Winter Solace

For all things that happen at the top of mountains. Hi I'm Sam and I'm making Winter Solace! A game about being a lone vampire, trying to make friends. For other projects, see sunlightafterdark.com @BaronBlackmore

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It’s cold out there

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Cutscenes = manga

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12 faces of Grey. It feels so good to be drawing again 💔

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Spoilers!! Finally managed to write up all the events that happen in the demo. This took a long time to nail down and put in order, these post-its have travelled.

The yellow notes are events, the green notes are what the player learns, the orrange are where you can apply your knowledge and skills for extra bonuses, the purple is a story gate you must cross.

A key part of this process is keeping track of the things the player has been taught. It’s no good being presented a puzzle if you don’t have all the pieces.

The thing I learned is the best way to reward a player is with story and variety. If you play to complete, you shouldn’t be hampered by story, it’ll only slow you down. Whereas a player more willing to explore and immerse themselves should be given more to immerse themselves in.

Now to do dialogue.

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New banner

It's been a while since I've made a new piece for Winter Solace and I wanted to make a new banner, or something. Every little thing feels like I'm working towards how it'll be when it's complete...Maybe I'll animate it... I feel like the name needs to change. Though not sure what to. Suggestions?

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Interactable background!

I’m hoping to put in as much of this kind of stuff as possible. background interactable elements really make the world feel more textured. One of my favorite games and great inspirations for this game is final fantasy 9, in which there were you’re greatly rewarded for exporing. In most backgrounds to each scene there were little bits of trivia about the world, if you cared to look, which lead to greater rewards later on.

This piece only took a half hour to make, so i’m hopefull to add a whole bunch more.

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We got some cheap node based path finding! Chasing rabbits!

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There are so many updates here, but I feel like they cluster, so here’s the breakdown:

1 - I’ve removed item highlights for a speach bubble when you come into contact with something you can interact with. This way, you can enter a room and have fun exploring, rather than know everything about a room as soon as you enter. Plus it’s silly, and silly = good.

2 - the inventory got a redesign, now it’s clearer when you’re holding items and nicer to navigate, plus

3 - you can hold items as clothes!!! if you can wear an item, you put it on by default. This is especially cumbersome, with unity, all the options for dong this are quite cumbersome. I chose to go with the option to swap out animators.

This is the little section of code that allows that to happen:

public void WearItem(GameObject item){ Animator anim = playerController.GetComponent (Animator); anim.RuntimeAnimatorController = Resources.Load (item.name) as RuntimeAnimatorController; }

If you make a folder in your assets folder called "Resources", unity has a bunch of commands that allow you to access an asset that doesn't exist in the scene, but instead takes it from the folder, as long as the name of the gameobject is the same as the Animator name.

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Making the first level from scratch, I learned some things which would have been super useful to know before starting, It’s taken a week to re-draw the castle, format a new color pallete and design floor plans that make more sense.

Here’s what I learned:

In a top down 2d zelda or pokemon-like perspective, it’s hard to see doors that run side to side instead of above and below a room. Walls need thickness, even if they’re never seen in profile. In Unity, colliders from adjacent rooms are too easily interfered with.

When making mazes, turn dead ends into loops, so that the player never feels a slowing in forward momentum. Make a style guide. If you take a break in making art, even if you’re the only artist, the style will slowly change. I came back to find my newer art looked like it was from a different game.

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When I started, It was my first time driving Unity, and I’ve learned a lot about making a smooth game, so much so that i’ve decided to go back and re-design the level. I’ve started on the kitchen, it’s based on a 19th century japanese house, as the whole castle will be.

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The LIGHT spell now casts light when you’re inside. This has inspired me to add a tea making section to the game!

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Little spots where you can jump over things!

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Tooltips have made the game feel more real to me, in a big way. We have a few things going on here: 1: a reziable UI panel 2: a UI prefab 3: UI following script 4: Tooltip Script

1 - Resizable UI Panel

In unity, if you have a sprite you’d like to use as a stretchable graphic but you’d like to keep the corners and edges a fixed size, you can do this in the sprite editor

Those green bars, you can drag in from the edges of your sprite, then anything in the corner boxes will have it’s size kept the same, side boxes will stretch either horizontally or vertically and the center will stretch to fill the rest.

2 - UI Prefab

Dragging a gameobject from the Hierarchy to the project file window will make it a Prefab. Prefabs are great because they can be gameobjects that are already full of things and you don’t need them in already in a scene to be able to reference them.

If you want to put the prefab in the scene and access it, you can do it like this:

public GameObject toolTipPrefab; private GameObject theTip; public GameObject canvas;  public void PopOpenTip(){    theTip = (GameObject)Instantiate (toolTipPrefab, canvas.transform); }

3 - UI following This simple bit of script is super useful for getting UI objects to be positioned according to what’s happening in game:

public RectTransform canvasRectT; public RectTransform uiObject; public Transform objectToFollow; public Vector2 offset; void Update () {    if(uiObject != null){ Vector2 screenPoint = RectTransformUtility.WorldToScreenPoint (Camera.main, objectToFollow.position); uiObject.anchoredPosition = (screenPoint - canvasRectT.sizeDelta / 2f)+offset; } }

If anyone would like, I can go into how the tooltip script goes =)

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Quick little update, got some picking up animation and it’s adorable!

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I was given a good tip about what I should make next: start playing the game and make the first thing that looks like it’s needed. Simple, right? So at the start of the game here I need to lead the player into understanding that mushrooms are objects the player can interact with, so I’ve added a shader that gives in an animated outline, to make them glow when you’re close. This may also need a key prompt, so you know what key let’s you interact with it.

The shader is this one, and it’s pretty great: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/78608

I’ve also used it to give Grey an outline when casting. Plus there’s a new casting pose.

I recently played Night in the Woods and one of the things that struck me about it was how you’re very quickly given a lot of fun and unique things to play with. Introducing the player to a variety of types of interactions feels really rewarding and very quickly engages you with the game. This makes me feel like I should create a few more animations, to display how Grey interacts with different kinds of things; shivering when he contacts the water, bending down to pick something up, skidding to stop running off a cliff. Things that will be often repeated through the game.

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When you start the game, this is where you’ll be

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Inventory

At the start I decided that Winter Solace would be an RPG, but pretty light in terms of inventory management. I would sit on one end of a scale where Diablo was on the other. To really reign back the complications, I decided you’d have pockets which can hold small things, and anything too big to go in your pockets would be held.

With limited pocket space, you’ll have the usual space optimization. The cool part here is that you can hold one item in your hand, and able to swap what it is, in and out of your pockets. This ensures that you don’t need to go into your inventory every time you want to use something, think keys or weapons. It also means that alongside the magic casting process you’ll be able to hold wands or relics to perform different spells!

I’ve also been playing with what the UI may look like. Keeping it simple seems to me a way to make it not stick out when the tone of the game changes.