Indie dev and artist Nathan O. Marsh has built one of the most distinctive new worlds in indie gaming almost entirely alone. South Scrimshaw, a hand-painted, free-to-play visual novel about alien whales and speculative ecology has quietly earned a following for its meticulous art and unconventional storytelling.
With South Scrimshaw Part Two nearing release, I chatted with Marsh about the long road of a solo dev, the films and games that shaped his artistic sensibility, and the patience it takes to build a world this strange and beautiful by hand.
Before we really get into the juicy stuff, how’s Part 2 coming along?
Probably the most pressing question for the waiting fans. I wanted an end of year release for Part Two, but if I miss December then I am not sleeping until I ship something in January or soon after. There’s been a mountain of illustration to get through but there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
Part of the delay has been from my attempt to push my painting techniques further. Part of it is the part time job stripping away productive hours. And there were some significant rewrites so it wasn’t always a straight path forward. But I hope the work I’ve put in is visible in the final release.
For any fans, I just always want to express my gratitude they’re here at all and my apologies for the long wait. I think they want something as handcraft and considered as Part One and the patience afforded to me has been pretty extraordinary. I also understand why I get impatient comments too. I feel confident that I’m making the best art I possibly can but there’s still a lot of anxiety of how it will be received.
I can’t imagine the work it takes to get a solo dev project like this done, not just drawing, but animating, painting, designing, and that’s just the visuals. How’s the solo route been so far?
I don’t think I fully realized how ambitious the project was until I was neck deep, so I’d say I was more naive than fearless haha.
The biggest benefit to working on my own is I have the space to figure things out uninterrupted. One of my main motivations at the very start was to learn how to paint. I could draw but I wanted to actually be able to render forms with a brush and really apply color theory. Most of the images in Part One aren’t something I’d have been able to make before I started, and at the outset I worked with glacial slowness. I don’t want to think about how long the watercolor of the mother whale took me. Ages. Anyway I just needed a lot of space to revise and scrap bad material to discover what South Scrimshaw needed to be.
Maybe the worst part of being a solo dev is that you’re the bottleneck for anything getting accomplished. Like I recently got sick for a week, so the game is delayed at least another seven days. There’s no one to pick up the slack or keep things moving. I can’t take day off without feeling some anxiety about work.
I have so much left to do for this project, but in a possible world after this yeah I think I will be done pushing a boulder all by myself haha.
One thing that I just found out is that you’re a movie star, you worked in the art department on films like AHS, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and my favourite: The Grand Budapest Hotel. That’s your first iMDb credit, how did you land that as your first film role?
Haha, I’m just thinking how my industry friends would tease me if they heard me getting called the star of the show. Film and television art departments are an intense collaborative experience with a ton of really widely talented people. Most of my work was in the prop department where you’re really aware these objects you craft are in service of a much larger production. So yeah the star is the team I contributed to haha.
My inroad into film was the work I did for my good friend Ed Bursch on his independent projects, and that got me on the radar of his employers at Indian Paintbrush. After Alfonso gave me a large role on Me and Earl he kicked me quite a bit of work and it was always great working with him.
I saw you did the title cards for Grand Budapest, do you have any fun BTS stories from that?
Grand Budapest definitely remains one of my proudest credits. My role was at the very end of post production and I was working remote so I don’t have any stories from being on set. If you watch to the end of the credits, the little balalaika drawings and the dancing man are what I worked on. But getting a commission of any size from Wes Anderson was awesome. His direction is really precise, the man has a vision and I was just trying my best to deliver on it.
I think my funniest story from that job was actually after it was released in theaters. This is what the dancer’s art assets looked like that I sent over to the animation studio:
Months later some guy found me on instagram and showed me that he got it tattooed on his arm.
I was surprised to put it mildly haha.
Your last iMDb credit was in 2019, coincidentally the same year that Disco Elysium came out. I’m imagining that was what inspired you to move into visual novels, but maybe it was something else?
Actually my IMDB looks like an incomplete list, I’m just lazy about keeping it up to date haha. I’ve contributed graphics to a few shows and films since, and a variety of other freelance work sustained me while creating Part One.
The game that got me thinking about the potential of visual novels was Ace Attorney. I hadn’t played it before the 3DS rerelease. I was so impressed with how strong an impression it made on me despite the minimal presentation (relative to an animated film). I was in LA at the time failing to convince anyone to invest in my own personal ideas and this format seemed both feasible for me to make myself without a million dollars and wouldn’t have to sacrifice any quality of experience. So I went down the VN rabbit hole and what really sold me on the medium was the When They Cry series. Loved Disco Elysium though, there’s no way it didn’t impact my work on some level.
South Scrimshaw is so eclectic, but you can see a few obvious inspirations: nature documentaries, weird sci-fi, maybe some Melville? What inspired the first part?
Yeah, I wear my love for David Attenborough on my sleeve. The clarity that Nick Lane’s books bring to complex biology have also been really important reads, both in terms of Scrimshaw’s prose and my own education.
James Gurney is also both an educator and an inspiration for painting. Calvin and Hobbes was probably the most formative work from my childhood and tracing Bill Watterson is part of how I learned to draw.
Evangelion was a constant inspiration, between the visual style and setting’s mix of otherworldly alien tech and the ordinary. Yume Nikki has lived in my brain since I played it forever ago and is a reason I think weird personal indie games can be as meaningful as huge productions.
And I think just playing in the woods all day and owning pets as a child is why animals eventually became the focus of my art as an adult.
Have you found any new artists or works that have been inspiring you through the development of Part 2?
Studio Ghibli has always been important to me (like probably every other young artist alive right now) but the books I have of Kazuo Oga’s paintings are something I turn to almost daily. He’s like my current lodestar to stay on track and inspired.
I’ve been playing Project Moon’s games and I love how much fun they have with their world building. Orca Layout’s games have made me feel excited about reading visual novels again. And Ed Yong’s An Immense World was a book that’s stayed with me for writing Part Two.
Do you have any snippets or teasers to share from it? What’s a small detail you’re proud of from it?
I put together a very short teaser trailer.
I’m pretty happy with the way I painted rolling waves here. It’s funny to look back but I remember when making the art for Chapter 1 I was so puzzled how I was going to stylize the surface of the ocean. I was looking at references for days trying to figure out what would look good and what I was capable of. I’ve just painted enough since then that was a far more simple task despite looking more complicated.
If you had an infinite budget, or infinite time, how would you like to develop the project, or what would you want to work on next?
I’d eat three meals a day haha. Really I’d love to have this be my full time job. I don’t think I’d ever outsource illustration for South Scrimshaw, but I’m definitely hiring a programmer as soon as I have the means. It’s simple work and I still turn the code into spaghetti.
Future projects, who knows. What I want most is to really switch up the style and make something drastically different. I think visual novels are a really under explored medium and there’s a lot of room to grow and experiment.
Bonus Question: Why Is South Scrimshaw Part 1 Free?
Also you asked why it’s free, which is a pretty common question actually so happy to answer here. For something this completely linear, where there is no gameplay to make an individual experience, it becomes free the moment it gets uploaded to YouTube (which I encourage, any content creator is welcome).
I think I win overall if as many people as possible can experience it with no barriers to entry and then viewers can donate to the extent they would like to support me. And free games just feel more special when you discover them.
Thanks so much for the chat, you do beautiful work, I can’t wait to see what’s next, is there anything you’d like to promote or share? Maybe the best way that fans can support or follow you?
Thank you! It’s fun to pause the stress of work and reflect on the past for a bit.
I’m on Youtube if anyone wants to follow me there. I’ve been trying to share the creative process more so people have a sense of what’s taking so long. The one digital painting I did on stream start to finish took about three days.
Part Two can be wishlisted on Steam right now
Right now if you donate to the creation of Part Two you’ll get your name enshrined on the supporter mural at the end along with a personal sea critter. I drew the mural on stream and I’m really happy with how it turned out.