Star*Soldier Gloss: Cover

... and here's our new daily feature which will carry us through the next two months! We'll be offering commentary from the writers and designer of the Wing Commander Arena Star*Soldier manual for each page. Have a question you'd like answered about this or a future page? Post it to the forums and we will pass it along! Just think, this is a fairly short entry -- this is just the notes about what's going on on the cover...

INTRODUCTION: Hello, and thank you for reading this text commentary! Star*Soldier was a gift for the Wing Commander online community and it was honestly just a joy to put together. This is, without a doubt, the single project that I am most proud of working on. The real credit should go to Producer Sean Penney for seeing the book through to release (and into print, which was no one's plan) and to the guys at Gaia who designed a very fun game (and provided the noticably superior pieces of art in the manual.) We wanted to archive some perspectives on the 'making of' the manual and also provide a catalog of the various references and in-jokes. If that's the sort of thing you prefer to find for yourself then... you are a very cool person and I would like to buy you an ice cream sundae... and you shouldn't read on.

CONCEPT: I spent several sleepless nights trying to come up with how to do a new take on the classic Wing Commander manual concept - Claw Marks was the shipboard magazine, Voices of War was the scrapbook, Victory Streak was a strange ostensibly-computer... I wanted something in exactly that vein, but different. The first concept was that it would be a 'shelf' of books that you could select from: a FODORS-style travel guide for the planet, a JOAN'S guidebook for ships, a newspaper and so forth. We even did a mockup of this concept... but ultimately ended up just ripping off Strike Commander and doing a magazine for mercenaries instead.

NAME: The name was basically a placeholder, too - I expected to come up with something else but never did ("So, Poochie okay with everybody?") It grows on you! I later found out that there was an original Nintendo game called Star Soldier - I hope that isn't a lawsuit in the making. For my money, the correct way to write the name is with an asterix: "Star*Soldier." Special kudos to Electronic Arts for not insisting that the manual had to say 'Wing Commander Arena' on the cover. Even Claw Marks said 'Wing Commander Special Edition' on it! (And I distinctly remember someone at Origin taking issue with Crusader's promotional newsletter for suggesting that Origin was releasing a mech game called TopLine...) It would have been a reasonable request here, since it's technically a piece of advertising material rather than something you see after you open the game's box...

IMAGES: The background image for the cover is cropped from one of the earliest released screenshots of the two battlecruisers fighting. I had hoped to replace it with a special rendering or some 2D artwork or something, but it seemed to fit the feel I had for the game by the end of the project. The inset image is more interesting. It was originally a perspective 3D rendering of the Mass Driver Cannon from Wing Commander: Privateer (salvaged from Origin's 3DS file archive.) Somewhat late in development, Gaia Industries provided us with a big fat ZIP folder of concept art and I made it my mission to include all of it somewhere. Out went the mass driver and in went... this thing.

REFERENCES-

• "Antares issue" - the Antares Quadrant, formerly the Antares Sector, was the location of Secret Missions 2: Crusade. We didn't choose the location. Arena's Producer insisted on picking a known time and place for the game very early in development. Antares was chosen because it was on the frontier between the Confederation and the Kilrathi, because it had several familiar star systems and because it was home to the oft-ignored Firekkan species
• "Spacedock" - In retrospect, I'm not sure that this word exists outside the context of Star Trek. That should tell you my background!
• "January 2701" - the year was established by the Wing Commander Arena team (the requirement was that it be long enough after the last released game for the Nephilim War to be over - and yes, Privateer 2 was discussed) but the month was my choice. I went with January because I liked the idea that this was the very start of a new century (it also gave me something to reference once or twice in the text.)
• "10c/1600k" - As many Wing Commander fans know, humans use credits. We came up with a stylized 'c' to represent that. The Kilrathi character is from the Terran Confederation Handbook, which provided a chart of Kilrathi characters used in the Wing Commander movie's subtitle scenes (which probably means it was originally designed by an artist at Digital Anvil.) This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time we've seen Kilrathi money... they use Confederation credits in Action Stations. Maybe it's kind of a cheat, giving an alien species an economic system that seems to work just like ours, but it seemed like too cute a reference to exclude. Note that the exchange rate between human credits and Kilrathi {somethings} is fixed throughout the booket at 1c/160k. My basic concept here was that the post-war Kilrathi fulfilled the same role as the Japanese or the Italians in the 1950s, with both a wrecked economy and a reputation as a source for especially cheap goods.

• The bar code doesn't mean anything, in so far as I know. Has anyone tried to scan it?