Pirates CSG Podcast #63: Ethan Pasternack! (Styrene Design, Prototyping, Graphic Design, and more)
You can listen to the audio via Spotify for Podcasters!
You can also listen on Archive.org.
Ethan the Farseeker from Pirates of the Frozen North, his in-game crew
Here is an overview of Ethan’s involvement with the game:
At the time when the project was started I was a graphic designer, and as the most technical among us I ended up being the main Styrene guy – designing and prototyping the ships was my biggest ongoing contribution to the game line by far. However I also did the graphic design for the first set (skinning the ships, figuring out how to display the stats, etc), which because we were working in parallel with the Game Design team (rather than after they were done) the needs of the ship design and layout ended up strongly influencing the game mechanics as things progressed and we figured out what could and couldn’t work on the medium we were working with. So the work Mike Mulvilhill and I did together figuring those things out had a lot of impact on the way the game morphed from the original concept to the final design that hit the shelves. So this title was actually my first real foray into Game Design (which eventually took over as my career path), though an uncredited one since it wasn’t officially my job yet.
By the end of the run I had personally engineered all but one or two sets of the styrene models (for the last ones I had finally found myself a worthy successor in Darrel Rustvold) but I never contributed further to the game design or the graphic design.
Questions of the Day:
(Ben) What is your favorite ship type to build and why?
(Ethan) What is your favorite ship type to look at and why?
Questions thread: https://pirateswithben.com/forums/topic/submit-your-questions-for-prototyping-lead-and-ship-designer-ethan-pasternack/
Ship shapes quick reference: https://psmlist.com/public/technicalshapes
GenCon 2007 giant ships: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Gen_Con_Indy_2007_exhibit_hall_-_Pirates%21_large_scale_models.JPG
Database with all game pieces: https://tilorfire27.github.io/PiratesCSGDB/index.html
Adventure Book with graphic design credits: https://pirateswithben.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Adventure-Book-Compendium-compressed.pdf
Starfield game: https://bethesda.net/en/game/starfield
Pirates CSG on eBay: https://ebay.us/5C1kyR (affiliate link – purchasing through it will help support my content and efforts with the game!) This site contains affiliate links for which I may be compensated.
Sorry if the audio is inconsistent on this one, I had to make a bunch of edits to make it better than the raw version.
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