The Hogbunny hits Jackpot!
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!
Welcome to Plumpet Island!
Making of Plumpet Islands
We were not quite happy with the design of the previous harvesting island (see blog post). Problem with the design was that it was not scalable enough. We intended to add lots of stuff along the way, but the shape and size did not support this. Our Art Director did some new design sketches…
Although this design did make it more intuitive what the player could do, it was still not modular enough. So he made another where he split the different sections apart into separate islands.
This was a much better design for several reasons. We can now add new islands as we se fit. Also note how the harvesting island and mountain are built by combining simple rocks. We began to make pieces and assembled Plumpet Island (the island with the windmill above) and Barnacle Bay.
The house will be replaced with another, but we have simplified the production process without loosing visual quality.
In the previous harvesting island we made before christmas, we had the barnacles grow in the garden, but seriously – barnacles grow in the turf. With the new design we spilt spud production and pearl production (ammo for each Spud gun and pearl cross bow).
Both the mountain on the beach above and the island walls of Plumpet Island are constructed based on 7 different rock meshes. We have used Unity’s vertex paint shader to enable the green grass texture on the rocks.
That is it for now…
Rock Crabler Color Version and Production Sheet
Hey guys! Quick little update from me here. I did the polished version of the Crabler from the last post by Frits as well as the production art sheet that Hans Kristian will be working from. Enjoy!
MOAR MONSTERS!
This week we looked at how to design and implement variations of each creature type in FoM. Instead of having a gazillion kinds of cannon-fodder, we have a few carefully designed creature types that really adds interest to the battle system. So e.g. the Crabler is one organic creature type with an aggressive and defensive behavior pattern that requires the player to use specific strategies and choose his/her abilities and pairs wisely.
As you can see below the Crabler will have different looks and weapons depending on its level and element type.
This “armor-sets” or attachment modules will all work with the base rig and mesh of the creature and lets us add a lot of variation to each monster type.
Next time I’ll go into some more detail on the production art and the whole 3D translation process.
Have swell weekend!
Zenit Desert – concept art post
Hey everyone! Hope you all had a good holiday and a great New Year celebration!
We figured it was about time to get back into posting stuff again, so I’m going to show you guys some concept art for an area we’re calling “Zenit”. We’ve got people working on the gameplay and content design for this area as well, but I’ll kick it off with some concept art and visual development sketches!
Without revealing any story around it, Amon and Gnart find themselves facing an unforgiving desert, the habitat of the Rock Crabler, Fire Beetle and Fire Djinn from previous posts.
As you guys are getting used to seeing from me, I start off by doing some rapid, rough sketches just to start generating some idea of what I’m doing. We wanted a crumbled entrance in an old temple partially hidden by the sand as a starting point, so that’s what I focused on when I did these first sketches.
After some pointing and discussing with Frits I colored and refined this one:
From there we wanted to get a better feel for the environment as a whole, and I started out doing a color sketch of Amon and Gnart right after they’ve been dumped into the desert:
We originally thought a camera above the player and pretty far out would do it, but after some discussion and prototyping the camera in engine we felt it would be better to position the camera more behind the player considering the gameplay we want in this area.
There will of course be combat encounters in the desert as well, so I did a quick mockup of how that might look when Amon and Gnart face off against a Fire Djinn.
And another following the same camera rules as the start of the desert, showcasing ancient architecture of a city buried in sand.
That’s it from me for this post! Hope you enjoyed the pictures!
Desert Monster Bonanza!
Spent most of last week working with both the content and visual design of the monsters for our desert outdoor environment! We had an original design for an armor plated lion-like beast, but decided to save that design for a boss battle and start fresh.
The Desert Armor Monster has two modes in combat – defensive and offensive. Its element is Earth and it is the only desert creature vulnerable to fire.
I ended up with the design below – the Giant Rock Crabler. It fits the desert environment, easy to read, not too hard to animate and looks both intimidating and cute at the same time.
These spider varieties were inspired by the adorable Jumping Spiders. I really liked the look of the four big eyes, but the whole quad legged design felt overly sci-fi and did not fit the desert. The Spider just ended up goofy-looking which is not what I wanted. The creature had to look brutish – big, lumbering idiot of a monster!
The Horus giant design. This is where I got the idea to place the armor on the front arms/legs. A gorilla like giant with an eagles head and giant fists of stone was overly far-fetched and would be hard to animate. I think it’s important that the concept of a fantasy creature is easy to read – both visually and conceptually – soooo this one was a no-go!
The first designs I did. We quite liked the Pokémon-ish scaled dog, though it did not fit the requirements for this particular creature.
Well I better get back to drawing monsters. If you have any brilliant monster ideas feel free to share them in the comment section. 
Flying Desert Beetle concept art
Hey guys! Friday art post! I just finished this enemy design for Festival of Magic and wanted to show you guys! It’s pretty large, constantly flying and it can swoop in and give Amon an uppercut with that nasty horn. We’re working on a new environment where this guy will be an encounter. Frits is doing the system design for him now! Can’t wait for Hans Kristian to make the 3D model and animate this sucker!
Modeling sheet and texture variation suggestion:
Other than that, you can vote for us for the Indie of the Year (IOTY) award over on IndieDB! It’s super easy, just follow the link below and click the big old banner on the top saying “Vote for this game” at the top of the page!
Indie of the Year voting link.
Have a great weekend everyone!
New pre alpha teaser from Festival of Magic
Hey guys! We’ve been hard at work preparing for Game Connection in France where Bendik and Erik are right now talking to exciting people about Festival of Magic! One of the things they have a long is a pre-alpha teaser which we made. We wanted to share that here as well!
Here’s the video! We hope you enjoy!
Cheers,
The SnowCastle Games team
Crossbow weapon design
Hey guys! I just finished up this design, and wanted to show you a bit of the process behind it.
This crossbow weapon is a design for one of our main characters, it’s going to be seen a whole lot so we wanted to nail the design. We ended up going through 16 iterations before landing on the final piece.
First up I usually do a bunch of silhouettes to get the masses down. After these were done Frits, Hans Kristian and myself gather round my screen and discuss what we like/don’t like about them.
I had this idea that the first one looked kinda front heavy to I added all these counterweights by the handle. Which looks cool, but it brings to mind a rifle or shotgun very easily. We wanted it to be a single hand weapon, so a solution would be to make the “body” of the crossbow hollow.
I took the first thumbnail and iterated on that and came up with the next few. I’ve defined the masses a bit more with these seeing as how we know we’re on the right track now.
After another discussion and lots of pointing around the screen we landed on the one with the “check mark” by it. There were a couple more tweaks that happened while rendering it out as well, but nothing major. Now I can’t wait to see it translated into 3D and see it in game!
Have a great weekend everyone!
Brave Slinger – Weapon Concept
Hey guys! Long time no post! We have something cooking that we are super excited to share, but we can’t just yet. Next week!
In the meantime, I finished up this crossbow concept that one of the characters will use as a main weapon and figured some concept art would sweeten the waiting!
I give you Brave Slinger! (cue drumroll)
