The Command Bridge, and a New Chess Set

Yesterday the ship sailed into a storm and the crew watched it from an open deck, which was never really where they would be. Now there is a bridge.

A room for the people steering

It is a new room on the ship: panelled wood, navigation charts, radar screens, a brass helm and a compass rose set into the floor, under windows that run the width of the frame and are full of weather. Four officers work it — a captain, a first officer, a navigator and a communications officer — and each has their own drawn poses.

The scene plays out from in here. The first officer cannot see; the navigator calls the shoreline and says the ship is drifting toward the rocks; the captain makes a ship-wide announcement asking everyone to stay inside; then the communications officer tells the ship to hold on to something and brace. They are captions, not recorded voices.

The rain and the branching lightning are drawn by the game as it runs, and on the bridge they are clipped to the windows, so the weather stays outside where it belongs. The sequence is about forty seconds now, and it still ends the same way: against the rock, and then everyone finding each other in the lounge on Deck 9.

And the chess set was redrawn

The pieces at the lounge chess table are new: a proper ivory-and-walnut Staunton set, cleaner at the size the board is actually played at, with the last move marked on the squares behind them.

The rules got stricter underneath, too. Alongside castling, en passant and all four promotions, the board now handles the draws properly: the threefold and fifty-move claims, including declaring the move you mean to claim on, and the automatic fivefold and seventy-five-move draws, with mate taking priority over any of them. The insufficient-material endings are recognised. It is still an untimed, casual game against a lounge regular — not an engine, not a rated one.

Both are in the recut trailer on the golf project page.