Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #180 - The Art & Music of The Great Wave

Happy Thursday, and welcome to the Art & Music dev diary. I am Karl, Nautical Aesthetics Officer, and the less I write, the better. Let’s get started.

As The Great Wave and accompanying free update have a massive amount of art between them I will say upfront that for practical reasons, not everything can and will be shown here, but I will do my best to guide you through the general concepts of things. We divide the content then into two main chunks: Japan content, and Navy content. First off is Japan, and in Japan there is architecture.

The buildings of Japan

As with many releases, we have made an overhaul of the architecture - in this case Japan’s. We sought to remain as faithful to the historical source material as possible. However, as this is both a period—and a game—defined by rapid transformation, we had to strike a careful balance between continuity and change.

In practice, this has meant preserving traditional Edo-period architecture in certain areas—predominantly rural—while allowing others to transition toward early Meiji-era styles, including the “giyōfū” forms that began to emerge in the 1870s.

Our ambition is to evoke a visual experience that reflects the architectural syncretism of Japan’s evolving urban landscape, while still retaining the enduring character of its rural environments.

Rural areas

Whilst cities rapidly modernized, the countryside remained largely rooted in Edo-period forms for decades. We have tried to illustrate this by keeping our rural buildings traditional.

Steam post imageLow income housing is illustrated by Gassho-zukuri and Nambu Magari-ya farms, while medium income households are based on smaller Sukiya-zukuri buildings. High income households - such as they were - are a mix of traditional Shoin-zukuri and the less formal Sukiya-zukuri, basically opulent mansions primarily for Aristocracy and Samurai.

Steam post image The Rural Town hub has a few typical Edo-period references: a bath house, often found in post towns along the Gokaidō; a temporary Kabuki stage has been set up, probably showing a classic folk story; there’s a market market going on, with lots of stalls. I think I can see a tea house as well…

Steam post image Farmland

Unique models have been made for silk plantations - lots of mulberry trees for the silkworms to feed on - as well as rice farms, livestock ranches, and wheat fields.

Steam post image A prosperous rural town - could be Kagoshima - in the south, with a manor house by the city centre

Urban areas

The cities of the Edo period and Meiji era are the most affected by the changing world, with both visual influences from Europe as well as a new burgeoning industry and technology.

For the low income housing of urban areas we have gone for the traditional Nagaya long row houses, with shared toilets and wells. Mid income houses are represented by the Machiya merchants quarters, two-story houses with shop fronts, alleys and sometimes small gardens in the back. High income housing is, as in the countryside, exclusive to the Samurai class.

Municipal buildings

As with residential houses, the city buildings will consist of a mix of traditional buildings and modern, western-influenced shapes, structures and ideals.

Steam post image Some of our references - see if you can identify them

Pictured here is a city centre, with Machiya buildings surrounding a modern style office; a government administration building, and a trade center.

The extremes of the Meiji era city can be illustrated by the most modern skyscraper, modeled on the Ryōunkaku with its’ electric elevator, and the most ancient military barracks, housed in a very traditional castle, loosely based on Osaka castle, Matsue castle and Tsuyama castle.

A few cityscapes (apologies for the weather, it seems to rain non-stop on the Japanese isles): A good example of Machiya townhouses right next to some industry

A mix of the old and the new

Some nagaya longhouses in the cities, as well as a lot of countryside vernacular architecture. And more rain.

Character art and DNA

We've incorporated DNA for approximately 99 identifiable historical figures. While many more historical characters have been added, the appearance of a considerable number of them remains unknown, as they have been lost to history. The images below showcase examples of characters for whom we possess a visual reference, though the quality of those references varies…

The DNA was provided by another of our amazing modders, Lord R, of Morgenröte fame, as we mentioned in the last dev diary. Here’s a few words from Lord R:

When Klakner asked me to create the DNAs for the characters I knew that all those hours in the Portrait Editor finally paid off. Instead of creating Darwin with all his beard variants or another Swiss Chemist no one knows (but I need all the historical chemists!) I would finally get to make DNAs for the game itself and not “just for a mod”.

But then it hit me: Japanese characters. To be honest I mostly worked on European characters before, so I wasn’t sure how well those Japanese characters would turn out. I tried nonetheless. And I think they turned out pretty good.

I especially enjoyed working on the characters of which there were only paintings or drawings. I had to decide how much I would take the overly stylized features (like the chins) into consideration while also making them look realistic enough.

One interesting thing I learned while doing that was that many Japanese people in the photos had a weak chin while the ones in the paintings and drawings were the exact opposite.

Now I hope that you will enjoy these characters as much as I enjoyed creating their DNA!

Thank you again Lord R!

Several new clothing items were also implemented, together with pattern and color variations on old items, to increase variation and better represent the classes.

If anyone can pull off a jacket like this, it’s this guy.

A short interjection from Pelly!

For this Update we worked with a Modder, Miss Duce, to get some lovely Japanese clothing assets from one of her mods (JUP/Japanese Uniform Pack) into the base game for Update 1.13.

Why, you may ask? Because one day we were looking at JUP, and said “ Those clothing assets look really good! We should pay her to get them in the game! ” and so that is what we did!

We will make sure that the selected assets will be highlighted in the changelog, however please note that will be removed from the mod around release as they will already be in the game. The mod with the remaining assets will, of course, remain so Miss Duce can keep making amazing clothing for it in the future.

These assets will be available to everyone who has the base game, free of charge, when the update releases on April 28th!

Here are a couple examples of the assets below:

And some words from Miss Duce herself!

Hi everyone! Miss Duce here! For those who don't know me, I've been modding the game since April 2024, and I'm the one behind the creation of the Japanese Uniform Pack and the Chinese Uniform Pack (and a few other mods), I'm also working on the Community Outfit Mod with Lord R and Ulf. I mostly do what I call “clothing modding”, which includes everything from making a 3D model from scratch to implementing it in the game fully working!

A while ago, I got contacted by Pelly regarding the implementation of some of my assets into the game for the 1.13 Update. I couldn't pass on such an amazing opportunity, so I accepted of course! Working with Big Platypus? Who would say no!?

Sadly I don't have much more to say as I'm no expert in dev diaries, but I at least want to give a few words before leaving. First I want to thank Pelly who's been lovely to work with and very helpful regarding all the paperwork. Then Mike for the pleasant exchanges regarding the assets. I must also thank Lord R and James1230 because I wouldn't be here without them.

Thanks also to the amazing Vicky community and of course last but not least! Those without whom we wouldn't be here, the whole Victoria 3 team!

Thank you Miss Duce! It was great to work with you on getting these assets into the game and we hope to work with you (and maybe other modders) in the future like this again!

Table assets

As usual, the update comes with a set of new table assets, at least one of which will be edible as is tradition. The one I’d like to showcase is not, though, but it serves as a nice bridge between Japanese content and naval content.

With most of the 3D elements of the Japan content out of the way, we move on to boat noises ships, ships and more ships.

The visuals of the navy update

In total we have researched, modeled and textured 20 distinct ship types, all with four separate categories of updates (plus wildcards with no visual impact, so won’t talk about that here). That means a lot of art has been produced that may not be apparent at first glance.

Here are the ships, copied straight from the in-game shipbuilder UI:

NB. The “entity states” and “free camera” will not be in the release version, that’s just for me so I can spawn ships at will.

Feel free to treat this image as a bingo sheet when searching for the historical reference points we used when making these.

All ships above are in their standard configuration. As previously mentioned, the configurations will affect certain visual aspects, but they’ll be - whenever possible - consistent across all ships, so with a bit of practice, you should be able to easily tell what sort of ship you’re looking at.

The different parts are:

• Armor - Illustrated by the colour and texture of the hull, and the number and position of portholes

• Armament - Illustrated by number and type of guns and barrels

• Propulsion - Illustrated by the number of funnels, masts, and/or sails

• Supply Capacity - Illustrated by type of funnel

Standard modern Ironclad, nothing fancy…

Here’s our favorite, the Dreadnought, with unmodified vs modified armor, armament and propulsion. That’s a lot of barrels.

A side note on animation: rather than relying on traditional keyframe animation, which produced great, but unfortunately very static results, we have created a code-based system, meaning that all rocking motions, yaw, pitch, tilt, etc, such as in idle and moving animations, are all based on mathematics. Same for any casemates or turrets - they swivel to a certain position that is set in script files when firing. This may not mean anything to you, the player, but it allows us to continue work on this in the future, e.g. if we wanted to add more visual aspects of weather - we could set the strength of the waves or have the wind direction affect the hull independently of the direction it is travelling or whether it is idle or firing all guns. Stay tuned for more on this in the future.

A very random selection of capital ships covering most of the game timeframes (see DD175 for a breakdown of how we categorise the ships). All are in default configuration, meaning they have middle of the road modifications - not too fast, not too armored, not too offensive, not too tailored towards long range - but they’re good ships nonetheless. Although I probably wouldn’t take that monitor that far out from the coast… Bonus points if you can pinpoint which historical ship we’ve based the models on!

We’ve also worked on new visual effects (as well as new shaders for the effects) that allows us to do more realistic effects cheaper (computationally).This means we can have more effects, e.g. different gunpowder smoke for earlier vs. later guns. Here are a few examples:

A Dreadnought firing a broadside…

…and an Ironclad on fire! That ship should probably head towards a friendly port soon.

A few more random things: Strait control, that most topical of topics. When we started looking at naval forts for enforcing your straits, the varying designs, materials, and - let’s be honest - quality of naval fortifications across the world, coupled with the infinite permutations of coastlines and available space made this a daunting task. Fortunately for us, someone had already solved this intricate design problem for us, and it is the British Empire, and they gave us Martello towers. They come in a single shape (almost), they are self-contained and self-sufficient, and they can be made from whatever stone is available locally. You’ll still to this day find them on most continents.

A selection of fortlets

Two Martello towers guarding a strait. Are you being blocked?

Finally, let’s have a look at the naval combat dioramas. As Tunay has gone through, a naval battle will have a whole UI unto itself, including a 3D view of ships, but we still wanted to represent the fleet action on the map in an appropriate fashion. After the 1.5 update I was also very keen to have battles less static - we wanted some motion in the visuals.

So, naturally, one’s mind wanders towards the line of battle etc. However, two things made us go for a different approach: one is that the age of sail ends very early on in our timeline - in fact the last “pure” ship of the line battle with sailing ships was in 1827, and the other is that we can’t fit a whole lot of action into our cramped map without losing our sanity. So we have opted for a compromise, which you may call the circle of battle (or not, no one else does). Basically, the two fleets converge on a sea node, and circle each other around that point, facing off across the circle of battle until one fleet is either sunk or all ships have withdrawn. If you pause the game, the actual combat logic pauses, but as with the land battle dioramas we wanted you to have something to look at, so the naval battle dioramas will keep playing out. And it looks a bit like this:

This is an entirely fictional non-historical fight between a super Dreadnought and her trusty Pre-Dreadnought sidekick, and, let’s see, a Protected Cruiser, a Ship of the Line, a Modern Ironclad, another Pre-Dreadnought, an Aircraft Carrier, and a modernized Troopship in what appears to be dazzle camouflage. That Super Dreadnought does not look healthy…

Another view of the same battle from the other side - looks like both dreadnoughts have sustained light to medium damage now.

Here’s a short clip of the battle above. Note that at the time of capture this is still work in progress, there is no sound, not all VFX are in, and that plane is flying far too low for comfort.

That concludes our look at the 3D art of the navy update, and we continue with the 2D art of The Great Wave.

2D

UI Skin

As with every UI reskin, we pondered “ What materials would be used to make the interface if it was an actual physical frame? ” So, lacquered wood and earthy tones formed the foundation for building a new UI skin for The Great Wave. Some of the early explorations dabbled with a mix of different textures and shapes such as Mon flags and Torii Gates.

Testing various colour palettes

References from various sources but all things Japanese

We eventually settled on a design that is still very iconic in Japanese designs but less typical than a Torii gate. The Karahafu design usually symbolises elegance and prestige and is often used for important entrances of Japanese buildings. We also wanted to incorporate the Ranma panels that are very prominent in Japanese interiors. This works perfectly for our UI frames, where the center section is where the header texts usually are. Then for the colors and materials, we decided to go with an almost black, dark brown color with gold trimmings to add both a touch of elegance and contrast, especially along the edges of the frames. We also threw in accents of red (still an earthy tone) for some variety.

Side Panel and Fullscreen Panel

For the first time, we have changed the material of the buttons slightly. It's not just wood, it’s lacquered wood!

Heavily inspired by Japanese lacquerware

With a dark wood as a base, the buttons need to be much brighter so they stand out. We did experiment with red for the buttons but they stood out too much and red is usually associated with negativity in UX design so we settled on a copper tone for the buttons.

Shiny buttons!

The aptly named ‘Lacquer’ UI main HUD

Different elements of the ‘Lacquer’ UI

Papermap Skin

“ What would a naval map look like if it was made in Japan? ” This was the big question we asked ourselves when coming up with ideas for the new papermap. Let’s take a look at some of the reference images we collected.

Looking at some old Japanese maps

War prints in Ukiyo-e style

There is a boatload of inspiration to draw from!

Of course, this is a fantastic opportunity for us to be inspired by Meiji era ukiyo-e woodblock prints and to make illustrations in the same style. As usual, we would like to showcase some historical events but this time, we focused on Japanese naval history. We also wanted to incorporate mythological elements, as they are so interwoven with Japanese culture.

One last aspect we wanted to add were humoristic drawings of animal caricatures also known as Chōjū-giga. If you squint there are also certain frog illustrations scattered on the map, as well as some secret references to our team. Let us know if you spot them!

A few great waves

A depiction of the Battle of Port Arthur

Japan's creation by deities Izanagi and Izanami

Kasa-obake and some frog humanoids

Giant catfish (Namazu) causing The Ansei Edo Earthquake of 1855

The Wakon Yosai papermap in its full glory

Icons

The massive rework of Ships also calls for a revamp of the Ship Stat icons. Since these icons are going to appear in multiple places (and most of the time, relatively small) the designs of these icons should be relatively simple and easily identifiable. There are also quite a large amount of stats and some of them are related. Below you can see a mind map of the relationship between some of these icons.

Ship Stats icons

Ship Customisation icons

Sea Conditions are a new feature that is expanded from Harvest Conditions. As such the style of the icons should be familiar, but distinguishable with a new naval themed frame.

Naval Laws are a new Law Group

We take every opportunity we can to draw samurai!

Admiral (Commander) Orders have been repurposed to fit the new featured Naval Missions.

Red arrows now mean offensive actions and blue arrows mean Defensive actions.

Several new buildings have been added and with new buildings, we usually have new Production Methods as well.

Naval Fort, Logistics Centres

New Production Methods and yes….another samurai!

New Prestige Goods

Event images

We have made quite a few images about fighting and battles and soldiers, but an Asian centered one is still lacking. There’s no time as good as now to make one that’s inspired by the Boshin War.

More Samurai and a couple of Jinshotai

Similar to battle related event images, we are lacking in an Asian cityscape. For this, we decided to show a Japanese cityscape that is modernizing with contrasting modern buildings and innovations with more traditional ones.

Tradition meets Modernization with the rickshaws crossing paths with the electric tram.

Ship construction was definitely a thing back in the day

That’s a lot of terms and conditions - almost as long as a V3 dev diary!

Actual photo of a V3 dev burning the ‘midnight oil’ to write a new dev diary

Main menu

With the focus on Japan and the navy, we feel this is a good opportunity to add even more flavor and immersion to the expansion. A new main menu illustration is a surefire way to showcase what's new in the pack right from the moment the player boots up The Great Wave. (Not exactly, there’s still loading times and compiling shaders)

A main menu illustration is usually a collage of different illustrations and with each new one, the content changes to reflect the new expansion it comes with.

Different sections that make up the main menu image.

We worked very closely with the Narrative team to come up with the top 5 characters that best represent this expansion. Everyone had their favourites, but we finally managed to come to an agreement.

Are these your top 5 historical characters to represent The Great Wave?

More references for the different environments for the illustration

I think the main menu turned out really well!

Music

When it came time to consider music for Volume 3, we decided to take a different approach this time around. Instead of a dedicated music pack, we opted for adding authentic fitting music for each release in the Volume. For The Great Wave, that meant adding music to highlight Edo/Meiji era Japan, and what might have been heard at the time. We reached out to our music providers and searched for highly skilled musicians, experienced in historically accurate performance of traditional Japanese music. They provided us with a list of candidate public domain songs, traditional authentic songs preserved over time through oral tradition or notation, and from that list the Victoria 3 audio and design teams narrowed it down to the strongest candidates.

Since release the music in Victoria 3 has used a few different instrumentation paradigms - symphony orchestra, chamber orchestra or soloist performances. For this release we opted for a soloist instrumentation since chamber and symphony- and chamber orchestra were not prevalent as performance formats in Japan during the period. This format also meant we could arrange recording logistics to allow recording a higher number of tracks. In total, roughly 28 minutes of linear music performance is included in the release. But as you know, on top of that we also allow music to continue with a more ambient/intermittent tail after the main tracks play. This is quite a sizable addition of music, considering our latest standalone music pack Songs of the Homeland clocked in at 46 minutes 51 seconds linear music.

That is all from us this time, we hope you enjoyed the delve into the art and music of The Great Wave and the inspirations behind them.

Tomorrow we also have a treat for you all, we will be streaming an interview with Drachinifel by our resident ship lovers Hansi and Lino! The stream will start at 14:00 CEST and be on our Twitch and YouTube channels.

Next time we join you in dev diary form, it will be with the changelog and achievements before release, with your friendly Community Manager Pelly!

Schedule of our upcoming Dev Diaries:

• April 23 - Changelog & Achievements

• April 28 - Release of The Great Wave and Update 1.13