Updated November 7, 2026: all three crew moved to new models after this was first written. See "Moving the crew to VRoid" near the end.
Last time the ship got a real planet and a proper hull, but nobody was home. Now three crew members walk the Yamabiko, stop when you come near, turn to face you and talk. Sora still keeps the records in the ISS Heritage Gallery, and she has company now. All three are invented characters and their names are still provisional.
The fleet's uniform
The uniform started as a bright blue jacket with orange trim and a belt, and it looked like a costume. I looked at photos of modern space-service dress for the language of the clothes: very dark jackets, grey trousers, light shirt collars and quiet silver trim. Every badge is our own invention, not a copy of any real service's insignia.
The jacket now has painted seams, drawn creases at the elbows and a baked contact shadow. The sleeve patch is a shield with ripples spreading from a star, a nod to the ship's name, since a yamabiko is a mountain echo. Rank shows in the cuff stripes, shoulder bars, chevrons and ribbons, silver for juniors and gold for officers.
Two cuts of one jacket
When Hayato arrived, the same jacket on two people looked like a mistake, so the cuts differ in their design. The women's cut has a diagonal closure with silver piping, a soft collar and flush pockets. The men's has a straight centre closure, a collar open over a shirt and tie, and button-flap pockets.
Hayato Itokawa keeps the engines running in the Hayabusa Engine Bay. Adding him meant turning a one-character script into a pipeline, so each new crew member is mostly a block of settings. His first conversation is about the probe the room is named after. By the end of its journey every one of Hayabusa's ion engines had a fault, and the team got one working thrust out of two broken engines by connecting them together, entirely from Earth.
A commander on the bridge
Yuki Aoyama runs the SLIM Navigation Bridge. She keeps the bridge console tilted on purpose, in honour of the SLIM lander, which came down on its nose and still made the most precise lunar landing yet at the time.
The bugs were the interesting part
Most of the time went on things that looked fine until they moved.
- Feet tipped toe-down. Two rigs slope their foot bones differently, and matching them tilted every pose, even standing still. Then the soles sank into the floor by up to 38 mm mid-stride. A new pass measures every frame and lifts the hips by just enough.
- Arms through the jacket. Animation clips assume a slimmer body than a straight jacket. Hanging arms now swing out slightly, and a script measures how far sleeves and hands go into the jacket on each clip. It reads 0 mm on the walk and idle the game uses today. Yuki's salute, which isn't in the game yet, still needs work.
- Hair that wouldn't stay put. A leftover transform left the first Hayato's hair at the wrong height after scaling, which looked like his skull was poking through. The first Yuki's scalp really did poke through, because her hair was made for a different head.
- Blinking ears. My favourite. The first Yuki's ears were separate pieces of mesh, and her blink treated them as parts of the eye, so every blink flattened them into spikes.
Moving the crew to VRoid
After all that, the crew changed. The first versions came from character kits and a bare base mesh, and I built their faces, hair and rigs by script. I then designed new versions of all three in VRoid Studio and prefer their proportions, so those are now the game's crew. It also means I can design each character myself and bring them straight in.
The uniform carries over, made from each model's own shirt and trousers: the same meshes and rigging, repainted as the fleet's jacket with the seams, closure, cuffs and shoulder boards on top. Each character needs their own measurements, because Yuki and Hayato are built very differently. A rebuild then takes minutes, not days.
They brought something new too: their hair now sways as they walk, even Yuki's, which falls well past her shoulders.
Playing it by script
I also wrote a test that walks each crew member's route, checks it for obstacles and plays their conversation through. It came back clean this time, and it means I can rebuild a character without wondering what I broke. It doesn't replace playing the game, and so far I've mostly checked the crew in stills.
What is still rough
- The uniform's cut comes from each model's VRoid shirt, so its hem and collar are only as tailored as that shirt. Hayato's tie barely shows.
- Hayato's trainers and fingerless gloves and Yuki's heeled boots are still from their VRoid outfits.
- Sleeves and trouser hems don't swing, only hair.
- Mouths flap while a line types out. There's no real lip-sync, and no voices.
- The seated animations exist, but nobody sits down yet.
- The rooms still use simple shapes, and the crew now look more finished than the rooms around them.
What's next
The crew have raised the bar again, so the rooms are next, along with giving each of these three more to say.
Crew models made in VRoid Studio. Animation: Mixamo. Music: "Koto" from Ovani Sound's Eastern Music Pack. Real missions are history here; the crew are fiction.
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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