Harold Halibut took years to complete; everything was lovingly handcrafted, molded, welded, carved, sewn and painted from real materials, with extraordinary detail visible in every floorboard and surface. “The project started around a passion to build a world and imagine together what this place could be and what stories we could tell there,” says Art Director Ole Tillman. “When you see the paint strokes and fingerprints there, there's something about it that feels connected.” Every physical element was then 3D scanned and digitally animated to achieve specific movement and lighting.
It takes an ensemble cast and so many props to populate the city-sized spaceship and the alien planet beyond. To save time, the team could have borrowed furniture from a dollhouse or even stolen some pieces from a miniature train set. “That logical step never occurred to me,” says Tillman. They just had so much fun experimenting with tools and materials in the workshop. For example, instead of sourcing existing tiles and cutting them to size, Fabian Preuschoff (an original team member, set designer, etc.) built a terrazzo floor from scratch. Costume designer Holle Schlickmann joined the team and designed and sewed all the costumes from patterns so tiny that they hurt her fingers. “We had so much fun making stuff,” says Tillman. “I think fun is a surprisingly often overlooked element of why we made the game the way we did.”
