Meet the Captain

Joost van Wollingen — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 22:52:43 +0000

Since I’m no artist , we’re starting from AI generated images, and from there try to modify them to fit the game. Today, I started on a first draft for a character: The Captain.

First I generated some portraits of “seasoned navy captains, with a scar, smoking a cigar, cartoony”. I’ll have to up my prompt engineering in the coming time.

This is what the Captain could look like according to AI

I threw the portrait I liked most into aseprite, a sprite editor & pixel art tool. It came up as a good tool to do the graphics in for our kind of game, and I got myself a license through Steam.

My first goal was to take the AI generated still, and make a speech animation. I grabbed the Captain’s mustache and lowerlip, added a frame where these part and painted in some basic teeth. For a draft, in a tool I never used before, it’s good enough for now.

More mustache than man

Next, I wanted to simulate some sort of scanlines, for the videocall sequences where we’d use these portraits. I’ve probably overcomplicated things, used too many layers and animated it clumsily, but the end result I was pretty happy with. Reminds me of those old, green, monochrome monitors.

The Captain uses some old naval technology for video conferencing.

Finally, I tried my hand at an overlay for the portrait + scanlines, to have somewhat of a border around it, and tried some more animations, such as the blinking light and the scrolling letters. That’s far too clumsy to do neatly in aseprite as far as I can tell for now.

Here’s the Captain on the phone with you, giving orders.

Doing these in aseprite is a lot of fun, although I should probably take some time to study the tool and read the documentation. For now, I’ve been going by experience from other graphical editors I’ve worked with throughout the years. We’ll get there!

Surfacing

Joost van Wollingen — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 08:22:42 +0000

Lightning cracks, thick rain drops fall down relentlessly, making it almost impossible to see outside. The wind howls around the bridge, rolling the ship in the giant waves. We’re being hunted.

Building in Public

It’s a game we’ve dreamed about for years now. We never started development, but that changes today. At this stage, it’s not much more than a few loosely related thoughts, ideas and experiments we want to run. There is a million things to learn, such as Golang, Ebitenengine, game design, sound design, music, graphics, aseprite, entity component system, artificial intelligence.

This blog will be used to document our journey, the things we learn along the way, and the progress the game is making. We’ll be building in public, to keep us on our toes.

The Game

In the game the player will pilot a destroy-class ship, with a unique, challenging control-scheme. Fights will take place in the air and with submerged enemies. You can expect updates as we refine our thinking around the game, its design and gameplay loop.

The Latest

We publish every build at the following url, fully playable in your browser thanks to WASM !

Play the game at https://ubootgame.github.io/ubootgame/

DEV Community: Uboot Game

Meet the Captain

Surfacing

Building in Public

The Game

The Latest