Sinemorsk: oil inclusive

About this game

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• Announcements·22 Jun 2026Official

  Developer Diary #10

  In my previous posts, I talked about spending nearly a year working on this game, but I barely touched upon why I believe this time was well spent and why the game itself matters so much.Personally, I'd describe myself as a lazy eco-activist. I sort my trash, buy clothes from thrift stores (and donate them back), share posts, and write about environmental events. But systemic activism is a whole different beast. I have endless respect for people who, year after year, travel to the sites of forest fires, organize waste-sorting drives, and plant forests (actually making sure they grow, rather than just sticking saplings into the ground at a local park). The volunteers on the coastline became systemic activists by necessity: the aftermath of the disaster couldn't be cleared out in a month, six months, or even a year and a half after it happened.Yet, even this kind of work often goes unnoticed. Just like the fuel oil disasters in Anapa and Tuapse went completely unnoticed by many Russians. So, my goal is to make sure as many people as possible know that the coastline was saved—and continues to be saved—primarily by volunteers, and only then by official agencies and services. This labor is grueling, long, and invisible. Not only is it unpaid, but it also frequently demands a massive toll on the activists' own energy, money, and time. Still, people from all corners of the country travel there anyway, simply because they can't bring themselves to do otherwise.I want the skeptics, the indifferent, and the casually interested to walk a mile in a volunteer's shoes—even if only virtually—and try to untangle the mess of problems that comes with this work. I hope that Sinemorsk will inspire someone to go out to a local clean-up for the first time, turn sporadic helping into systemic action, subscribe to environmental channels in their region, or support these teams with a donation. In short—to change some small thing in their own life so that something around them changes for th...
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• Announcements·19 Jun 2026Official

  Developer Diary 9

  In the initial visual drafts, the main character, a volunteer named Lena, was a teenage girl. The niji model I was experimenting with kept creating smooth, anime-style faces with huge eyes. I wanted to keep the eyes, as well as Lena’s fragility, but make her look more mature. I searched for references on Pinterest and found a lookalike real-life model, but I described her using text prompts.Her look came together gradually—pale skin, blonde hair and eyebrows, grey-green eyes, hoodies, long-sleeve shirts, and a DSLR camera. At first, Lena came out looking cold, emotionless, or just sad. At one point, while searching for the right style, I cranked up the Weirdness slider, and Lena ended up with white, fish-like eyes and tiny black dots for pupils. I think that was the exact moment I realized I wanted to create a revenge route, where Lena gradually loses herself and turns into a sea monster.Artem—a volunteer from the pro-government headquarters whose storyline spans the second and third phases of the game—was a bit easier to figure out. Almost immediately, I liked the concept of an arrogant hipster with bleached streaks in his hair, wearing a branded hoodie. Plus, his facial features didn't distort during generation as much as Lena's did. For a while, I envisioned Artem more as a hacker than a PR photographer. A black turtleneck and a trendy laptop remained as a nod to that idea.I spent several weeks looking for the characters' visual styles, and even during the final build, I was still tweaking some images using Midjourney V.7, which was brand new at the time. Looking back, I think it would have been better to use Nana Banana, which keeps the images more consistent. I could have made things even simpler by creating a few poses and expressions for each character and swapping them out according to the dialogue lines. But for some reason, I chose the hard way, embedding the characters directly into the overall composition of the image rather than just overlaying them on ...
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• Announcements·18 Jun 2026Official

  Developer Diary #8

  …is exactly the kind of comment I expect to see. And honestly, I’ll probably get them.There are over four hundred illustrations in the game, and working on them took several months. I’m certain human artists would have done a better job, but then the project would have taken years.Every single illustration was pieced together by hand. First, I looked for photos of Anapa's landscapes (recalling my own trips there before the spill and what the atmosphere felt like back then) alongside references that could capture a moody, liminal vibe. I generated a few dozen backgrounds, which I later combined. I’ll talk about the characters separately, but I didn't use photos of real people as a baseline, nor did I type prompts like "in the style of \." I only started liking the first results about a month in, but not a single one was used "as is"—every image was touched up and refined.The illustrations in the game are part of the narrative. They are packed with details you can examine closely: text on banners, screenshots of chat logs, notices. Some of them function as micro-films: characters move around, take photos, a TV anchor reports the news, birds fly across the sky, and the sea washes up new layers of fuel oil onto the shore. This was one of the last ideas to cross my mind, and I love how a subtle animation of water or clouds suddenly breathes life into the otherwise static artwork.I've already mentioned how I used data analysis, but a purely technical part of the job involved Cursor, which helped translate the finalized text from Twine format into code for the Ren'Py visual novel engine. Now that felt like actual magic to me: I’ve barely worked with code before, and learning it from scratch would have taken months. Being able to just say in plain English, "Please add a stat panel to the top right corner in the following order," was priceless. The same goes for debugging the already loaded game, where I'd ask Cursor to playtest different narrative routes and show me how the...
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• Announcements·16 Jun 2026Official

  Developer Diary #7

  Even though Sinemorsk is based on real events, at the end of the day, it’s a game. Personally, I find it more interesting to unlock storylines for the sake of the narrative depth, but I know many players love to "min-max" stats across different playthroughs and test the limits of the system by intentionally lowering or raising certain values. Besides, there is a distinct dramatic element to these stats: the player can see how their decisions cause Lena to burn out faster or, conversely, feel more confident when communicating with other characters.There’s also a unique drama to the numbers themselves: if Lena forces herself to push through, working despite her fatigue, the burnout counter will start ticking up faster and faster. If she occasionally chooses hanging out with friends over taking on another work shift, listens to her team's input, and spends time with them, her fatigue will drop, while her inner circle's trust will grow.To keep the visual novel from turning into a mechanical point-counting exercise, I made some of the stats hidden. They reflect how Lena interacts with other characters and how her decisions impact them. These invisible stats pay off at pivotal moments: for instance, determining who comes to Lena’s rescue in a critical situation, or how her blog subscribers respond to a crowdfunding appeal. A careless word, an unexplored corner of the beach, or a momentary indifference to someone's plea can lead to tragedy—the death of a living creature. And when Lena finds out, she will carry the weight of guilt and shame.The relevance of these stats shifts as the plot progresses. At the beginning of the game, it's vital for Lena to grow her blog and avoid burning out prematurely. Later on, however, interactions with fellow volunteers, friends, and eventually local officials take center stage.The hardest part was balancing the transitions between chapters and the endings. Initially, I mapped out stats that mirrored real human experiences, overlaid them on...
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• Announcements·11 Jun 2026Official

  Developer Diary #6

  Mystical experiences and the arc of an insecure protagonist are all well and good, but what’s under the hood? Aside from the thousands of lines of chat logs and articles I’ve already mentioned, there is a massive web of branching paths written in Twine. This software allowed me to map out the different trajectories for our protagonist and her companions, eventually tying them all back to their respective endings.The game is divided into three narrative phases, each capable of leading to its own set of conclusions. In the first phase, Lena gets a crash course in the realities of Sinemorsk and meets her fellow volunteers, facing her first tough choices and her first painful losses. If her fatigue level hits a critical point by the end of this phase, the game will trigger one of the "premature" endings: Lena will simply give up, head back home, and scroll through third-party social media feeds to see how the disaster wrapped up without her. But if she still has the strength and motivation, she pushes on.In the second phase, Lena crosses paths with people who will become her permanent companions, and with whom she can build either friendly (or hostile) relationships. While before people would drift in and out of her story, affecting only her, now most choices will directly impact her relationships with other characters. These bonds, in turn, will dictate her chances of success. It's here that the protagonist's self-doubt—or the player's own urge to blindly champion "everything good against everything bad"—can play a cruel trick on them.At the climax of the second phase, players might unlock a tempting path of retributive justice: pushed to the brink by the apathy of others and her own powerlessness, Lena might opt for radical measures. No spoilers, but I will say that animating the white haze for this particular story branch took more effort out of me than anything else in the game.Finally, those who make it to the third phase will face the ultimate boss: the grand open...
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