Arctic Awakening News

We love a good TV series just like the next person. But, we're in video game development! Why haven't the things that make great TV translated to our interactive world?

That was the original spark behind Arctic Awakening – before we even knew what kind of story we wanted to tell. All we knew was that we wanted to tell a story in 5 parts and release it on a monthly schedule.

Breaking a story into episodes lets you dive so much deeper into character development. Arctic Awakening is all about exploring the growth of our characters as well as the world they inhabit, so an episodic format just made sense. And we get it, everyone is busy these days, so breaking the game into easier to consume chunks is another plus.

However, the episodic format hasn't exactly had the best track record in the games industry thus far. Not to mention, the way we consume games, TV and movies continues to evolve. With all that in mind, we've decided to change to a single release model for Arctic Awakening.

Does this mean we're abandoning the episodic format completely? No! The game will still be broken into 5 chapters, but just like the latest binge-worthy Netflix series, they'll all drop at the same time in one release. No more waiting a month between episodes – hooray!

We'll have more to share about the game and its release in the coming months. Until then, be sure to say hello in our Discord and on our socials (Twitter, Instagram, TikTok)!

Everything you see in a game like Arctic Awakening is intentionally designed through numerous iterations of sketches, concepts and finally in-game assets. This is no different for characters, props, environments or anything else in-between.

Much of these concepts contain spoilers, so we'll keep those under wraps for now! But, we thought we'd peel back the curtain on our two primary characters, Kai and Alfie, and show a bit of the sketch to concept process that went into their designs.

Designing the main character – Kai.



Early studies of shapes and styles for drone tech.

Getting more detailed with shapes and tech styles.

Honing in on the visual style for drone tech.

Trying a variety of design ideas for Alfie.

Landing on Alfie's base design with facial expression experiments.

These character concepts were created by Lane Brown, who also did much of the artwork for our previous games.

This dev log is cross-posted from our blog: read original post.

Be sure to wishlist/follow on Steam and follow our socials for further updates on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok!

Nature plays such an important role in Arctic Awakening that we treat it as somewhat of a character all its own. For that reason, even with a stylized sci-fi setting, grounding the game world in the real world has been a focus since the very early days of pre-development.

Since Oklahoma isn't known for sweeping mountain vistas, using our local environment for inspiration wasn't going to cut it. While traveling to location in Alaska was well out of our indie budget, a quick trip to the snowy Rocky Mountains would serve as a perfect backdrop to collect reference materials.



Beyond gathering references, I also wanted to immerse myself into Kai's character as much as possible (learning to fly was just the start). So, I booked a week-long stay at an AirBnB n a remote part of the Rockies during prime blizzard season.

To truly feel Kai's total isolation, I found a place with no TV, no internet and spotty cell coverage at best. I would have no contact with the outside world for the entire week, which would get as close as possible to simulating the isolation that our characters would experience.



When I wasn't hiking through three feet of snow within dense forests or climbing to mountaintops, I was fleshing out the outline of the script. This trip would double as the first of several writer's retreats where isolation allows for the extreme focus needed to make leaps forward in the progress of the game script (I'll write another post detailing the writer's retreat process later).

Getting into the head of Kai and our other characters was an invaluable experience to understand their point of view. But, it wasn't all about getting into character to aid in the writing process. I also carried my phone camera, an action camera with head mount, a drone and a notebook.



We believe that transformative work is created by focussing on the little details that others might miss. So, the idea was to take note of every little detail in the physical world while documenting all of it through photos, first-person videos and detailed notes. These would lay the foundations for our early work in populating our world and making sure it was rooted in reality, while still allowing the freedom to apply our own stylized flair to the experience.

The popular image of indie game development is a few developers locking themselves away in their virtual "caves" for months or years on end to hammer out the code, artwork, sound design and music required for a vision to come to life. That is of course part of the process, but I believe it is just as important to get out of that cave and put yourself into the shoes of your characters. After all, you can't fully realize a vision if you don't know what you're looking for.



This dev log is cross-posted from our blog: read original post.

Be sure to wishlist/follow on Steam and follow our socials for further updates on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok!

For a narrative-driven game like Arctic Awakening, it's really important for our team at GoldFire Studios to be able to quickly get a feel for the flow and pacing of a scene. We do this some time before we actually head into the recording studio with our voice actors, so we need some kind of placeholder to fill in for the real recorded dialogue.

Developers have a few options for placeholder dialogue, including timed subtitles and scratch audio recorded by programmers (the aural equivalent of "programmer art"). We tried both of these early on in development for Arctic Awakening, before settling on a workflow using Google Cloud Speech, which has proved a significant time saver and given great results. Better still, our use case has fit within the product's free tier.

The Text-to-Speech product is a Cloud API which delivers great-sounding voice clips from the text strings you provide. You can pass other options besides the content itself, specifying a language, one of several presets for the character of the voice, and a gender. The language code allows for different accents as well, for instance American, British, Indian or Australian English.

We already had a database with the data we needed to get started (the line itself and the character who said it), so plugging that into Google's API was relatively quick and painless. Here's a snippet of our code in our dialogue management platform, StoryDB (which we'll talk more about in a later post):



And here's a sample of what gets generated:

Listen to Sample Recording

From there, we jump into our game engine (Unity) and run a script which automates importing the line metadata and the audio clips. At that point, the clips themselves as well as the subtitles are ready to be used in a scene!

We're really happy with the results, and we'd definitely encourage other developers to give it a try if it sounds useful for your projects. If you have any questions, please drop a comment below and we'll be happy to answer to the best of our ability. We'll also be covering StoryDB in more detail in a future post.

This dev log is cross-posted from our blog: read original post.

Be sure to wishlist/follow on Steam and follow our socials for further updates on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok!

This is being cross-posted and was written by Joff Winks for his blog. Joff was the composer of the music created for the Arctic Awakening reveal trailer. The original blog post can be found here.

Sometimes the planets align, and the universe manages to find a way to connect you with like-minded, creative people.

One of those cosmic conjunctions happened to me recently when indie game developer GoldFire Studios contacted me to score the music for the reveal trailer of their latest video game Arctic Awakening.

Arctic Awakening is an episodic narrative adventure game. Set in the not too distant future, survivors of an aeroplane crash find themselves stranded in the remote Alaskan wilderness.

If you tuned in to watch the Future Games Show, perhaps you saw Arctic Awakening as part of the 2021 Spring Showcase.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The screenshots accompanying the brief for the trailer music grabbed my attention straight away with their stunning stylised realism, stark beauty and gorgeous colour pallet reminiscent of games like Firewatch or The Red Lantern.



The images were so evocative that I immediately had a direction for the music and instrumentation.

Acoustic Guitars would be a core ingredient of the sound pallet, as would flutes. For me, these instruments conjure the sound of northern indigenous folk music, where zithers and wooden flutes are prominent features.

I also wanted to capture the crystalline quality of the snow and ice of the Alaskan wilderness, and for this, I decided to use Glockenspiel doubled with Triangle and Cimbalom. The combination creates a bright metallic sound that sparkles atop the guitars and flutes.

Sci-fi elements such as the drone and installations are picked out with a few of my favourite synths - Yamaha’s amazing CS80, the ever-brilliant and adaptable Minimoog and Roland’s seminal synth, the Jupiter-8.

I made several drafts of the game trailer music to match edits made in the footage as it was gradually honed and refined and to incorporate feedback about the score from GoldFire.

I find comparing them a useful exercise and I’ve included them below for you to enjoy.

Listen to Trailer Track #1

The first draft features a swirling swarm of flutes that flutter underneath the guitar theme. In this mix, I used a Minimoog for the bass pedal point.

Listen to Trailer Track #1

I reworked the second half of the score for the next draft using flutes. A repeated melodic phrase played in three contrasting rhythmic settings between the bass, alto, and wooden flutes are layered and build to the final crescendo. I like this layering technique and find the resulting patterns very pleasing!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The third draft is a complete rewrite. It honours the spirit of the previous compositions but also develops new ideas. I recorded six guitars played slightly out of time to create the swarm effect of the earlier drafts. I also introduced the Jupiter-8, the distinctive sound adding character to the sci-fi undertones of the music.

Be sure to wishlist/follow on Steam and follow our socials for further updates on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok!