One of the biggest challenges when starting this project was to design an entire ship that could have engaging elements on both the exterior and interior sections. At first, we wanted this ship to share both a pirate and space theme. I took inspiration from ships designed from works like Treasure Planet and Arcadia of my Youth for the overall shape of the ship. We started out with a long warship design with wings all over, to allow areas to grapple and entrances all around the ship (8 initially).
The ship started out as having textures and UV all across the body, but we decided as a team that a consistent color palette could offer a clean, futuristic look. While it did take away from the pirate aesthetic, we all agreed that the look felt distinct enough to leave in. With testing, we ran into issues where the ship was just too big. It could take too long to make it from one side to the other, but the largeness was necessary to house the interior sections inside. Each interior section would have a theme to help make them unique: including an engine room, barracks, hangar, and even a living quarters. All rooms were mapped out with one being fully completed.
The old design of the ship would eventually be scrapped in favor of a smaller ship, the one that we ended up using in the final build. While a lot of work went into this older version, there were a lot of techniques that I learned in the process of making it that were useful to make sure the development of the next version came about a lot faster than this one did.