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Harold Halibut - Stop motion adventure (now on Kickstarter)

Explorerbc

Arcane
Joined
Nov 22, 2012
Messages
1,170


Harold Halibut is a modern adventure game, with a strong focus on storytelling and exploration. Set in a spaceship, stuck under sea on a distant water planet, you slip into the tiny shoes of Harold. As a young janitor and lab assistant to Professor Jeanne Mareaux, one of the lead scientists on board, he tries to help out in her attempt to find a way to relaunch the ship.
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Hundreds of years ago, in the 1970s the generation ship was sent out as humanity’s last chance to continue life elsewhere.
But poor planning and silly fights in the cockpit led to the mission crash landing on a planet that turned out to be water-only. So Harold never witnessed the heroic spirit the people on board once carried with them, as he was born way past the crash date. Currently you will notice a limboish state inside of „Fedora I“.


Classic Modelmaking

All that can be seen in the game is carefully built in a real-world workshop using classic sculpting, set building and clay and puppet fabrication techniques. We’re not even buying supplemental model train trees or anything.

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Our love of stop-motion films, childhood nostalgia and respect for traditional craftsmanship are some reasons for this. Patience and taking a break from an ultra-fast paced digital reality are big factors as well.

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„There’s something about working with your hands that just can’t be replicated by using a computer. We wanted the feeling of traditional stop-motion films and still benefit from the possibilities of the digital world.“ Is what Ole said in the video and what he’s referring to is our decision to switch from stop-motion animation to 3d scanning all objects and animating them via motion capturing technology for the most part.

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Photogrammetry

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When we're done building tiny things we 3D scan them using a process called „photogrammetry“. It mostly means taking a bajillion pictures of each object from any conceivable angle in order to make a 3d model from it.

Texture Scanning

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Finally we’re using a material scanning method which our friends at Apec Visual developed. Their proprietary machine from the future picks up the tiniest details of the handmade surfaces. Eventually when this is released you need to find a way to play this game on a 4k monitor. You’ll see what we’re talking about.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/slowbros/harold-halibut-a-handmade-adventure-game
 
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Blackthorne

Infamous Quests
Patron
Developer
Joined
Jun 8, 2012
Messages
981
Location
Syracuse NY
Codex 2014 Divinity: Original Sin 2
This style looks really amazing, but the amount of work and money needed to make it come to any kind of real conclusion is more than even this KS is going for. $179,000 USD seems like a lot, but not for a project of this scope. Sadly, I don't think the market can support it. Seems like they have a decent start.... I'd love to see this kind of game made, but I don't hold out a lot of hope.

Well, the only hope I have is that I'm wrong.


Bt
 

Pyke

The Brotherhood
Developer
Joined
Nov 29, 2011
Messages
1,196
Location
South Africa
Them going with the photogrammetry angle (especially for the characters) will help speed up production - but yeah...its gonna be a long hard slog. I found that Adventure Game design tends to be way more iterative than I initially imagined. Sometimes things just dont 'work', and you need to be able to quickly change/add/subtract items, graphics, and sometimes even entire locations.
Needing a few weeks to get a new section up and running, or even a day or two to add in a new item can impact the production MASSIVELY.

They also have a huge team. 8 people. But of those people, only 1 is a programmer (Im assuming Game Design/Dev, Composer is fancy speak for programmer...?) and 6 are artists. It seems a touch unbalanced. Also 8 people and €150,000 on a game with huge material costs is gonna be hard!

That said the game looks beautiful. Seeing the smoothness of computer animation on handmade puppets in those amazing environments is certainly amazing. It'll be interesting to see where this goes.
 
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