Last time the shrine got its keeper. Since then the Yamabiko has started to feel lived in. It has a day and a night now, and the crew live by them: they go to work, sit down together at meals, spend their evenings somewhere quieter, and go to bed. Four new people have come aboard, and a run of rooms has been furnished.
Day and night
A ship day takes 40 minutes of play. The garden's projected sky goes from morning blue through a golden evening to stars, and the stone lanterns come on. Lights through the ship dim at night, the quiet rooms most of all. Maple leaves drift in the garden by day, and fireflies come out after dark.
The crew keep hours
Everyone aboard now has a timetable. Yui is in the garden and on the farm racks most of the day. Tsuneo sweeps the shrine at dawn and says evening prayers before bed. Yuki takes the night watch on the bridge. If you go looking for someone at the wrong hour, they won't be there. The Logbook's crew cards now say where each person is right now.
Nobody vanishes or appears in front of you. If someone's hours move them on while you're watching, they wait until you've looked away.
Sitting down to eat
At lunch and dinner the crew come to the galley, take their places at the benches and eat together, facing each other in pairs. Each place is set with a meal: rice, miso soup, grilled fish, pickles and tea.
Getting them onto a bench took some thought. A galley bench has the table right in front of it, so there's no room to stand between the two and sit down. So they do what people do at a picnic table: they stand with their backs to the table, sit, and swing their legs over the end of the bench to turn round. The sitting down and standing up are motion-capture clips. The swing is made in Blender from the seated pose. The game moves each person along the clip's own path, so their feet stay where they stood.
Spoken to at the table, they talk from the bench without getting up. If you first meet someone at a meal, you get a short hello, and they tell you where to find them later. The longer first conversation happens there, at their post.
Four new crew
Four more crew members have come aboard. They're the owner's own VRoid Studio models, and like everyone else aboard they're invented characters. Their names and roles are provisional.
- Haru Miyake, the ship's medic, in the C Deck medbay. Her family were flight surgeons. She'll tell you that crews on the old space station exercised about two hours a day to keep their bones and muscles.
- Itsuki Sugiura, the teacher, in the B Deck school. Today's lesson was IKAROS, the solar sail that unfolded between Earth and Venus in 2010. It launched on the same rocket as Akatsuki.
- Reo Akai, keeper of the memory core on A Deck. He looks after every log and record since the ship launched. The first Hayabusa carried a small marker holding about 880,000 names to the asteroid Itokawa, and he likes that they're still there.
- Shiho Konishi, who runs the nursery on D Deck. Her afternoon story was Kaguya filming the Earth rising over the Moon's edge, in high definition, in 2007.
Each one goes through the same pipeline as the rest of the crew. The model's own VRoid shirt and trousers become the fleet's service dress, fitted from the measurements of a crew member of the same cut and scaled to their height. All four fitted first time. They keep hours, earn trust and have cards in the Logbook, on a row of their own: "Also aboard".
Rooms
The rooms the crew use most got furnished, with new pieces built in Blender:
- The tea room on A Deck, where Yuki spends her evenings. It has a raised four-and-a-half-mat tatami floor, a tea set between two cushions, paper lamps, lit shoji panels, and an alcove with a hanging scroll and a camellia.
- The seed vault on C Deck, Yui's charge. Walls of labelled seed drawers, frosted cold cabinets, racks of seed jars and a sorting table.
- The wardroom, the officers' mess, is no longer an office. It has a long dark table with dining chairs, a red rug, paper pendant lamps and a sideboard with the tea things.
- The cafeteria is a café now: round wooden tables, a counter with a menu board, and planters of bamboo.
The canopy deck, the long observation hall under the glass on A Deck, was nearly empty. It now has seating groups on rugs, pines and maples in planters, telescopes pointed up at the stars, benches, and bamboo along the walls. In the middle stands a model of the Yamabiko itself on a plinth, built from the same hull as the docking scene.
Smaller things found on the way
I wrote a check that walks every doorway, corridor and lift approach on all seven decks, looking for anything in the way. It found four things:
- The nursery's mural hung right across its doorway, at head height. The room was the one place where the door was on the wall the mural always goes on.
- The gym's climbing wall stood across the corridor. The corridor runs through the gym, and the climbing wall was on the end wall, which is open to the corridor there.
- Two koi lay on a corridor floor for their first moment in the game, before swimming off to the garden pond. They were told where their pond was a moment too late.
- The reactor core sat on top of the Engineering lift.
All four are fixed, and every doorway, corridor and lift on the ship is now clear.
What is still rough
- Nobody eats yet. The crew sit at their meals but don't lift their chopsticks: there's no eating animation.
- As they get up from the bench, the new crew's hands press into their jackets for a moment.
- Many rooms off the main path still have their first, simpler furnishing.
What's next
More rooms on the crew's routes, and more for the new crew to say.
Disclaimer
This is a work-in-progress development log. Everything shown is a prototype and is subject to change without notice.
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