Category: DevLog
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Dev-log 4.4 – Art Updates
Hello and welcome to another art update. This week we are starting with updates on characters from the artist majikarpette .in this sprite you can see the shipyard’s cook, Maelle. In most gamedev studios, the role of concept artist, character designer, and writer are separated. But For us, it makes perfect sense to let the artist…
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Dev Log 4.3 : self-hosting for gamedev
Where we talk about the infrastructure of a game development studio. To collaborate on the shipyard, the team uses various tools. These are usually open source alternatives to services such as Github, which is free but steals your IP (intellectual property), or Jira, which does not steal your IP but costs a bunch. Here is…
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Dev-log 4.2 Map UI
Under the hood I had to write an update before I lose track. We’ve onboarded new team members and improved our workflow and infrastructure, did some UI work, added lighting and textures to the hangar scene, and more. The hangar: This is a scene where players will spend a lot of time in, and it…
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Dev-log 4.1 2D characters
Advisors character art update In The Shipyard, the advisors are a group of 8 yardies who are your friends and fellow shipwrights, sometimes they give you advice. They will be displayed as lowpoly 3D models, but also as 2D pngs for dialogue and be present in illustrations for events. All of the art above by majikarpette And…
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Dev-log 4.0 Buildings concept art
Buildings art progress. These past week we’ve got some steady progress from the art team on buildings. Each building has three levels. here you can see the level 1 option we ended up with. Design by EliSa (you can find more of her work at https://elisacherdot.ultra-book.com/ ) As you can see we chose option 3 on this…
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Dev-log 3.9 AO baking
The Baking show In Game graphics, everything that can be baked, should be baked. Captain Honora Have you first heard of raytracing 5 years ago, or 20 years ago? That would dictate your view of the technology, and what you imagine the point of it is. When I first heard of raytracing, it was around…
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Dev-log 3.8 Lowpoly
🎵It’s too late, topologize.🎶 Before any rigging can take place (or UV mapping for that matter), the high poly sculpt from Sam Proctor needs to be optimized. I like to think of the lowpoly as a 3D papercraft version of the model, which in flattened view will act as the paper canvas on which we…
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Dev Log 3.7 Music ! 🎵
Soundscape and music sneak peek. For music expertise, we needed help. Julian Bohn, FRÉ are two musicians that were introduced to me by the documentary filmaker Bobby buenig. Fré is someone who helped organize music declares a climate emergency and “No Music on A Dead Planet” concerts, so it felt like a natural fit for a…
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Dev Log 3.6
Why lightmaps also make economical sense for gamedev. Most devices that people already have that *could* play games are the ARM CPU GPUs in our phones. Or they are thin laptops without dedicated GPUs. Targeting a RTX 2060 as the min-spec means 80% of potential gamers won’t be able to run it. Most of the…
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Dev-log 3.5 Godot Integration
This week, we continue to design buildings in 2D first, while integrating the 3D buildings in Godot Engine early to check if it fits stylistically. I’m in the process of testing out the pathing system previously established by Rie, and so far the 3D navigation regions seems to work. Voltairine jumped over the rocks to…
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Dev-log 3.4
We got another fun emotion sheet from @majikarpette ! This time we’re showcasing the anarchist welder Voltairine. These 2D portraits will later be rendered in color and used for simplistic visual-novel style dialogue and notification about events. The embarrassed emote could be used to tell the player “Hey y’all, coppersmith workshop is on fire!” Here’s what…
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Dev-log 3.3
Buildings and upgrades. Khaleer and Elisa are spearheading the efforts on buildings.In the game, buildings usually can be upgraded from LvL1 to LvL3 From the point of view of the art process however, we need to start with thumbnails for all possible explorations of what the building could be. We can’t land on the first…
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Dev Log 3.2 Haast sprites
Dialogue portraits : Haast In this series of sketches by @majikarpette , we see captain Haast and his various emotes to react to player choices/dialogue. Haast dislikes any new technology because of a “innovative” container fixation system that ended in a deadly accident. So you could be in the tech tree spending your research point, and…
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Dev Log 3.1 Character portraits
while building ships, you will make mistakes and receive advice. Not all the advice is worth listening though, and it’s up to you to learn about each character’s motivation to know what topic each of the yardies is an expert in.
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Dev Log 3.0 Loading Screen
The loading screen. Bringing everyone’s work together as I get started on the loading screen. We are thinking of having the loading screen take different weathers, so I tried adding volumetric fog, and was pleased with the look of the screen space Z/normal buffer line art effect highlighting the silhouette of distant objects for us.…
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Dev Log 2.9 Visual Target
Usually we work on something called a Beautiful corner. You can easily get stuck at this stage. This is costly. Life is too short to wait before making a decision. Here: we are leaning heavily on fog cards, screen-space reflections , and grease pencil 3d vector strokes. However we end up rendering and optimizing it…
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Dev log 2.8 Line art style
From lines to polygons, and back to lines. This game’s art style is heavily inspired both by lowpoly games, and by BD/manga style, with watercolor textures and black linework to add details. Since our last dev-log, Khaleer advanced on the modeling of the building, (based on concept art by Amir ). The first step is…
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Dev Log 2.7 Art updates
More art updates! Sam Proctor delivered another sculpt, this time for the cooperative’s CEO Deborah. Process: Meanwhile, @khaleer_art has been starting the work on modeling the kitchen building. In the next couple weeks, Eno is hoping to start getting some of these assets in-game.
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Dev Log 2.6 Art Updates
Art updates We’ve been busy on the art side of things too. @khaleer_art joined us to help with modelling and texturing. We’ve got a first mock-up image showing what the ship could look like in-game. Meanwhile, @majikarpette proposed a tweak to the color lineup, and also finished a BW concept art of the traveling shopkeeper.…
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Dev log 2.5 Shipbuilding UI
Ship-building UI and resource flows. Building a ship requires parts and components, which you make with metal plates, composites, and recycled ingots. Various buildings produce these materials and refine them into ship parts. Some of these buildings consume electricity (🪫), which at first is easy to procure, but as the game progresses and storms keep…
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Dev Log 2.4 Separation of programming and art
Early pre-production sketches by Eno, (2019). Generally it’s considered best practice during prototyping for the art to be done in a separate pipeline, to work on top of “cubes that play well”. Meanwhile, the art iterations are about exploring the total possibility space of what this game could be, what it could look like. Godot…
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Dev Log 2.3 Choosing art tools
Why do some of our artists sculpt on a 5 watts ipad or android tablet, instead of a 100 watt desktop with a neat GPU in Zbrush? It’s like asking “why do we swim?”. It’s joyful, to be lightweight, to exercice, to prove what is possible. The app we use for sculpting is called NomadSculpt.…
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Dev Log 2.2 Character sculpting
We are beginning the character sculpting process. Based on character designs by @Majikarpette, Sam Proctor and I are sculpting the characters in Nomadsculpt to match it but with polygons. Proportions and chunkyness are super important since this is mostly a top-down game, similar to Disco Elysium or Anno 1800. Here, we are sculpting Haast (ship…
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Dev Log 2.1 Scenarios
From the archives; an early prototype of the game took place in South America and was inspired by Buen Vivir, cinco saberes, sailcargo movement, degrowth, etc. Each scenario has unique buildings and resources, and the “Costa Buen vivir” (temp name) scenario is all about wood and nature and smaller scale de-pollution work. The scenario we…
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Dev Log 2.0
Environment art begins! Mostly proxy meshes for now. I’m interpreting Amir’s concept as accurately as possible into 3D here to increase stylization and save time. The line art style will be our strength, I hope. As usual, I’m working in Blender, and using mostly 1K textures, 2K atlases. I will mostly talk about our approach…
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Dev Log 1.9
It’s not just art and programming, there is also game design, and even marketing. The tech tree allows you to learn how to construct new buildings and ships, but also weathering the storm better when incoming events knock you off course. As far as marketing goes, I have to figure out the elevator pitch, so…
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Dev Log 1.8 menus and scenes
@tracefree@mastodon.gamedev.place has done some incredible work and we now have a way to transition from the top down camera to inside the hangar, and from inside the hangar to the loft. The resource bar was also implemented by Rie (Tracefree), following this design diagram:
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Dev Log 1.7
Here is the result of two days of modeling after Amir’s hangar concept art. Quite happy with it, and it’s rather low-poly for now. The game’s art style now feels 80% defined. The art style is informed by our shoestring budget. Top-down concept art, then using this as projection textures and flattening it into trim…
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Dev Log 1.6
Our first screenshot in godot engine. We have a videogame, I repeat, we have a videogame! In parallel of the art development, @tracefree and Giiba have been implementing the various gameplay functionality and UI/UX needed to immerse players in the fantasy of managing a shipyard and its fleet. Tracking the quantities of wood, steel, and plastic you have,…
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Dev log 1.5
I wanted to share some first glimpses on the environment art front. We are planning Dev log #2 to be focused on solely on the art, but I just couldn’t resist. Image of the Loft interior: This is a concept art by the amazing AmirDraws to visualize the Loft. Characters hang out there, you can talk…
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Dev log 1.0
Preface: Welcome to our dev-log: Expect short updates on what the dev team has been up to, our technical choices and artistic struggles (or the other way around). Pre production started slowly with just Eno on the team in 2020 and ramped up in 2023 when Amir and Majikarpette joined. What follows a series of…