Until now the Yamabiko has been a set of beautiful, empty rooms. This week it got its first crew member. In the ISS Heritage Gallery you can now walk up to Sora, press E, and have a conversation that remembers what you said.
Who Sora is
Sora Mizuhara is the ship's Mission Historian. She keeps the records for the Gallery, dusts the glass, and argues with the ship about dates. Her family has looked after the story of Japan's Kibo module for generations, not the astronauts but the people who kept the lights on in the control room.
She is invented. So is every other crew member who will ever live on the Yamabiko. The people on the Gallery's walls are real, and they stay as silhouettes with plaques that say what they actually did. Sora is a character in a story set a century or two from now, and her name is a provisional placeholder. That line, real people are history and the crew are fiction, is the one rule the whole crew system is built around.
For now she is a stylised figure built from simple shapes: a cream jumpsuit with navy trim and an amber stripe, a bob of dark hair, a small face. She breathes gently and turns toward you when you come near. A proper model and portrait art come later.
A conversation that remembers
Press E and the camera swings toward her, you stop moving, and a dialogue box opens along the bottom of the screen. The text types out, and you can click or press a key to finish a line early.
At two points you are asked something, and your answer matters.
Sora asks what you make of the silhouette portraits. Say they feel respectful, and she warms to you. Say they look unfinished, and she shrugs it off with a laugh and a fair point, but she trusts you a little less. Ask who they are to her, and you get a quieter answer about teachers she never met.
Later she offers to tell you about Kibo. Say yes and a small piece of the story unlocks. Say not now and she lets you go without making it awkward.
What the game keeps track of
Every crew member has two numbers: trust and wellbeing. Trust moves when you say things they care about. Wellbeing is how they are doing, and it will matter more once the story gives you ways to help. The game also remembers small facts, like whether you have met Sora and whether she has told you about Kibo.
It all survives moving between rooms and is saved to disk when a conversation ends. Come back after your first chat and she greets you differently. If she trusts you enough she says she was just reading the Mukai plaque and thought you would have something to say. If not, she is polite and gives you room.
How it is built
Conversations are plain text files, not code. Each is a small graph of lines, choices and branches, so I can write a whole conversation without touching the game. Adding a new crew member is three steps: give them a name, write their conversation, and place them in a room.
I tested the whole thing without a mouse. A script plays the first meeting start to finish, always picking the first reply, and checks that trust, wellbeing and the story facts come out right. Along the way a screenshot caught a real bug: with three choices the dialogue box ran off the bottom of the screen. It now grows upward instead.
What is still rough
- Sora is a placeholder figure with no animation and no voice.
- She has one conversation. Trust changes it a little on a second visit, but there is no second chapter yet.
- You cannot yet see trust and wellbeing anywhere. A pause screen for that is next.
- Sora's name and the whole crew roster are provisional.
What's next
A pause screen showing how each crew member feels, and a second conversation with Sora that opens up once she trusts you. After that, a second crew member somewhere else on the ship, so the corridor starts to feel lived in.
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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