How did they make Harold Halibut?

Hand-Crafting Harold Halibut

I’d like to say I’ve got a fairly good eye nowadays for unique video games, and I when I first saw footage of developer Slow Bros first ever game, Harold Halibut, I was taken aback.

What I was watching didn’t look like a game at all – in fact, it was something more akin to a stop-motion clay animation like Aardman’s Creature Comfort series or Wallace and Gromit.

Did they really animate all of this by hand?

The answer is of course, somewhere in the middle – what you’re looking at when playing Harold Halibut is part 3D technical wizardry and genuinely handcrafted assets. Pretty much everything you see and interact with in the game, from characters, textures, sets and props – has indeed all been put together by hand, painted, sculpted and then 3D-scanned to be placed in the game.

The results are incredible, and Harold Halibut is a game you can get lost in.

I got to virtually sit down with Art Director Ole Tillmann and Director Onat Hekimoglu to learn all about how Harold came to be, and what it’s been like to spend more than a decade developing this incredibly unique and visually mesmerising title.

Humble Beginnings

Development on Harold Halibut actually began way back in 2010. Think about that for a moment – iPhones had only existed for 3 years, and we were all still playing games on our Xbox 360s.

Director Onat decided he wanted to make a stop-motion adventure set in an underwater world. There was one catch – no-one could actually draw on the team, so making models seemed, outwardly at least, moderately more possible.

The very small team started creating sets and fleshing out what was possible in Onat’s kitchen, and one of the first sets ever made was titular character Harold’s solitary bedroom.

“We quickly realised that, while we were good at actually building things, we weren’t artists, and it was very hard for us to visualise what our main character would look like.” says Onat.

At this point, Ole interjects – “This is where I came in. The team sent me a video of that room, which I already found really impressive, and I loved the vibe of that…and made an initial drawing of Harold based of the descriptions they gave me.“

The team quickly realised how important an artist would be for their project, and Ole moved back to Cologne, Germany to begin work on the game. Even at this point, Onat and team were still determined to create the game using traditional stop-motion techniques.

This meant that the puppets had to be movable, with joints, foam bodies, and everything else required to actually animate them.

The team were, in what Ole describes as “student mode, with no money whatsoever“, as they showed images of kit-bashing sets together in Onat’s bedroom and kitchen. “We managed to borrow a bunch of equipment from our universities, and started recording the first stop-motion footage at the time.“

In some early prototype footage, we see the results of that genuinely stop-motion captured work, and while the team were happy with the general direction, it was clear more work needed to be done to fully realise their ambition.

Onat reminisced “The character always looked like it was slapped onto a static background – it doesn’t feel like he was really in the environment.“

It was also clear the original title was firmly in the classic point-and-click adventure game slot, with items being highlighted by a mouse cursor, enabling Harold to look at or interact with them.

This came with all the usual genre trappings – a focus on puzzle solving, restricted movement with static lights and cameras. As the team sat back and assessed, they realised this isn’t what they wanted to do.

So, they pivoted, and moved towards a more modern narrative game, with a heavy focus on characters, story and exploration.

“The whole project started because we wanted to tell a deep and engaging story, and we had the feeling that classic point-and-click adventure puzzle solving kind of slowed down the pace of the story experience we actually wanted to create.”

Onat Hekimoglu, Director, Slow Bros

Experiments and Foundations

While work continued, the game needed funding, and thanks to a a German-based game development grant, the team took their first steps into being an actual business, and founded Slow Bros. This enabled the team to truly experiment, and in 2013 they began their first experiments with 3D scanning and photogrammetry.

“While it was missing a lot of detail compared to the current models,” says Onat, “it gave us a glimpse where working with 3D scans could lead us. It was 2013, and resources for 3D scanning were not as widely available as they are today – we didn’t know of any games that used it…we created our final workflow based on that, and it’s the same workflow we use today, and it all starts with Photogrammetry.“

They used a regular DSLR camera and a turntable to capture images of their hand-made objects to recreate a 3D model within the software itself. Each object needed between two to five-hundred photos to adequately capture and produce a virtual representation.

“The process unfortunately doesn’t end there, as we get a very, unnecessarily high poly-model that’s not suitable at all for games, and needs a lot of manual clean up.” says Onat.

They even worked with material scanning, manually creating every floor, from worn, wooden boards to polished stone, before scanning them into the game.

The process was still time-consuming, but also allowed for more freedom. Character models placed into the game from scans could be compared to their real life counterparts to check for detail and material accuracy.

Where they were once movable in order to animate effectively, the new models were created in greater detail and in rigid form, with the skeletal moving joints digitally re-rigged, which made it possible to use motion capture to animate them. Onat laughs, “Fun fact. I actually did all the motion capture performances. It saved a lot of time because I was also directing!“

Somewhere, Under the Sea

Harold Halibut is set aboard The Fedora, a generational-ship that left Earth in order to ensure humanity’s survival, but ended up crashing into a water-world, trapped under an ocean where severe gravitational forces make it difficult to escape.

I’ve been playing the game for a couple of weeks, and I’m only really going to lightly talk about the first couple of chapters of the game, and will remain as spoiler-free as possible.

Outside of the unique, hand-crafted aesthetic, the first thing that struck me is how real the characters feel. Harold himself, part-lab-assistant, part-janitor and errand boy, somewhat awkward in his own skin, bumbling and mumbling his way through conversations, earnestly showing genuine interest and kindness, and hints of frustration at how hum-drum his life feels.

He’s not your typical hero-protagonist, but more a conduit for the player to immerse themselves into this peculiar world. As per Ole and Onat – “We had the fortune of working with all the voice actors, particularly Andrew Nolen who played Harold and our dialogue-writer Danny Wadeson. They really advanced our whole situation a lot, so much fun and wit and sincerity in the words that Danny added to our character profiles and story-structure… Which was picked up and vividly transformed to sound by the cast.“

It is indeed incredibly well voice-acted, and the actor for Harold is, handily, also an opera singer. Amusingly, there’s a moment of real humanity in the early game where Harold, tasked with cleaning and repairing the Fedora’s water filter, starts singing to himself about the monotony of it all, and starts really giving it some welly.

I asked the team if they ever considered making the game into a musical, but they laughed it off “We’d have loved to put so many more things in there,” says Onat, “…but there’s one point where you have to stop. It’s nice to have these ‘one-off’ events.“

Of course, many have asked Ole and Onat during the development of Harold Halibut, as to why make it a game at all? With all the inspirations the team listed, from classics from studios like Pixar, films like A Nightmare Before Christmas and even creators like Wes Anderson and Hideo Kojima, why make a game – why not a film? “Because it wouldn’t feel the same!” says Onat passionately.

“The interactivity is what enables us to create a much more empathic connection to the story. You decide who to talk to, where you want to go next.”

Onat Hekimoglu, Director, Slow Bros

Beyond the Sea

As I wander the various locales aboard The Fedora, all interconnected by the mysterious “All-Water” tube system, where characters are literally flushed from location to location, I frequently marvel at the “real-ness” of it all. You can see every flaw, every imperfection in everything, and it makes the whole world feel incredibly tactile and alive.

There’s “Slippies”, a store dedicated to winter sporting goods (an incredibly tough sell, considering their environment) and a post-office, where you can go through older, undelivered letters from generations long since dead and gone.

There’s even an arcade, where yes, you can go play some neat little video games within the video game. Every character you meet has a very distinct personality to them, from the genuine warmth and curiosity of Sunny, the pharmacist, to the impatience and curtness of Dr. Mareaux.

There’s genuine history and a real sense of place aboard the Fedora, but while I adore experiences like this, I wonder as to how many out there would gel with this kind of game.

The plot starts laying some groundwork early on – Does the All-Water corporation have an agenda? Is there intelligent life beyond our own in this underwater world? Will the crew of the Fedora ever escape and make it home to Earth?

These are all threads I long to pull at further, but the game is leisurely in its pacing, content to meander through Harold’s life, much like many of us meander through our own.

It was a question I posed to Ole and Onat as they approach release – is the availability of the game on Xbox Game Pass a savvy move to get more folks to try something new, and get the finished title into more players hands? When they look at the state of the industry compared to when they started development all those years ago, is there concern that Harold Halibut would sail by unnoticed?

“While we had various sources of funding over time, from the initial government fund to a period of working with a publisher,” says Ole, “...The Game Pass Deal made it possible to finish the game in the way we want.“

“We’ve heard so many stories from game dev colleagues about how they’re looking for a publisher for 2+ years,” says Onat, “We’ve had a lot of luck that we had a game with this visual style, because we never had any problems. We put out a trailer, 100,000 people have seen it. We launched a Kickstarter campaign, that we didn’t promote before, so it totally failed, but we had 8 or so publishers that were interested. Even when we signed the Game Pass deal…was a very fortunate time where we got more funding than we would have probably gotten if we signed it today, and with less than that, we wouldn’t have been able to finish this.“

Harold Halibut arrives on Xbox Game Pass on April 16th 2024, and you can look forward to my full review closer to launch.