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.

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.

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.

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.