Harold Halibut is a handmade 'stop-motion aesthetic' adventure about friendship and home in a giant spaceship trapped beneath an alien sea

pcgamer.com:

I love the way Harold Halibut looks. It's «a handmade narrative game about friendship and life on a city-sized spaceship submerged in an alien ocean,» which is an intriguing premise in its own right, but the «stop-motion aesthetic» reminds me of those classic holiday movies from the '60s, and games like The Neverhood and Armikrog. That style, which we got a closer look at in a new trailer that appeared today in the PC Gaming Show, was actually born in part out of simple necessity.

«The very first proof of concept for this game was Harold’s room,» Harold Halibut art director Ole TIllman told me. «It was made from painted wood because it was what Fabian Preuschoff, Daniel Beckmann and Onat Hekimoglu were able to work with. 

»At that point, many years ago, none of them were skilled enough in any of the usual art-for-games-making skills. They were however quite skilled in real-world-crafting up a beautiful little room with a little bull eye to the sea. They then invited me to the project as a concept artist but we quickly got swept up together in the world building."

The team experimented with using stop-motion to make the game but ultimately decided it was «too restrictive» and time consuming. Instead, they continued to build physical assets and, as the development team grew and gained experience—Tillman said a lot of Harold Halibut's 10-year development period was simply «learning and figuring things out»—scanned them in three dimensions, enabling them to be used as conventional game assets. Most of the in-game animation is actually motion-captured and then applied to «digitally rigged» 3D puppets, which enabled the small team at Slow Bros to create a large library of animations.

«Even though we did it this way rather than