THE MAKING OF / 003
IN DEVELOPMENTWinedark
Homer says we drowned. Homer wasn’t there.
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THE WORLD WE SET OUT TO MAKE.
Build the raft.
Find the way
home.
Homer says the crew of Odysseus drowned. Winedark begins with four of them waking on the wreckage. Hook what the sea gives you, grow a raft into a home, and sail it past the islands of the Odyssey, from the Lotus Shoals and the Cyclops’s cave to the Sirens and, at last, Ithaca. Making it meant building a whole sea inside Conqrex.Engine: an ocean and sky that move through the day, a raft assembled piece by piece, a crew to share it with, and islands worth the landing.
A co-op survival game in development, playable in the browser at winedark.conqrex.com, alone or with a crew of up to four. These captures come from the game’s Linux desktop build, rendered offscreen at 2560 × 1440; no desktop download is offered on this site.
- Landfalls from the Odyssey
- 8
- Raft pieces to build
- 70
- Sailors in a crew
- 4
01 / THE JOURNEY
From the first shape
to a world in motion.
From a scrap of wreckage to a raft with a hearth, a sail and a crew. Follow the building, the people, the sea, the islands and the sound that make the voyage.
THE WRECK & THE RAFT
Start with four reed tiles.
Every voyage begins on a scrap of wreckage. Hook planks, reeds and rope out of the water, then grow the raft tile by tile: reed, cedar and bronze hulls, rails and walls, a sail and a steering oar, a hearth, a still and a loom. The hammer shows each piece as a see-through ghost before it is placed.
- Made with
- Sculpt · Canvas · deterministic building rules
- What changed
- 70 kinds of raft piece on one grid that the whole crew shares.
Behind this step
The ghost in this frame is the game’s own build preview: green where a reed hull tile would fit beside the rails. Whatever a crewmate stores aboard counts for building and crafting, so nobody has to carry it.
THE CREW & THE HANDS
Four survivors you can tell apart.
A veteran in a bronze cuirass, a young actor with a comedy mask pushed up onto his head, an old sailor with a coil of rope, and a hooded man under a wide-brimmed hat. They share one skeleton and 19 animation clips, from treading water to hauling a line hand over hand.
- Made with
- Sculpt · Rig · Canvas face painting · authored clips
- What changed
- A crew whose faces and silhouettes read at one metre and at thirty.
Behind this step
Each sailor is a single rigged model of about 18,000 triangles with sculpted eyes, ears and five-fingered hands. Open the 3D studio below to play their clips on the actual game assets.
THE SEA & THE WEATHER
Let the light tell the time.
The ocean and the sky move together through the day. The sun lingers at golden hour, night brings lamplight and stars, and the weather turns from a glassy calm to sea mist, squalls and full storms that pile white water against the hull.
- Made with
- Ocean and procedural sky · VFX · fixed-step weather simulation
- What changed
- A day and a weather that change how the sea looks, sounds and plays.
Behind this step
This storm comes from the same build and the same raft as the golden-hour frames; only the hour and the weather differ.
THE LANDFALLS
Every island is a chapter.
Eight landfalls follow the Odyssey: the Lotus Shoals, the Cyclops’s isle, Aeolia and its bronze wall, Circe’s Aiaia, the Sirens’ Teeth, Thrinacia, the land of the dead and, at last, Ithaca. Between them lie smaller islands of olive, cedar, salt and basalt.
- Made with
- Terrain · Sculpt · set-piece layout scripts
- What changed
- Eight story landfalls and twenty-two islands to put in at.
Behind this step
The island in this frame comes from the game’s island templates. On its shore, the cave, the pens and the boulder are set pieces placed by the project’s layout script, which also writes the collision the game uses.
THE SCORE & THE NIGHT
Sixteen cues. One theme.
Every music bed carries the same four-bar Winedark theme in its own mode and metre: a lone lyre on the title screen, frame drums in 7/8 for the storm, and the whole theme in full voice only when Ithaca comes into view. Lyre, kithara, aulos, frame drums and voices are synthesised in the engine.
- Made with
- Music Studio · synthesis · composition scripts
- What changed
- Sixteen music beds and five stingers that follow the hour, the weather and the voyage.
Behind this step
The project keeps every song as an editable Music Studio file beside the script that composed it. The listening samples below are encoded from the game’s own exports.
SAME WORLD. A LOT OF SMALL DECISIONS.
A crew finds its faces.
From helmeted mannequins to sculpted people with eyes, hands and draped cloth.
02 / THE 3D STUDIO
Pick a piece.
Look a little closer.
The actual models that make up the game.
Turn them around, try the animations, and explore how they’re built.
Choose “Explore in 3D” to open the collection.
- Triangles
- —
- Materials
- —
- Animations
- —
03 / ASSET LIBRARY
A world, piece by piece.
A raft to live on. A crew to share it with. A sea to cross. Actual characters, pieces and places captured in the game renderer.
9 asset collections
A raft that has been lived on
Rope rails, a reed net, a painted eye and a banner, grown out of the first wreckage.
Golden hour, anchored
The whole crew aboard, off a wooded island.
Faces in the evening sun
Sculpted eyes, lids, ears and beards, painted on Canvas.
Into the sun
The figurehead and the crew against a low sun.
Morning mist
Fog at dawn turns the sea to pearl.
The Cyclops’s isle
Basalt peaks over the cave of Polyphemus.
Night watch
Lamps and a brazier keep the deck lit.
The title screen
The tagline, the painted eye, and the wreck every voyage starts from.
The bag and the craft list
Every recipe shows its ingredients, and everything stored aboard counts.
04 / SOUNDTRACK
From the first plank.
To the shore of Ithaca.
Four of the game’s sixteen music beds, made in Conqrex Music Studio. Each carries the same theme, from a lone lyre on the title screen to the full voices of the homecoming.
TITLE / THE THEME, WHOLE
The Theme
Solo lyre, then the sea comes up · D Dorian · 54 BPM
1:20 · ORIGINAL GAME AUDIOOPEN SEA / EVENING
Dusk
Lyre and low aulos · D Dorian · 5/4 · 58 BPM
1:26 · ORIGINAL GAME AUDIOOPEN SEA / THE WEATHER TURNS
Storm
Frame drums and a hard-blown aulos · E Phrygian · 7/8
1:20 · ORIGINAL GAME AUDIOLANDFALL 08 / HOME
Ithaca
The theme in full voice, once · G Mixolydian · 76 BPM
1:16 · ORIGINAL GAME AUDIOThese listening samples come from the game’s music assets, trimmed and faded for this page. The songs, instruments and mix settings remain editable in the project’s Music Studio files. The music was composed and rendered with the built-in tools, without a local generative music model.
05 / THE TOOLBOX
The tools behind
the tiny details.
The engine provides the studios.
The project adds recipes and workflows for this particular world.
Sculpt, from Python recipes
Generators in the project drive the engine’s Sculpt operations: lofted and lathed forms, carved faces, five-fingered hands, and the leaf cards that give each tree a broken outline against the sky.
The crew, the creatures, 70 raft pieces, over a hundred items and 41 island set pieces.
Canvas
Layered painting with real alpha: faces with brows, lips and beards, cloth with folds and borders, the eye on the sail, and leaf sprays cut out of their own transparency.
Faces, clothing, sails and foliage.
Rig & clips
One human skeleton carries every sailor’s 19 clips, from climbing out of the sea to hauling a line. The first-person arms have their own clips for the hook, the rod, the spear and the hammer.
The crew, the creatures and the hands you see in first person.
Music Studio
Each cue is an editable song written by a script, with the theme threaded through it in that cue’s own mode and metre, then mixed and exported as a seamless loop.
Sixteen music beds and five stingers.
Design Lab
A fourteen-row campaign of bot crews measured the first hour, the ketos’s attacks and a long voyage. It caught hunger and thirst draining three times faster than designed, and the numbers were fixed against those runs.
Meter timings and the pacing of the first hours at sea.