Handmade from clay, Harold Halibut has taken nearly a decade to make and is one of 2024’s most anticipated indie games.
While AAA devs push for graphical supremacy using Unreal Engine 5, the German indie studio Slow Bros. has turned to stop-motion animation and an artist-first workflow that celebrates the creative process as much as it strives to find a new way to deliver interaction.
Harold Halibut, scheduled for its release in the coming months, features handmade clay poseable puppets and detailed model sets, which are then scanned and digitised into Unity, with some clever use of mocap suits from Xsens to bring the scenes to life. This is a modern and inventive merging of traditional animation with leading edge game technology, and one that celebrates the flaws and quirks of artisan animation as well as narrative design in video games.
We sat down to interview Harold Halibut art director and Slow Bros. co-founder Ole Tillmann to discover how and why this small team decided to spend almost a decade making an elegant animated game that resembles Wes Anderson filtered through classic era LucasArts adventures like The Secret of Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion. In a word, it’s unique.
Did you ever feel like making this game traditionally using the typical 3D software?
We started even longer ago, I fear to admit, and I’ll happily list some of what we’ve learned since. But I also feel like prefacing that a lot of our time and learning revolved around running a game company, finding money and all the boring things, as well as actually realising and, in part, inventing a new physical-thing-tointeractive-virtual-thing-pipeline. We never felt like doing this ‘traditionally’ in 3D, although we’ve often drawn comparisons out of curiosity.
The first reason for doing it the way
