Solargram's Fix It Shop
In a post-disaster world, a community finds refuge in the middle of a flooded city. As Pomo, a skilled mechanic and grandson of a community leader, you are vital to their survival. Your mission is to fix their machines, empowering your people to prosper in their home.
Concepts and Finding our Protagonist
The Cultivator
- Finding the protagonist meant scripting the backstory, key events and supporting characters first; the story had to exist before the character could. The answer was a community helper archetype, someone who sits visually between a mechanic and a gardener.
- That's what needed to be signalled visually: a cultivator, not just a fixer; someone who tends as much as they repair. The design reflects the solarpunk ethos without announcing it.
- The top-down perspective called for a triangular, bottom-heavy silhouette, maximising surface area for narrative props that do the storytelling work without dialogue.
The Workshop
- The main concern behind the level design was what this space says about the world outside it? So I created two versions, open-plan and homey versus industrial and cramped.
- The open-plan workshop won, specifically to hold more greenery and let the solarpunk atmosphere breathe through the space itself rather than through exposition.
The Blueprint
- This prologue storyboard never made it into the final game, but it shaped everything that did.
- The sequence of a protagonist inheriting a derelict workshop became the project's tonal anchor; a reference point for scope decisions, puzzle difficulty and the emotional register the whole team designed toward.
Creating Pomo and The City
Workshop's Visual Design
- The workshop balances a futuristic aesthetic with an approachable warmth; its pod-like structure signals the resilience required in a post-disaster world.
- Indoor plants push back against that harshness deliberately. The old world is not gone; it is being fostered within the new one.
- That contrast is the solarpunk atmosphere in miniature; cultivation and new beginnings held inside a structure built to survive.
Pomo, Optimised for Care
- Pomo was modelled in NomadSculpt and optimised through retopology in Blender.
- The minimalist design was a deliberate technical choice; simple geometry enabled a rapid and safe rigging workflow in Mixamo and smooth integration with existing animation libraries.
The City That Stayed Afloat
- The flooded city draws visual inspiration from the illustrations of Dustin Jacobus; a world where nature has begun reclaiming the machinery that damaged it.
- Green and yellow lighting represents lingering pollution rather than recovery; the atmosphere is hopeful but not clean.
- Rising water levels are not a backdrop; they are a reminder of the ecological disaster that shaped the in-game world, reinforcing the game's core themes through the environment itself.
The Design Behind The Frame
The Hero's Journey
- The game was designed across three acts, each spanning a set number of days. Within each act, players repair machines and encounter narrative conflicts that force a choice between two NPCs and their competing needs.
- Those choices set the tone for everything that follows. Prioritising gun repairs over water filters pushes the community toward militarism; the world responds to what the player decides matters.
- Repair is never neutral in Solargram's Fix It Shop; it is always an argument about what a community should become.
Dialogue System and Inky Integration
- The dialogue system was built in Inky, the scripting tool behind 80 Days. A global dialogue script tracks the full history of player interactions; which NPCs have been spoken to, which topics have surfaced and how Pomo has responded.
- That memory is active, not decorative. The system reads specific conditions met across the script and dynamically selects what comes next, making every conversation a product of everything that came before it.
A World That Talks About You
- Every dialogue choice builds a relationship; friendship levels shift, allegiances form and the web of connections between Pomo and the community grows more specific with each interaction.
- NPC relationships were also mapped to each other, not just to the player. Predefined connections between characters made it possible to create shared world events that NPCs reference between themselves; suggesting a story that extends well beyond the walls of the workshop.