My name is Thomas Marrone and this is my art blog. I'm a UI Artist at Cryptic Studios working on Star Trek Online, though I'm more likely to post concept art and personal art projects here.
I also do a lot of stuff for David Weber's Honor Harrington novels, so if you're a fan of the Honorverse you should keep tabs on me as well!
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
More STO patches! Threw in a couple Klingon ones this time. :)
Class development patch I made for the Odyssey class, the newest class of Starfleet cruiser and the class of the U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701-F
A few Starfleet patches I did in my spare time for Star Trek Online. They’ll be trickling into the game here and there over the next few months. The ASDB one is already in the new ship store in ESD (log in to STO’s public test server, Tribble, to check it out before Season 4 launches.)
Currently in Star Trek Online, star systems only really have one planet. When you enter a system you go directly to one area, or instance, to do your thing. You might fly around in orbit and then beam down to the surface, but there’s only one planet you have to deal with.
Eventually the goal for STO is to have users create missions for other users to play. These missions might even be available from existing systems. This piece is a proposal on how to add complexity to star systems and leverage all that content in a way that’s easy to access by type and quality of mission.
Project Brief: Star Trek Online
I’m a pretty huge Star Trek nerd. If you know me, you know this. If you don’t know me, you might’ve been able to gather it anyway.
The moral of that story is that I play Star Trek Online, a relatively new game that allows thousands of players to captain their own starships in the same galaxy.
The game is fun and certainly has great things going for it, but it was built very quickly and has a lot of room to grow before it really delivers on the promise of an expansive Star Trek Universe.
I’ve been stealing time away from other projects to design some features that I think Star Trek Online could use to spice up the game play and make the experience more “Trek-like”. Recently, the developer of the game even bought some of these designs from me so they could be implemented in the game.
You can read about it in this STO Forum thread, but the gist of it is that I wanted the developers to consider more entertaining interactions with the environment beyond simply clicking on things or shooting things. Ultimately, I thought it’d be cool if the could add short “minigames” that would simulate some technical operation that we often see characters do in Star Trek, like “re-aligning the plasma conduits” or “scan for life forms.”
Here’s one of my designs:
And here’s how it ended up in the game:
Obviously, it’s a real kick to see this stuff wind up in the game and I intend to keep coming up with new ideas. Even if it’s not likely that more will be used, it’s a good exercise to match an interface as closely as possible while designing something that you would expect people to use, not just look at.
That, and it’s freaking Star Trek.
