THE MAKING OF…

German indie game studio Slow Bros. on fusing Wes Anderson with Monkey Island in a stop-motion video game, and why its “artists-first production values” matter

Interview by Ian Dean

Images © Slow Bros.

Handmade from clay, HaroldHalibuthas taken nearly a decade to make H 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.

HaroldHalibut, 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 Halibutart 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 SecretofMonkeyIslandand 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 we did was that the first three people working on the game had no other way. Building things was their strongest way of telling a story. There wasn’t enough digital 3D knowledge or even 2D drawing at the time.

I came on to the project shortly after and the building, digitallyrebuilding, manipulating and expanding was part of the big intrigue to me. I was working as an illustrator at the time and had always connected to this way of thinking; a hand connection first, digital processing later. A pencil sketch to the digital finish of a drawing is a simple example.