Our dear composer Eiko Ishiwata was recently interviewed on 1Up’s game music blog Chiptuned.

Eiko will also compose the music for Project FoM – our upcoming adventure RPG. She talks about how we collaborate and what her inspiration were for our last interactive title – Hogworld: Gnart’s Adventure.

Make sure to check out her bandcamp and composer page!

Hey guys!

Hans Kristian spotted some fan art over on the polycount forums!

I was super stoked to see that Tim Lewis was inspired enough by my concept art for Millies Spudshop to go ahead and made this super cool 3D model of it!

First up is the concept art followed by two renders of the model that Tim has made from it!

He has wireframes and textures and all that goodness up over on his website if you want to see more from him! You can also check out his thread over at polycount to see the process!

Thanks again from the team, Tim! Made our day when we saw it!

We have reached our milestones in time, and the first level of the prototype is mostly done. (Hurray)

Here is a new screenshot from the game where Amon and Gnart just have found some magical flower beds.

Hey guys!

In the last post I showed the production art for the second part of the room, and now we have a screenshot showing some of that room as well! Yay!

Have a look!

Thanks for looking!

Hey guys! We’re super excited to show you the first ever screenshot showing a final scene from ProjectFoM! Grabbed from in engine, no tampering with colors or otherwise!

Thanks for stopping by!

- The SnowCastle Games team

Hey guys!

We wanted to share some visual progress with you guys. We’re hard at work on our vertical slice, and as Mattis showcased in the last post, we’re greyboxing the levels to prototype functionality early on. Parallell to that we’re working on assets, textures and all that good stuff to replace the grey boxes as we get them done.

I have a couple of steps along the way to show you.

After game design have made their decisions we paint up an environment to inform how we want the 3D assets to be made, as well as guide lighting and textures down the line. Here’s a concept I did for the very first room the player gets to see:

This is a typical environment concept art sheet we give to the environment artist. Separate elements, whether they’re tileable, units width and height and so on so there is as little guesswork as possible down the pipeline.

Below is the scene after we’ve gotten it back from our awesome 3D environment guy, Thomas Pasieka, with textures and wireframe and a uniform light .

This is after we’ve gotten all the 3D bits and pieces back and have reassembled them in Unity. For me, this is an awesome step to see my concept art come back as building blocks and then assemble it into something dimensional where the player can move!

And finally I have a screenshot from one of our designers playing around with lights and post processing effects. This is work in progress of course. We’re hoping to have some gameplay videos up before long as well, where we’ll have gotten further on the lighting too.

I’ll end this post with the concept art for the next part of the first environment, which is almost complete as well.

Thanks for looking! Hope you guys enjoy the updates!

New week means new update!

The last couple of weeks have been really efficient weeks here at Snow Castle. We kicked ourselves a little bit and got the pipeline more streamlined and the project as a whole is rolling smoother and faster, which really shows from what we have in the prototype so far.

The prototype is moving along nicely, thanks to the addition of Thomas Pasieka from 3D Attack (The Other Brothers), who is helping us out and working hard to convert the concept art into 3D environments which we can use.

Its an iterative process, and for each delivery the assets only get better and better. As you can see in the image above, it’s looking good .

On the feature side we have made some developments too. We now have a moving Amon in the game, rigged and animated, with animations being added constantly.

We have also been grey boxing the first stages in the prototype, one of which you can see below.

Eivind (our programmer) has also been hard at work, implementing first draft version of the combat, cameras and a whole lot of features.

The combat so far consists of:

• Combat Initiation
• Battle Scene
• Combat Manager
• Time To Act Timer
• Player and monster slots (for placing them where we want to)
• Team/Pair selection
• Ability selection, targeting and execution
• End Logic

There you have it, a super quick update, some in development screenshots and in not to long, we will be able to show you some actual in-game footage!

- Mattis

Boy it’s been a busy week! We finally have some animation and functionality inside the prototype level and it’s already looking quite good.

Thought I could give you a quick visual update – a couple of new monster designs and the final rough concept of one of the first scenes in the prototype.

The Frog King is the antagonist of the prototype story. A pretty random character, but we liked the idea of having a mix of South Park’s Frog Prince and Futurama’s Hypnotoad as the quirky villain.

The Ice Monkey is not exactly a new design, but I don’t think it’s been posted before except for appearing in the early battle mock-up. Hanska has made the 3D model, but we were not too happy with the translation – mainly because we could not find a way to replicate the furry parts.

 

I first set out to make a new design for the Ice Monkey, but it literally ended up as a different beast entirely. For now I just call it the Panzer Lion.

 

It’s not much, but at least we have finally settled on a design for this tricky scene. We really had to poke the old dream sponge in order to find a layout that worked with the camera, puzzles, passages and overall theme of the scene. It’s a clever 2 story design where the player needs to figure out how to activate the elevator and then find a way to enter it. The elevator leads down to the giant blue grotto where the Frog King is performing his evil deeds.

 

Peace!

 

Just posting up our complete miner dude. He’s now rigged and skinned and ready for animation. Here’s some shots of him posed!

And a turn around video from Marmoset renderer: