Devlog #1 - UI and Texture Updates!
The first Frostbitten devlog is finally here! And its a long one.
For those not in the know, Frostbitten was a game I started making in early 2022 inspired by a particular mobile game I had been playing on the long bus ride to my partner’s house as well as classic dungeon crawlers from my childhood (especially Shin Megami Tensei). I displayed Frostbitten at PGF 2022 and had great success and lots of positive feedback! It was at that point I finally considered following game design as a career option, something I had been interested in since I was very young but always assumed wouldn’t be possible for me. Due to the ambition of this project however, I decided to spend a year working on a project with a smaller scale to hone my skills and especially learn more about the game development process but unfortunately this lead to Frostbitten being put on hold. Now, over a year later I have finally returned with my newfound knowledge ready to bring the projects original vision to life!
I’ve spent the last 2 weeks or so preparing Frostbitten to move forward in development but before that could happen, I wanted to update a lot of what I already had to fit in more with what I have in mind for the project now. The first of which was upscaling all of the existing textures!
In the original version of Frostbitten, I was creating assets exclusively for a cave environment and as such, didn’t have much of an issue with the smaller scale. But when I started moving on to the outdoor environments of later levels, especially textures for nature, I found it more difficult to achieve the fidelity I wanted to have. So I decided to upscale my old textures in order to be able to fit more detail into them and I am glad I made this decision! These new textures make the environments feel much more open and less claustrophobic to me and allow the cross-hatching shader, that I made to emulate rudimentary shadows, look much nicer. However it did take a while for me to get comfortable with the new size when creating textures, hence the middle images above being updated to those on the right. I feel I’ve really gotten the hang of it now though!
Afterwards, I decided to revamp the UI elements as well. But before I got the time to, I made the unfortunate mistake of deleting all the data for the original level 1… (don’t ask me how).
Luckily, I did still have the build I made for PGF which allowed me to still play said level! So I had to go through the admittedly not-as-time-consuming-as-I-thought process of recreating it. I did this by taking screenshots of the minimap at various points throughout the level (shown above) and stitching them together into a level 1 map (shown below).
I then had to go through and label all of the items and events in the level before I was able to finally settle on the finished blueprints.
The finished blueprints are flipped because the level layouts are mirrored in my level editor (due to a small mistake in coding I made early on and decided to just keep in haha.)
After creating this blueprint, recreating the level was relatively straight-forward. Small things like the placement of rocks and stalactites are different in the new version, however, as placing all of those details exactly as they were was not a huge concern of mine.
Finally, I remade most of the UI elements with new designs meant to fit in with the comic book aesthetic that inspired the iconic black and white look of the game (no, I was not inspired by Undertale as some people had guessed). Most of them are shown off below, however the differences in the inventory screen need further explanation.
As it happens, I picked up a new influence in the year or so between the inception of this project and now and that influence is expressing itself through the inventory system.
In the original version, I didn’t put very much thought into how the inventory system would work. I knew I wanted to make a game with survival mechanics but didn’t think about how that could be expressed via the inventory, instead simply implementing a weight system like many other similar games. Enter: Resident Evil, a game series which I fell in love with in the interim of 2022 and now. Influenced by those games, which challenge the player with strict inventory management, I decided to do something similar with Frostbitten and I think it fits the game perfectly!
Carry weight is still a thing but all item types have been synthesized into one inventory rather than the separated “Item, Weapon, Armour” system of the original. The amount of space you have to carry things has been significantly reduced as well (but it can be increased by equipping bags). This makes item collection much more of a gameplay feature rather than having players simply horde huge tons of rocks. It synergizes well with the crafting system as well as it encourages players to actually craft items they need as they can’t carry the ingredients around with them forever.
So what’s next?
Now, we move on to adding new content, starting with some additional survival mechanics (namely a temperature system as well as hot and cold clothing options)! My goal will be to update this blog weekly with my progress, however I might reduce this amount the further along I get, as I don’t want to spoil the game before its released!
See you next time,
June.
