The last log ended with seventy rooms that were walkable, but most were built from plain boxes and spheres. This week I started improving them one room at a time. Along the way the game picked up a proper look: a soft toon shader that sits well with the crew, and furniture modelled in Blender instead of stacked boxes.
Finding the look
The crew are detailed anime-style models with ink outlines. The rooms were flat-coloured primitives under realistic lighting. Put together, the rooms looked blocky and washed out next to the people in them.
I looked at games that put anime characters in detailed worlds. The common thread was detailed shapes with clean, simple surfaces and soft, stepped lighting. Polygon count wasn't the problem; the shading was. So the environment now uses Soft Toon, a free toon shader for Godot by Francisco Cidade (CC0). It works with the game's real lights, so lamps and grow lights still shape the rooms. Shade is a soft violet, light falls in two gentle bands, and solid furniture gets a thin ink outline. Leaves get no outlines, and they glow a little when light is behind them.
Pieces built in Blender by script
Every new piece is built by a Python script in Blender, the same way as the shuttle exterior: lanterns, trees, a tea pavilion, beds, a bath, a shrine. Because they are scripts, I can change a size or a colour and rebuild the whole set in seconds, and nothing comes from a purchased pack. The largest pieces are the tea pavilion (about 42,000 triangles) and the maple (about 28,000). A whole room still runs at a steady 144 frames per second on my machine.
The Japanese Garden
The garden on C Deck was the first room rebuilt properly. There is a two-lobed pond with an arched red bridge you can walk over, koi swimming slow loops under clear water, a tea pavilion, maples and cloud-pruned pines, a bamboo grove, a raked dry garden, a stone water basin, and wooden gates where the ship's corridor comes in.
One question came up while building it: is any of this real, or a hologram? I decided it is real. Every plant aboard is alive, carried up from Earth or grown from what was. Only the sky is projected. Yui looks after it, including a cutting from a line of cherry trees whose stones flew to the Kibo module in 2008. Some of the trees grown from them flowered years sooner than expected, and nobody is quite sure why.
The Hoshi Shrine
The shrine on B Deck is the other fully Japanese room. A stone approach runs under a vermilion torii, past stone lanterns and a pair of komainu, to a small shrine with its offering box, bell and rope. There is a purification basin on one side, and on the other a rack of wooden ema where the crew write their wishes for a safe voyage.
A spaceship first
At first I went further and turned the canteen, the crew quarters and the bathhouse fully Japanese too: tatami, shoji walls, paper lanterns. Seen together it was too much; the Yamabiko stopped feeling like a ship. So I set a rule. The garden and the shrine are fully Japanese. Everything else stays sci-fi, with wood and Japanese touches as accents.
The other rebuilt rooms now keep the ship's white panels and light lines, with an oak rail at hand height and one or two touches each. The canteen has a noren over its serving counter, and its menu runs on lit screens. The crew quarters have sci-fi cabin fronts with slippers by every door. The bathhouse keeps its painted mountain mural and wooden lockers. The lounge has one kotatsu corner. The medical bay has sage curtains, and the hydroponic farm now has real growing racks.
The tram gets a tunnel
On E Deck the tram ran down the open middle of the corridor. It now has its own low tunnel. On the walkway sides there are planters of moss and grasses, and framed murals in a flat poster style: a mountain at dawn, sea waves, bamboo, cherry blossom over a river, a moonlit night, rice terraces at sunset. The tunnel opens at every door and station, so you can always cross.
What is still rough
- Most of this is checked with screenshots and scripted walk tests. I haven't walked every rebuilt room by hand yet, and riding the tram through the new tunnel isn't tested.
- Only nine rooms have been rebuilt so far. The rest of the ship still uses the older furnishing.
- The crew names, Yui and Sato included, are still provisional.
What's next
More rooms, one at a time, starting with the library, and a walk through everything rebuilt so far to catch what the scripts miss.
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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