Homemade video games sound contradictory, like rock operas and TV movies. However, in rare cases, a designer may choose to build an interactive world from physical materials such as cardboard or clay rather than pixels or polygons.
For the unforgettable 2013 puzzle game The Swapper, Olli Harjola sculpted the sets and characters from clay and digitized them using a technique called photogrammetry. “People would often say, 'Wow, why did you choose this very tedious and complicated manufacturing method?'” Harjola says.
In fact, this was a pragmatic decision. Harjola had no idea how to program 3D models, so he felt working with the real thing was an easier entry point into video game design. The same was true for Slow Bros., the Cologne, Germany-based studio that developed Harold Halibut, which he announced Tuesday will be released for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox consoles.
Fourteen years ago, fresh out of film school, Onat Hekimoglu came up with the idea for a game about a hapless janitor stranded in an alien underwater city after his ancestors fled to Earth from a disaster. The scene he imagined was visually ambitious, but he had no experience building things digitally. So he and his friends chose to work on the skills they didn't have (coding, 3D modeling) rather than the ones they did have (carpentry, sculpting, lighting, costume design) .
Soon, Harold Halibut director and designer Hekimoglu enlisted the help of Ole Tillmann, who became the game's art director and puppet maker. Tillman attended the Rhode Island School of Design, where the instructors emphasized making things by hand, “and it was up to the students to figure out the digital part on their own.” It depends,” he said.
At 10:1 scale, the game's designers created nearly everything players see on screen, including clay characters and adorable miniature costumes sewn from real textiles.
They built some walls using real tiny bricks fixed in real mortar. To weather the sets, they were left out in the rain for weeks, allowed to collect dust, and were treated with special sprays to encourage rust. For a time, Tillman was fascinated by his 19th-century terracotta technique, mixing plaster, dye, and bone glue to create trompe l'oeil surfaces.
Initially, Slow Brothers wanted to animate Harold Halibut using traditional stop-motion techniques. However, the studio was not satisfied with the initial prototype and embarked on a journey of experimentation. In the end, designers devised a new solution. He 3D scanned the handmade puppets, props, and set pieces in detail, then imported them into video game engine Unity and used motion capture to bring the characters to life.
Few game developers have taken this hybrid route. “That's not a very rational thing to do,” said Jakub Dvorski, founder of Amanita Design. The company's upcoming game, Phonopolis, is digitally animated from hand-drawn paper and cardboard scans. “So we need developers who are motivated, passionate and a little bit crazy.”
Contrary to what many people assume, Harold Halibut was not a handmade approach that took more than a decade to create, Hekimoglu said. What slowed them down was funding.
But it still had its advantages. With little money but plenty of time, the team pursued creative puzzles just for fun, creating water animations from scratch rather than importing ready-made assets.
Narratively, Slow Bros. is inspired by the genre of games known as walking simulators, such as Dear Esther and Firewatch, and its interactivity is less about gameplay and more about exploring the environment and pursuing the story. Emphasis is placed on However, the studio's frame of reference was not centered around video games. Mr. Tillman cited the avant-garde architectural collective Archigram and his firm Ant as sources of inspiration.
Harold Halibut is full of small details and detours. If he chooses to sit in the break room and watch the small TV, he will be able to watch 8 minutes of a surreal unsubtitled Turkish TV novel created by developers from clay and animated from scratch. .
The game, which includes a telenovela, is fully voice-acted by a large cast of actors. However, Hekimoglu played all the characters himself, while Throw His Brothers recorded his motion capture to map the physical performance onto the clay puppets. It was an impressive feat of acting considering the different personalities in the game. This eliminated the need to painstakingly explain to the actors how to move and where to look without the benefit of a life-sized set as a reference point. “The whole game is in my head,” he said.
The high quality of Harold Halibut's handmade products is consistent with its stories and ideas. As the characters try to escape the planet they're stranded on, they try to build a solution using the materials they have, much like the game's designers. The intentionally imperfect aesthetic also syncs well with Harold Halibut's vision of futuristic technology. Despite the constant hype from technology companies, the devices the characters produce are often unreliable or disappointing.
“Games usually want to make you the hero,” Hekimoglu says. “We liked the idea that things could go wrong, things could fail, and we might not reach our goals.”
