Frank Wu art for the videogame REVOLUTION
60 (AVAILABLE
NOW for iOS!)
My wife Brianna Spacekat Wu is the
mastermind multi-hyphenate behind this game. It is essentially a 3D animated
version of her art,
featuring an all-female team of
special ops who run around shooting lasers and flying spaceships. The game is
cinematic, with a highly-involved script,
which is professional
voice-acting (including Amanda Winn-Lee!).
You can see
a brief video here
Here are two of the lead characters, Holiday (whom you play in the
game):
And Minuete:
One of my main roles in this project is hardware design! Here are some of my work below:
In the Rev60 universe, the U.S. once again doesn't have a manned
space program, though it does have
some older space stations (like
the N313) still in orbit. But the U.S. loses control of the N313
(and its secret military payload) and it
drifts over China. Chinese soldiers have flown up there
and are unlocking its secrets.
So Holiday, Min and their crack team of female operatives steal a
Chinese spaceship to re-take control of the station in the name of
Chessboard, a shadowy U.S. agency.
If they fail, it will mean an all-out nuclear war between the U.S.
and China.
This is the Chinese spaceship, the "Xiezhi",
which they steal:
And here is the space station, the N313:
The entire space station in the film "2001" rotated to
generate artificial gravity. It turns out, though,
that you don't need to rotate
the entire station. You can just rotate the individual rings. You could
spin the rings at different
speeds to generate different levels of gravity, which would be useful if you
had aliens from
different-sized planets. We don't actually have aliens in the Rev60 universe,
but we do
spin the rings at
ever-so-slightly different speeds. This is because we want to create a small
imbalance
and instability, as that
generates extra gravitons and gravitinos. The excess
gravitons will (in the words
of fake Uwe
Boll) "power your weapons and lead you to their central weakness".
There are emitters on the
bottom of Holiday's boots which
shoot out anti-gravitons when she needs to jump higher, and gravitons when
she needs to stick to a
surface at a weird angle in zero G. Her motorcycle has a rotating wheel which
emits gravitons to stick to the
road in front, and, as it rotates, anti-gravitons to push off for added speed.
.
For nerds who are wondering:
To prevent precession, we use RCS (reaction control system)
assemblies.
But overall, we want the system to be slightly unbalanced and
unstable, to generate extra gravitons.
.
Below: In CNC (Command and Control) Room of the N313.
The parallel tubes in the back are graviton channels, colored
Safety Yellow because you don't want to touch them.
But the contractors shot into space to paint the station liked the
color so much that they used it everywhere,
even when there weren't
graviton emitters. And their supervisors on earth - everyone was an underpaid
government
worker - said, Eh, whatever.
There's an outstanding work order to re-paint them white because, since the
U.S.
(again) no longer has a manned space
program, that'll never happen.
The AKB93, a laser-firing, stabbitty variant of an AK-47: