We have a new crane from Khaleer. It re-uses texture from the previous crane in order for the game to run on potato computers (hopefully).

Mostrovska finished their internship, with a cool painting showing eco-pirates in need of ship repairs. Find more of their work at https://mostrovskaa.tumblr.com/

Fire event, illustration by Mostrovska.

Development updates

Giiba has been working on the shipbuilding UI.

We changed the shipbuilding system to be a 2D top-down view instead of side scroller. The new system seems to scale nicer to the different size classes. We’re still working on giving each icon an unique png/svg so that it’s easy to tell the equipment apart.

Pixelberk -who joined us last month- has been working on the solar foundry and scrapyard building so that they produce scrap metal, plates and ingots, but also an inventory system to hold these items before assembly in the hangar.

In the past few weeks, we’ve added new artists on the team who will be helping us until the summer.

Maritime festival event

Illustration for the Maritime Festival event, by Elsa Serka

A celebration of sailing ships and all things related to the sea, this event boost the morale of shipyard workers and you have the option to spend some cash to participate and get a booth (increases city approval, +1 yardie) or take the whole team on a day cruise on tallships (large morale boost).

Hello and welcome to another dev-log! This week we talk about gameplay, brainstorming, and demo scope

But first, we’ve got some new website, discord and store page for this project.

• Itch Io page: https://niwl-games.itch.io
• New website to read dev-logs: <redacted as we have a new one here>
• Discord server: https://discord.gg/huxRAE6Mju

Brainstorming the gameplay

We had a nice brainstorming session with Yann, Khaleer, Giiba and Honora, focusing on gameplay.

Khaleer Finished the first Crane. The final game will have up to three different models of cranes.

Honora integrated the scrapyard in game (with help from Giiba).

This is a first step to integrating art assets in game, but hold on, not so fast.

We wanted to add a quick mouseover effect (so you know which building is selected) and it took much more time than anticipated as soon as art assets were involved.

With the groundwork on characters and visual novel structure more defined, it was time for us to return on buildings, which -after ships- are the core of game.

Art news

In The Shipyard, most buildings have 3 upgrade levels. But in a break from most city builders and management games, more upgrades is not always better.

Electrolysis of hydrogen is a good example. It’s a way to store surplus energy from solar and wind with a low carbon footprint, but building it, and building upgrades does have a carbon and capital cost that has to be paid back. With a 40% efficiency, only the player can decide if it’s worth it.

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.

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 fill up the page with extra headcannons.

This addled granularity makes it more fun to imagine responses to events that the advisors will suggest. This is similar to oil painters who tone their canvas value down from 100% white to a warm 50% grey tone.

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.

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 sheet of sketches.

We looked up references from the marine festival for both fabricator mobile stations with 3d printers, and thought a thinner boat and fabricator-bus would be cool.

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 2004 with the first versions of blender. Before cycles was around, there was two choices of AO; approximate, or raytraced brute force. We’d spend hours , then later in the 2010’s minutes to calculate a single AO pass

🎵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 will print the texture, including the normal map.

For this we turned to the app Cozy Blanket, (always following the challenge to use the lowest possible energy requirement for the rig and cloud, here with a 5 watts power consumption on M1 ipad pro. No need to have a 40-100 watts laptop or 250 watt desktop running just a simple retopo task.

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 cost of frames these days is lighting and shadows. Shadow maps essentially require re-rendering the entire scene from every shadow casting light’s perspective. We do this offline by raytracing to a lightmap texture. And we do it once, not per frame.

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.

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 option we try.

Let’s look at the backup generator lvl 2 for example:

As you can see we picked option (4) and flipped it. These sketches are done By Elisa.

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.

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 hilighting the silhouette of distant objects for us.

We are using the High Quality Post Process Outline shader by EMBYR.

The clouds are simple planes with alpha hash and alpha clip. Overdraw will be solved later by trimming the planes using knife tool. A fancy way of saying “yeah they look good but only from one angle, like a billboard”.

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 is de-coupled from the technical details of how we implement it. This reduces dependecies. We can make the artistic decision once and stick to it.

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 a block-in with mostly flat colors. Around this time, the UV space is laid out to facilitate painting textures in a 2D program (like Krita).

Sam Proctor delivered another sculpt, this time for the cooperative’s CEO Deborah.

Process:

• Concept Art (@majikarpette )
• Sam Proctor blockout, rough color, clean color in Nomadsculpt
• Enora tweaks the colors and shapes if needed
• Retopo and baking ( in Blender or Cozyblanket).

Meanwhile, Khaleer has been starting the work on modeling the kitchen building. In the next couple weeks, I’m hoping to start getting some of these assets in-game.

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.

An early greyscale concept art of the traveling shopkeeper, who will exchange rare items and ship components to the player in exchange for a steep price. Finishing her quest expeition leads to more reasonable prices.

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 knocking down the grid, you find yourself having to improvise a DIY micro grid (⚡️) for the shipyard to keep going.

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”.

Godot Engine Programmer Evans (Giiba) calls this the “sea of cubes”. The point is maximum readability, and programmers to not need to wait for art.

Meanwhile, the art iterations are about exploring the total possibility space of what this game could be, what it could look like.

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).

Here is the result of two days of modeling after Amir’s hangar concept art. This is the main hero building of the game and requires some detail.

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 defined by our shoestring budget. Top-down concept art, then using this as projection textures and flattening it into trim sheets. Can’t afford to waste any work.

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. Yuna, Voltairine and Captain Haast are currently hanging out here and you can initiate dialogue. You can also hear the radio, and see the week’s weather forecast on the screens above. Talking to the advisors initiates quests such as expeditions, contracts, rescue missions. Completing all the quest of an advisor gives you a unique item.

Hello Yardies! Pre-production advances steadily on The Shipyard.

There will be 8 advisors in the game you can talk to in order to initiate quests. Thanks to Majikarpette, We now have sketches in greyscale for all of them.

Amir finished the scrapyard concept art, where plastic, metal hulls and wood debris floats up with the tide. Giiba and Rie are working on Godot Engine programming (save/load, skill tree, UI, camera). And lastly, Cued joins the project (game design, trailer).