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!
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!
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
First ever screenshot from ProjectFoM
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