This is the headline in Norway’s largest business paper today. The article notes that Festival of Magic was the big winner in the latest round of the Norwegian Film Institute’s grant program. This is the second round of funding Snow Castle has received for the Festival of Magic project from the Institute and brings the game a big step closer to release.

A great week at Snow Castle as we received word of the grant yesterday! With the new round of funding secured, we are moving firmly into production.

”We believe Snow Castle again will make a great game that both gamers and reviewers will enjoy,” says Kaja Hench Dyrlie, head of the Film Institute’s game section. Of course we couldn’t agree more. Now we are looking forward to GDC and the opportunity to show Festival of Magic there. Do drop by us at stand number 1432 so we can show you what it looks like.

We will also be at the Nordic Game Conference in May, so if you want to meet up with us there, give us a holler!

In other news, we also released a new and extended version of Hogworld as a free-to-play app this week. Initially it includes English, Spanish and German. We hope to add more languages soon. It looks gorgeous, especially on the iPad, so if you have one you need to download it right away!

Hey guys!

I wanted to show you guys some more desert concept art. Couple of posts back I showed some stuff from the Zenit Desert area. Back then we figured the area would end up in sort of a bowl in the desert with a temple ruin sticking out of one of the sides. We decided it’d be way cooler to approach the temple in more of a flat environment where it’ll be much more imposing sticking out of the flatter ground (also it eases our job with the camera, avoiding it clipping into sides of the desert that are higher up than the character).

The arid desert and the rocks sticking out of it is still in there though, but as the player draws closer to the temple, things take on a little more order to guide straight towards the temple.

As the player approaches the temple we’ll switch the camera angle to a more overhead view, but that’ll come in the screenshots later. I was tasked with developing the entrance area (and the puzzle you’ll find there) visually. So here’s a jumpcut to a closer view of the entrance.

That’s it for me for this update, but we’ll get back to you with more from this area soon!

Have a great weekend!