Wing Commander and Freelancer creator Chris Roberts has been busy. Though he took some time off from game design to work in the film industry, he recently announced his return with a new space sim called Star Citizen. After showing an initial demo and releasing an early trailer, Roberts started crowdfunding to get Star Citizen off the ground, securing more than $3 million dollars between Kickstarter and his own website. Many fans donated $250 or more, often to secure themselves a space ship they didn't know the look of or function, acting simply on faith that Roberts and his team could deliver something special. To learn more about the RSI Constellation (the first big ship to be revealed), the team's approach to ship design, and Star Citizen overall, we interviewed Game Director Chris Roberts and Lead Conceptual Artist Ryan Church.

"Who doesn’t want their own Millennium Falcon?," responds Roberts when I press him about why the Constellation has been a common pledge level despite its $250 price tag, "What’s been interesting is that people have been signing up for the Constellation just on the promise without knowing what it will look like. I’m guessing that now people can see the attention to detail they may just want to upgrade."

Click the picture above for a detail-laden brochure on the Constellation.

Indeed, as a longtime fan of spaceships and science fiction universes like Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek, I'd say the ship looks impressive. It features a gigantic, pod-like cockpit at the front, a pair of turrets on the top and bottom of the ship, and a general aesthetic that makes Constellation look like a combination of the Han Solo's famous ship and the titular Firefly-class ship from the now defunct TV series. There are even places on the ship that Roberts and team have yet to decide the purpose. "You should be able to eat a meal or drink something in the kitchen! I don’t think we’ll go to the extreme of requiring you to do this to keep your energy up, but it is a nice texture moment. I would like the sleeping quarters play into the game the same way a bunk bed did in the original Wing Commander – which was as an in-fiction save point, but I’m not going to let you save anywhere in space. But I think when docked / landed the sleeping quarters will be where you 'wake-up' when you load your game to start a new session."

This is all part of Chris Roberts' greater vision for Star Citizen, that it earns the sim part of the space sim title. This is exemplified by the Constellation's cargo bay. Roberts says "the goal is to be able to walk back into your cargo hold while flying and actually see the cargo you’re hauling. There’s a big focus on simulating and showing everything that you would imagine to be inside and functioning on a spaceship in Star Citizen. So if you’re hauling it you should see it in your hold (if you can walk back into your hold), if you activate a system, you should see your pilot avatar lean over and switch it on, and so on."

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The goal is to be able to walk back into your cargo hold while flying and actually see the cargo you’re hauling.

Church and Roberts thus work together from concept to finished product, with Church beginning with Roberts' description and then figuring out how to make it functional. "It's much like designing a car or any other product," Church tells IGN, "there are the engineering requirements and then there's the feeling you want to convey -- look at a Ferrari and a Lamborghini. Both are high performance Italian sports cars but they have very different looks, different surface form languages. So I will start pretty rough and send a bunch of variations to Chris and he will weed them down and distill out what he wants. Once the shape and configuration are locked in I put on my engineer's hat and work backwards from the functional requirements to the form."

This is exactly how the Constellation came to be. Church writes, "The design brief for the Constellation was that it has a crew of three, is heavily armed and has an 'iconic' shape. That's tough to do! But I think we've succeeded- it has a very aggressive shape in attack/landing mode and can configure itself to a more benign looking cruise mode. At every stage while building it and figuring out the functionality I'm thinking about the Constellation class ship as a potential user: what would I want to fly? What would I want to be seen in? These questions resulted in not only the look of the ship but the layout of the interior and a lot of the functionality like the way the weapons can retract and change the silhouette of the ship."

Though the Constellation may be inspired by the likes of the Millenium Falcon, it has one advantage over such a craft: a deployable fighter. This small craft has no ability to navigate the warp gates that will separate the gigantic sections of Star Citizen's universe, but according to Roberts, "is important to counter act the Constellation’s lower maneuverability compared to a pure dogfighting player ship." The addition of a fighter and all the other considerable armaments of the Constellation doesn't mean it'll be everything, either. "It all comes down to how the player decides to modify and upgrade his ship and what he wants to focus on – dogfighting, trading runs, exploration," writes Roberts, "A lightly armored, but very maneuverable ship piloted by a good pilot would have a chance."

We still have yet to see the array of other ships that are being created, and as a bit of disclosure I've tossed in $125 myself for a freighter, but this first design is encouraging. There's just so much attention to detail, and if Roberts and company manage to pull off the gameplay elements detailed in our first preview, then Star Citizen could set a new standard for immersion when it releases in 2014.

Anthony Gallegos is an Editor on IGN's PC team. He enjoys scaring the crap out of himself with horror games and then releasing some steam in shooters like Blacklight and Tribes. You can follow him on @Chufmoney on Twitter and on at Ant-IGN on IGN.

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