The third entry of the Behind the Scenes series published on the official Black Prophecy website is now available. In this latest issue, Creative Director Timo Krahl and Art Director Nick Ebenhoch discuss some of the more interesting aspects of Black Prophecy's gameplay and art direction.

On docking:

Chris:

In other space MMOs, but also single player games, it is possible to dock to a station with your ship to attend to your business in a graphical designed 2D environment. The gameplay trailer already showed that Black Prophecy will also have this possibility. In which form and scale will see this feature implemented in Black Prophecy?

Timo:

A real graphical docking (the flight into the hangar) of the player ship is not available at the moment. But if you reach a specific distance to a dockable station, you have the possibility to dock to this station via the menu after that the ship will get removed from the current scene and the player can use the station features like ship alteration, modding, trade, clan administration, etc. Depending on the menu selection, the appropriate interiors are displayed as a 3D scene in the background. We consciously designed these interiors somewhat lavishly as we might have plans with this feature in the near future.

Nick:

As Timo already explained, there will be no visual docking for now. However, the required assets already exist. The implementation would be pure technical but you have to set priorities, like with so many other things in the game development, and the priorities are currently set to more important systems.

Check out the full Behind the Scenes #3 here.