Aerojelly - a gas-filled jellyfish that floats through the air. Luckily, they don't have stingers because that would make them nightmare fuel.

Working on some new art.

Cut Crawler - a gentle giant that wades in the shallow waterways and filters small krill-like animals through their baleen filter mouth.

Some current WIP locations from Gunwale.

Here be dragons!

It's just not a game if there aren't some cute birds, like these Crimson Wiggletails.

It's Monday here, so enjoy this cute Greeley I did just for fun yesterday.

Big Critter Energy.

Free post over on my Patreon talking about the map screen work I did this week.

Free post over on my Patreon talking about the map screen work I did this week.

New Greeley head art.

First (official) day back on Gunwale for 2026. Today I thought I'd take another look at the map and how I could maybe incorporate my kinky hex into it. Took a long time to get it working with my potato level mathematics but I persist and results are achieved. Here's the first pass I just finished.

New Year, New Art!

I'm supposed to be off for another couple of weeks but I really wanted to do some work on Gunwale. So I've been doing a 2nd pass on some of the dialog portrait art. Here are 2 that I did today. I guess I can take a nap now.

It's been a challenging year working on Gunwale, in a good way. This old dog has been learning heaps of new tricks and things are progressing along nicely. I'm super keen to start introducing you to this cast over the next year. Which characters below intrigue you the most?

Here's a new character reveal: Rapier Whitt, a childhood friend of Greeley's who goes off to the capital to study.

The gates of Black Nest Castle.

Spooky night.

Dropping the layers for the new room I'm working on into the game to see what needs to change. After checking it out, I decided that the big boat needs more parallax. So that means splitting out the layers even more and filling in the missing bits.

Trust the process. Today I painted some rocks and tree layer elements, as well as coloring in the boat layers.

Took a break from the detailed background stuff today to take yet another crack at the interiors. Previous version was isometric and just felt very technical drawing vs the more cosy feel I was after. Experimenting with some simple 3D shapes and sprite stacks. I like the new feel, so far.

My weekend of Gunwale boating lineart.

WIP line art for a new room for Gunwale. I'm trying to make sure that each location has lots of detail for you to look at since that's a pretty major point of the game. I actually can't wait to color the layers and put them in the engine to see them in parallax. That's the best bit.

Here are a few more characters - this group hails from the Forlatt region of Astre.

Some new character bits I did last week.

Some of the residents of the Black Nest Castle in Gunwale. There are only really two that you'll interact with but I like to create whole worlds for them to live in, because that's heaps of fun to do - the best bit, even.

Some new character bits I did last week.

I'm experimenting with various layout designs for my dialogs. My current fave is this one which uses the cute little Greley head for the cursor. I'm thinking of having various heads to use as emojis to represent the text. It'll look super cute.

Experimenting with adding animation to Greeley at the tiller that responds to player controls.

Experimenting with adding animation to Greeley at the tiller that responds to player controls.

I'm experimenting with various layout designs for my dialogs. My current fave is this one which uses the cute little Greley head for the cursor. I'm thinking of having various heads to use as emojis to represent the text. It'll look super cute.

Been a little quiet here because I've had my head down the last few weeks working on some code for the dialog system. Took me a while to get into it, but I'm firing on all cylinders now and hope to get it finished in a few more weeks. In the meantime, here's some background Groats I forgot to post.

Just a slight change to Greeley's basic costume that's a little more summer-y.

Working on a farm down by the water today.

Pretty pleased with how Gunwale is looking at the moment.

I was looking back through the videos of Gunwale that I exported over the years since I first started playing around with the idea back in August 22. It's come a long way even though there's still a long way to go.

I wasn't super happy with the Gunwale universe version of Kit I designed a few months back, so I took another stab at it. Much happier with this variant.

Gunwale Critter of the Month Club: May 2025 A Doch.

You and some of the boaters you'll meet in the waterways of Kanali. Greeley Stonehammer (you) and the Gunwale Regis

I love designing casts of characters more than anything else, followed closely by mechs, critters, and tech. Here's a bunch of characters from Gunwale. I'm very happy that there's a unity of world, yet they're all very different shapes, sizes, and colors - you know, just like a real world.

Greeley cruising down the waterways of Kanali on a narrowboat with a lazy blue ball of fluff for a cat. Me: The anti-action animator. I just want super chill these days. Done in Photoshop, Spine, and After Effects. Also, it was originally meant to be a static drawing, but I got carried away :)

Here's a new angle view of the Regis in 3/4 top-down I'm doing for a video/cutscene. Top is the 3D model I built for reference. I set up the appropriate angle and render it out in Blender with Freestyle lines turned on. Below I draw over that and hand color it for the final version.

Here's a little poster with some of the main characters from Gunwale.

Greeley and Yato are on the drawing board today.

After a lot of hitting brick walls creatively I've finally gotten this to a point where I'm happy enough with it. There's enough in this prototype level to get the vibe right, so I'll leave it here for now and get started on some of the other demo levels.

First test level status: "Getting there"

It's not the Skiffyverse without a Kit.

Here's some progress on the test area. Still a long way to go but it's getting there.... slowly.