Frost, fishing and a crew with faces

A station that fights back

Each station now has its own rooms, its own names for the four systems, and its own trouble. The newest is the third station, at 900 m under an ice shelf in the polar night. It opens once the previous station is stabilised and the diver is home alive.

Its trouble is the shelf above. It calves every minute or two, shaking the station and groaning loudly enough for every shark to hear, until the aurora array is aligned. The pacing is fixed so it can be tuned and tested.

The second station got the same treatment: its own lab, radio room, hydroponics bay, cold store and heat exchanger in place of the ship's rooms. Its doors are frozen, so you either chip them loudly or restore the geothermal tap and let the heaters thaw every one. A radio mast puts the whole station on the map. The pilot that plays the test dives learned all of it: it chips doors, raises the mast, aligns the array and warms up when hurt.

Every station also has its own hidden basement hatch and its own key. Leviathan's key opens nothing elsewhere, and nobody can find a hatch until the site's three stars are lit. The ship's own hatch used to sit in plain sight from the first day; now it is not there to find until the topside unlocks are done.

Drawing frost

Frost drawn as scattered single pixels reads as static at 6x. Frost drawn as clumps of smooth noise reads as frost. The second station got 14 new pieces of frost-rimed art drawn this way. In total 30 new sprites went in, all inside the 48-colour palette, bringing the library to 487.

Things to do on the surface

• A tiki bar on the aft deck, open 5 pm to 5 am, with eleven drinks that each give a small dive buff. The crew sit at the stools.
• Fishing off the aft rail: cast, bite, reel, a catch log, and the galley will cook a catch into a buff.
• Real-time seasons, read from the date on the server.
• Footsteps by surface, and the memorial bell now rings from a real recording with a reverb trail.

Voices

Every voice line is recorded: 454 earlier in the day, 481 of 481 by the end, after 23 more for the new radio lines, the captain's offer of the third station, and every line that names a station. Any line that names a station is voiced once per station name, so a new site adds recordings as well as a level. That was an easy cost to miss.

Two lessons from the tests

The first full PlayMode pass since the basement work found a real bug. Anything started on a crew member's own component dies when you talk to that crew member, which left a conversation open forever. It is the kind of failure you do not see until a person talks to the right character.

The balance pass found that the frenzy thresholds had no effect on how often greedy dives ended in a frenzy. How fast noise agitates sharks did. One tuning change took greedy dives that frenzy from 60% to 26%, against a target of 20 to 30%. The second site is harder than the first: greedy extraction is 67% there against 74%, and it is still fair for a quiet diver.

EditMode tests stand at 372 of 372 and PlayMode at 46 of 46, 5 of them new dive tests on the second and third stations.

The crew gets realistic faces

A note from the studio was that the crew did not look realistic, and that pixel art can be. So the crew figure was rebuilt: brow, lids, nose, lips and ears, shoulders, hands, collars, cuffs, pockets and shoes. It is drawn at twice the pixel density (128 px tall instead of 64) and seen side-on, because the crew only ever walk left and right on a flat deck.

The black outlines are gone. Shape now comes from shading: a soft falloff at the edge, a cool rim light, and soft shadows where an arm overlaps a coat. The normal-mapped lamps in the game do the rest. A three-quarter view was tried and rejected as too 3D.

All eight people were baked with the same clips, frame counts, speeds and on-screen size as the first crew, 46 animation strips in all. They sit beside the old art, which the game uses only when the new sprites are missing, so going back is one deletion.