Finished sculpting and painting faces for 60 passengers and crew.There's supposed to be 80 people in the game - I'm cutting the remaining 20. If I find an easy way to add them back later in I may go for it. 60 is way too few for sailing a boat of this size (120 would be a realistic minimum), but I just don't think I can build out that much content in a reasonable time. The character models themselves aren't actually that hard, it's integrating the characters into the story, adding them in flashbacks, and making sure the player has enough information about each one to deduce their identity. Also there are some UI issues with enabling the player to efficiently sort through that many characters; even 60 will be a bitch.At my fastest, I was able to sculpt+paint 6 faces in one day. That rate was mostly thanks to a simple feature randomizer tool I built from blend targets. I could either select the features manually or hit a button to generate randomized facial geometry. Most combinations were useless but after a few clicks something inspirational would come up that I could tweak and paint fairly quickly.Most of the faces are just sketched from my imagination but I did use references for some. Referenced faces took a lot longer, and the detail gives them a slightly different look. Overall I wasn't able to stay very consistent with my technique. Some faces are realistically detailed and some are more painterly. Luckily, in-game this comes across as making the characters look unique (a useful thing for the mechanics) as opposed to out of place. Another benefit of outputting to 1-bit 640x360.The next step for the characters is to model and attach all their clothes and accessories and add unique scars/tattoos/etc. That process is pretty straightforward so I may take a detour and assemble some flashbacks first. Would be nice to know if 60 people is actually enough, and how hard it is to arrange that many characters.

There seems to be a terrific degree of variety in build, features and ethnicity in just the GIF. Even with the 1-bit rendering, this seems like a job a TEAM would be doing at any other studio. It sounds like the graphical limitations are working to your favor in terms of glossing over the stylistic differences in the art. I'm hoping there's at least one set of twins on board; bonus points if they're deliberately trying to obscure their identities from other crew members!

Been following this devlog for a while, and immediately jumped on the build as soon as it came out - it's really great! I've been thinking about the problem of brute forcing the crew's fates. I'm not certain if limiting the scope of the flashbacks has solved this for you, but the thought occurred to me that you might not need a mechanical disincentive. Since the Muster Roll's purpose is to determine the fates so that the insurance company can decide whether to distribute unpaid salaries to the families of the sailors, it seems you might also have the unpleasant duty of informing those families the fate of their loved ones, and whether they will be receiving that (sorely needed) money. If you fudge on things, you're messing the the hearts and livelihood of a family anxiously awaiting news of their loved ones. You could make marking something in the Muster Roll permanent, too, since you can't exactly erase ink. After you decide on the fate of someone and mark it in the ledger, you get some sort of feedback from the family themselves - a line of dialogue or something small like that. Your role as investigator and arbiter gains some narrative weight, and it's harder to play the game "wrong".

okay this is fantastic, despite the fact that when i looked at the sky with white pepper noises i feel like my screen is going to explode at certain extent, everything is so nice and unique! Keep going Pope!

There's a cool idea here. This game is probably too fantasy-oriented to work exactly like this - I'm not planning on injecting any pathos for the families, or including them at all really. But the idea that the fate entries have to be "finalized" before getting feedback is interesting.Maybe I could have a "finalize these fates" button on each page, or a global "finalize all current fates" that can be used X times. Then you can "spend" those finalizations to find out if you're correct. Players could game this a little bit into something like Mastermind, but not much. Or they could wait until the end and just hit it once and get some special reward if they're all correct.I think this is at least better than instantly getting feedback on page 1.I promise to fix the sky :D

okay this is fantastic, despite the fact that when i looked at the sky with white pepper noises i feel like my screen is going to explode at certain extent, everything is so nice and unique!

[...] You could make marking something in the Muster Roll permanent, too, since you can't exactly erase ink. After you decide on the fate of someone and mark it in the ledger, you get some sort of feedback from the family themselves - a line of dialogue or something small like that. Your role as investigator and arbiter gains some narrative weight, and it's harder to play the game "wrong".

I've finally got the entire ship roughed in - all rooms, areas, etc for the top, gun, orlop, and cargo decks. Fitting everything in was a bitch. They didn't design these ships for first person adventure games unfortunately.I've had to add buffer space here and there to give the player enough room to move around comfortably. And because the ship has to properly articulate for the different flashbacks I couldn't cheat and leave out a critical capstan or threading hole for the anchor ropes for instance.At the moment I'm going through and decorating each deck. One of the key ways to identify people will be to recognize which rooms they spend most of their time in. So, for example, the carpenter's room has to look the part. This bit is pretty fun to work on.An in-progress Maya shot of the orlop deck. It'll get a lot busier before it's done:Also, this is what OCD looks like:That took ~4 hours to "fix"...

Weird question, I've been noticing that all the rendered lines look really nice and easy to see. Is there anything you specifically did to make them look like that, or did they just turn out nice on their own?

Probably the only particular trick is ensuring that they're always 1 pixel wide, which requires some special handling in the post-processing shader. There's a post here (and some afterwards) about how the lines are rendered.

Weird question, I've been noticing that all the rendered lines look really nice and easy to see. Is there anything you specifically did to make them look like that, or did they just turn out nice on their own?

Pope! Good seeing you got some new progress :D Sure thing, hope there's a beautiful and warm feeling sky looking though it's a murdering ship, but i think the ambient would fit in to give some extreme feeling :D Actually I liked the 'compactness' of the room, because it actually feels real in a compacted size, also liked the shaders you written, because I am a vision engineer, so looking at your technical shading hooked me in :D Just one recommendation, if you could add a little bit noises into the scene especially on the deck, it would looked perfect with scratches and stuffs :D All the best, been following u :D

I've only fairly recently noticed this and am really happy to see you building a new game, especially one that seems drastically different than your previous ones (which I enjoyed too of course). The short demo was great, it felt like you let the player really figure things out for themselves without a fear of failure or obscurity. Even at an early stage it feels really nice, can't wait to purchase the final product, thanks for all your work!

Can't believe I only found this game just today even though I've played Papers, Please. Played the old 0.04 dev build a little bit ago and thoroughly enjoyed it, looking forward to release!