2025.01.13

building the bionicle boat

Back in 2023, I was trying to build the boat. You know the one. It looks like the pic on the left, and gazing at images of it makes this music play in your head:

There was a challenge to this endeavor - just look at the damn thing and imagine reverse-engineering it. For years, I had resolved that it was probably a faux construction – a shape with some identifiable bionicle parts slapped on, sort of like the winch or the mine elevator. Like look at that elevator, thats an ussal chassis pasted in there!

Here’s the thing though: unlike the winch or the elevator, it turns out the boat makes an appearance outside of MNOG. You know the boat racing minigame in the gba title? It uses the same boat, although maybe a little longer:

Click the image for full resolution

The sprites were ripped and recolored by joint-dogg. Their color separation of Boat from Guys really helps make sense of what you are actually looking at.

The fact the same boat design is in both games tells us that there was a physical reference model from Lego that both Templar and Saffire used. If that alone doesn’t convince you though, consider this: every other one of the six Sports on the island has a prop that the lego design team made for it:

         - Ball for Kolhii
         - Ussals for the crab race
         - Lavaboard for Ignalu
         - Kewa + Volo Lutu for Bionicle Joust
         - skates for Huai

The sport for Gali is boat racing, so it makes sense they’d make a boat for that. For as long as this boat had an ‘official’ name, it was called an 'ngalawa,' hence the sport being titled 'ngalawa boat race.' Of course, it isnt *really* an ngalawa. Ngalawa are actual fishing boats in Zanzibar, not fantasy robo-boats. The key trait the bionicle boat appears to borrow is the double-outrigger design. Ngalawa racing is also an actual thing, and I would presume that’s where the Bionicle team got the minigame idea from. However, so far as I have been able to discern, the races are broadly a wealthy white vacationer activity, with no basis in the boats’ intended usage (fishing). If anyone more familiar with the history there could share additional context, please do! But for our purposes, this is all to say: we don’t need to call our bionicle model an ngalawa. It’s just a Boat.

In trying to reverse engineer this guy, we’ve got slim pickings for reference. There are 3 angles of the boat rendered in MNOG. More art was made in 2002/2003 for the bohrok animations and MNOGII, but it was clearly made using the mnog art as reference as opposed to the original model, so it’s useless to us.

Safe to use are the gba sprites, linked earlier. Unfortunately the sprites are of limited use; they are soooooo small you can’t pick out much detail. But they can at least be used to broadly guide the boat’s proportions as seen from overhead.

For the most part, then, we are stuck with Templar’s art of the 3 angles. I like this art! But it is dogshit for trying to interpret what it was based on. In the early chapters of MNOG, Templar employed a very painterly, abstract style. Imagine trying to reverse engineer the lavaboard from Templar’s art, vs. the PC game. It uses those slizer wing pieces, but you never would have known from MNOG.

PC game capture by PeabodySam

What this means for us is that we need to be very generous when we are interpreting this boat. There are two major sections where I Did That – the front of the outriggers, and the ‘pilot’s seat’. Both were rendered as solid blocks of color by Templar, and while you could finagle some okayish solutions using lego bricks, that is definitely not something the original designers would have done, in my opinion.

The front of the outriggers ended up being pretty straightforward. The shape matches excellently with the slizer head, so I’m quite confident that is the part used there. The seat is trickier. I did experiment with bent liftarms all slotted together, but none really matched the outward angle of the walls, and honestly bunching up liftarms like that for a ‘marquee’ shape doesn’t fit the design ethos they were using at that time anyway. I ended up looking through technic parts on bricklink and landed on the technic figure chair. It’s got the right angle, and when you place them flipped as I’ve done, they lay flat at just the right degree to nicely mount the octagon on the back. I don’t know for sure that these chairs are the correct parts, but the lego math works out really really nicely, which I consider promising. Speaking of that octagon – it's been suggested that it was assembled with this znap part. While I do feel that would be Epic, realistically im doubtful it was actually used, especially when the assemblage I’ve used matches just as well to the art, and keeps things in-system. Something else that may be controversial in my design is the use of the 3x5 L-shaped liftarms with bow, as opposed to their larger cousin at 5x7. I realize that this makes the handrail bows, specifically, look a little low compared to the mnog art. But I experimented a fair amount with the 5x7 bows and mathematically they just made so many more problems, trying to get them to mesh with the other parts. I am ready to die on the hill of 3x5 bows being the original part used. fight me. Or design a boat of your own and put me to shame. Click the image for full resolution

Click the image for full resolution Click the image for full resolution

colors

We’ve got the choice between gba and mnog again when deciding what to use as color reference for building a model IRL. But its hardly a choice - the MNOG appearance is the famous one, and anyway on gba the boats are just blanketed in monochrome to make them easily distinguishable from one another. Boring!

MNOG’s color work is, typical of that early stage in the game, quite moody and ambiguous. The panels making up the bow are obviously green, but from there I think there are a number of ways you could interpret the rest. The slizer heads and competition shooters on the outriggers really should be green too, but unfortunately they were never made in that color. I opted for black as a neutral alternative. It also happens to match the colorization in the updated bohrok-era art.

The toa arms on the ‘railing’ are weird – they’re colored light blue aside from the main arm length, which is green. I went with light blue since the piece doesn’t exist in green anyway. Another option would be lime, but I feel like that’s a bit of a betrayal of the boat’s subdued colors.

Then we have the many L-shaped beams with a bow. Comparing all 3 angles, my feeling is these are all supposed to be green too – with the main ¾ angle art falling victim to only showing the sides of the parts, which are shaded in the deep greenish yellow. This said, I feel like faithfully making them all green looks kind of shit. this is too much green!!

my compromise was to leave the upside railing ones green, and have the underside ones in grey. Another option would be to do some/all of these in brown, akin to what lemonylepid did in her excellent MOC, below.

I went with grey myself because it keeps things more in the lego ‘house style’ imo – grey was an established ‘base’ color for bionicle in 2001, whereas brown was only used as a highlight/main color.

Click the image for full resolution

more general thoughts not about colors

One of the funky things about this boat is, while we know it as a motorboat from Templar’s work, it was designed as a rowboat (in keeping with the basis in real-life ngalawa). That’s how it is used on gba, for the race! And the layout/design is to facilitate a rowing team.

At the back, we’ve got drummer and their drum they use to control the rhythm of rowing. The rowers themselves then sit in a line in the body of the boat. There’s also a guy standing on the prow, a coxswain who is ostensibly controlling the rudder and direction. I’m not gonna try to figure out how the oars may have been constructed, but I gave a go at how the drum may have been built/its placement. The ball ends of the toa arms kind of look like mallets to strike it with. I mentioned before that the boat in the gba sprites is longer, to accommodate the full rowing team. Possibly Templar’s boat art was based directly on a longboat and they shortened it in the art process. I’m saying this because it could potentially account for the uneven gaps in the middle lol.

There have been some other good interpretations, too! In addition to lemonylepid’s work above, I have to shout out my friend boxturret’s interpretation.

I hope that someday we’ll get like a photo of a lego designer at his desk in 2000 and in the background the original boat model will be visible, allowing us to lock in a proper design. Until then though, I’m pretty happy with what I have here.

 
 

Click images for full resolution

Download link for the stud.io file of my design!