with a small lever to adjust the ship’s height. There was no real visual problem with that, but it didn’t offer the player any feedback as to how they were really controlling the ship. At the time, it didn’t really matter, because you could only accelerate and reverse, turn left and right, and lift up or down, which we felt was very primitive and rigid. It didn’t give players enough fine control over their ship, which was supposed to be a major focus of the game!

So Luke, our designer, with plenty of your comments on this blog as ammunition, suggested a different system: giving players the ability to yaw/turn, pitch up and down, and roll/bank, in addition to the forward/back throttle and the up/down lifting axis. With this many axes of movement, it could be quite overwhelming without a clear visual indicator on screen. So Luke designed the helm around a central control stick. Basically it functions like a joystick to control pitch and roll (the player controls this with the mouse), and it can twist to tell the ship to turn/yaw (the player controls this with A and D). Then you have the throttle to the right (W and S on the keyboard), and the vertical control on the left (Shift and Ctrl).

I’m told this control scheme is closest not to a car, train, boat, or plane, (or even a helicopter), but rather a submarine!

Sounds cool right? Now all I have to do is make the new helm! …and make sure it works properly… Oddly enough, I have never piloted a submarine. Nor have I ever piloted a plane. So understanding exactly how it works was going to be quite tricky, with plenty of trial and error.

I took what Luke’s giant control sphere demo (fig1) and tried to make something a little more manageable (fig2). I sent some screen shots (fig3) of a basic “whitebox” version (Corndog handles and all) over to Dan, our concept artist, for him to add some details and possible features. We liked the idea of having bull horn type handlebars to keep the feeling of having wrestle with the steering in bad weather or battles. However, we had to rein that in a little as the player also has to able to see where they are going over all that metal!

The throttle lever, with its little notches, I placed on the right hand side of the helm, and the fuel gauge (fig7) initially fit on the bottom left, but eventually moved to the bottom. Ultimately, we will want players to build their own instruments (speedometer, compass, etc.) and place them wherever they want.

Finally, we needed a visual indicator for the ship moving along its vertical axis. Originally I put a similar level to the accelerator on the left of the helm, but we felt that it was getting a bit lever heavy. Plus it looked absolutely crazy when you were piloting the thing! So we decided to use pedals for the actual controls and then a small meter above the fuel gauge to give you feedback (fig8).

That’s where we are with the helm so far. There are still a few tweaks that will need to be made to this basic helm, but on the whole I’m really happy with what we have made. Hopefully we can get some footage of it fully functional up for you guys soon!

Iain

3D Whizz-kid