For a long time now people have been asking us, “When are you going to do some sci-fi stuff?”. We’ve always wanted to do something for that genre but wanted to make sure that what ever we did wasn’t just a repeat of the same type of stuff that everyone is doing. There is way too much of the same kind of style around, what we call “off world, far future, habitation, drop pod stuff”.
When we think about the future, even the next 200 years we see the buildings we have now, repurposed and modified. If you think about what we have right now, we have 200 year old buildings in the middle of our major cities, people didn’t knock them down (we not all of them anyway!) and build some monster glass sky-rise. So the near-future (which many games purport to be) we see a future that is much more Bladrunner-esque, cramped, crowed, old, dark and dirty. We wanted our range of “near-future sci-fi stuff” to be similar to that aesthic.
So in comes Neo Sentry; a futuristic take on our Sentry City range of model kits, and the first district, or area in that range is Easy District. We went back and forth for quite some time when discussing the name, none of us could settle on something we all liked. Easy District was thrown up on the board and dismissed but we kept coming back to it. After a while we decided to roll with it, Scott did the artwork, logos etc and pretty soon we all feel in love with it!
The first model we showed on Facebook a few days back was the Obelisk, now we’ll write up different articles about each of the buildings rather then writing a small novel in this one trying to explain each building.
For us it was important to still show that the buildings are “real world” buildings, something you might find in any city on Earth. At at the same time we needed to wrap the building in features that might help you imagine a scene that is not too far in the future. We think we have achieved that through the use of the detailing on the outside of the kits. When you have a table together and you’re looking down alleys and streets from the models perspective you get a real sense of the dense, urban, jungle that has sprung up from an increased population, changes to technology and the overcrowded feel you get from movies like Bladerunner, 5th Element all with a slight cyber-punk feel.
We’re looking forward to continuing to work on and expand the Neo Sentry range, and for the time being we are putting other plans on hold to keep experiencing the fun and excitement that has gone into the creation of this new range of model kits.