We are now the final submission date, and all the games are handed it. So, I also bring you one of the final spotlights of the year. This time it’s the ice cold team REEP, bringing their chilly yet hot game Snow Hard. They have been one of the more active teams, posting demos throughout the competition year, and hyping there game even at the very fist Kick-off event. To start you of, you can check out their gameplay video at youtube:
Could you give us a short introduction to Snow Hard?
Snow Hard is an action game where you command a group of kids into intense snowball battles and where you yourself can make amazing special moves. The game is also an adventure about a little girl, Claire, that discovers the secretes of snowball fighting in her late mother’s childhood diary. The game is set in a landscape unlike anything you have seen before.
You have been promoting Snow Hard ever since the SGA kick-off. How long has there been plans to make the game?
Hahaha! Yes, we came to the SGA kick-off in winter clothes with Snow Hard stickers all over and fake snowballs made of cotton. We wanted to do something different to show that we are a bit different as a group. Sure, we also wanted attention cause we knew from the start in October that we needed to attract a lot of really great talent to our team if we were to realize our ambitious vision. But doing promotion is fun. When it’s done with love.
You don´t see game based around snowball fights every day. Why did you pick that concept for you game?
It all started as an experiment of making a fast game on an early prototype engine. We were all fans of the action shooter genre (Gears of war, CS etc…) so we wanted to do just that kind of game and at the same time, avoid being a poor copy or a simple clone. 48 hours later we had a crude and yet charming snowball game.
We suddenly realized that the snowball throwing had a much greater impact on gameplay than we originally anticipated. Since snowballs are slow and their trajectories are curved, aiming became something completely different compared to traditional shooter games. Covers worked differently as one could lob a snowball and make it dive behind the cover. And the relative slowness of the snowball also made it possible for a player to avoid getting hit by a well aimed shot through simply moving in a different direction. Awesome! But the most important thing we learned was that throwing snowballs was fun. It brought back the nostalgia of when we were children and felt the adrenaline rush of being in the middle of a huge snowball fight.
So we had a concept for a game but no game concept. How we ended up with a story driven game about a little girl and her dead mother’s diary, was simply because we thought it was cool. And that people said that story driven games are hard to do well and we wanted to know why.
You decided to put a lot of back story in the game, even featuring a separate comic. What is the story behind that idea?
Yes, we have spent a lot of time on creating the universe in which gangs of small children run around, trying to control territory and fight with snowballs. It served as inspiration to our amazing artists and even made one or two of our programmers laugh occasionally. But it also helped in making important design decisions as the back story could anticipate logical conflicts.
We found the best way of explaining an idea of a game was by combining pictures with text. So we did a comic. The comic was an extended version of our intro scene and with a few pages we could show our vision. This was of course very helpful in our recruitment efforts but also for other purposes. Because the team spent so much time working on the game, away from family, friends and girlfriends/boyfriends, our comic helped to get support for what we were doing and an understanding for the long work hours.
It seems as if the story might not only end as a comic since we have been offered to adapt it into a 2D animated TV series pilot targeted to an international audience. Let’s see about it, maybe we’ll be able to watch Snow Hard as a TV show in two years. That would be great!
The game has a unique graphical style and yet it seems familiar. What can you tell us about it?
We wanted our game to follow an old Swedish tradition, namely, the mixing of styles beyond recognition and then ending up with something original but nothing extreme. Here we have mixed the influences from Tim Burton, Japanese steam punk and from a popular Swedish children’s show from way back, Skrot-Nisse. This triangulation has then been spiced with cute references to great games such as Monkey Island, Pacman and Space Invaders, scattered here and there in the game.
We have also had great help of shaders to set the mood of the game. The animated trees that are blowing in the wind do that without distracting, yet it adds to the mood in a great way. And when the light hits the snow from a specific angle you can notice a vague shimmering pattern of frost. Small stuff that brings the environment to life.
There were times when your dev-team was big enough to start a small country. How did you manage such a big team, what roles did you have, and how did you communicate?
As long as you are working with smart and talented people, it isn’t a problem being many but an advantage. We have roles but very loose roles where people can wander between different tasks depending on project needs and personal interests. Decisions are often made by groups as we learned earlier that the more people that take part in the decision making process, the better the decisions. Having large groups making the decisions also reduces the need to communicate the decision and explaining them.
Between meetings, we communicate by all means possible but at the core is our custom-made project management tool -Trac. There everybody can see the plans and the progress of the game. Also worth mentioning but easily overlooked is Google Calender and its automatic notifications of planned events.
As much as we can, we work together in one and the same room but since many of us do not have that possibility because of work, studies and that roughly 40% of the team lives in another city – we have become very good at working together over the Internet.
What tools are you using, and how have they been working out for you?
We built our own C++/Lua engine, called R3. It is based on Ogre 3D, Newton, Fmod. And it is great! The only real problem was finding the right sound library, after implementing every open source library, we finally ended up with Fmod.
We have also developed our own tools such as an AI-plotter, MayaToR3-exporter and other handy stuff.
One of the more interesting things for other developers is that we developed our own quite special graphical effect, the UV-animatex that is super cheap and can replace certain particle effects. Another is a new and clever parallax that we came up with and that we will have great use for later. We have also made sure that you can be using the super cool “next generation Wii-joystick” – the Novint Falcon, when playing Snow Hard.
You released quite a few prototypes during the development. Did you get any feedback, and did it help you in the development process?
We released six prototype in total, one every month, starting from October with the exception of our French release that we made in record time (a French media company wanted to promote our game to their readers – so after a little bargaining we got loads of their DVDs and magazines in exchange for translating the entire prototype into French).
Releasing the prototypes was one of the best decisions we made since that gave a focus to our development. It gave us credibility, fans and it helped us keep us bug free. And we, of course, loved our game even when it was ugly and silly. So it made us happy to show the world what we had done.
What future plans do you have for Snow Hard?
We are keeping an open mind for what is next. Our collective achievements have got increased attention which is opening a lot of doors. One of the more exotic is the opportunity to be the first game company in the world that gets settled in Dubai’s High Tech District. But of course, we are really looking forward to work on a multi-player for the game.
What are your 3 favorite games, and your most hated game?
We love Snow Hard, Smash & Blast and SNIGEL’S QUEST. But we don’t hate any game at all. Actually, we love every game and we carry a special warm feeling towards all the other games in this years SGA as we have learned to get to know them and the people behind them.
Any last words or shoutouts?
This is cheesy, we know, but you guys behind SGA have done a great job.
That’s it for this time folks! Don’t forget to download the latest Snow Hard demo and read the comic. I hope I’ll see you all at the grand finale. You better be there, because it’s going to be epic!
