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!
The Desert Temple Concept Art
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!
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!
Fire critter concept art
Hey everyone! Just wanted to sign off this Friday with a peek at what I worked on today. we have started planning a new area for Amon to explore, and it’s got to have some enemies, right? We’ll be back with more on what kind of environment it is and such at a later point! Until then, have a look at the little guy below!
Hope you all have a great weekend!
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
Friday afternoon concept art
Hey guys! Long time no post. Been busy making concept art and butting in on game design meetings, but I wanted to get back in the swing of things and post some art!
I was tasked with doing concept art for this little guy, who is a low level enemy you encounter in Project FoM. He’ll jump ya and use those little claws to attack, and there’s a chance he might poison you with that stinger on his tail. He’s a Crimson Cherby. Enjoy!
(Click the picture for larger view)
And the ortho. Hans Kristian usually looks at the 3/4 view above for the sculpting, seeing as how that one describes the shapes, so the ortho is done just to show larger masses and separated with flat colors or minimal rendering.
