Camille, the testing engineer.

This week, we’ve got a neat update from Majikarpette on advisor 2D sprites, completing the 8 advisor characters the player can talk to. We’re going to work on coloring the sprites in the coming weeks.

Eluci, shipyard security.

Khaleer made some nice progress on modelling the emblematic cranes of Brest port:

Looking forward to share more art updates next year.

For sculpting and making the 3D versions of characters, we enjoy using NomadSculpt. Thanks to Majikarpette for the feedback on Deborah.

Alejandro Libonatti also made some progress on Yuna, and even helped with character topology (we might use up-resolution the ingame rigs for cinematics, for simplicity.

Make sure to check out Alejandro’s portfolio.

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 here’s a redesign of the traveling merchant trader that players can buy rare engines and advanced ship parts from.

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 I mean by “these can also be used as a sort of notification system for the player” in this UI mockup.

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 if you click anything related to automation, he will have a disapproving look and say “can’t believe you’re considering building this”.

Visual Novel Dialogue system

Now let’s switch things up a bit and talk about the advisors: 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.

Deborah, the cooperative’s CEO will be one of the 8 advisors you can talk to in the game. By “talking” I mean that the player’s brain will produce the fantasy of talking by looking at text, as is the case in games like Disco Elysium, or the visual-novel-style dialogue in Hades. To add emotions so it’s not just a simple PNG, we add 3 variants: Happy, Embarrassed, Thinking.

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.

Same thing goes for the choice to use Godot Engine not UE5.

There is no Nanite, there is no AutoLOD, and yet we will deliver a kickass fun game nonetheless.

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 captain) and Voltairine (Anarchist welder).