Arctic Awakening News

A great story hinges on believable characters, and the best way to achieve this is to write "in character." To get into a character's head, you must fully understand your character from the inside out. Since Kai, the player character in Arctic Awakening, is a pilot, I couldn't think of any better way to get in that character's head than to experience flying a plane myself (plus, I'd always wanted to fly a plane, so it was a great excuse!).

I signed up for a flight lesson with Oklahoma Aviation at the nearby Wiley Post Airport in Oklahoma City. A few days later, on a crisp cloudless morning, I found myself standing outside of Hangar 14 and climbing into a Cessna 172 Skyhawk.

My pandemic beard was still in full effect at this time!

There was a quick "ground school" where we went over the basics of flight controls such as how to turn using a combination of rudder and ailerons, how to taki using the pedals, how to read the basic instruments, etc. All of this can of course be learned online, but it was still great learning them within an actual plane, as our character would have.

The moment where it really clicked was when we lifted off the ground and the instructor gave me control of the plane. I've flown plenty of flight simulators, but you can't get a true sense of the sensation until you've sat in the cockpit of the real deal. It was at this moment that I really felt I could understand our character's love of flying and at least a sense of his mindset as he went to work every day.

Coming in for a touch-and-go about halfway through the flight.

Overall, it was a great experience that was both fun and beneficial to our story creation process. Games are a multidisciplinary artform, and I feel it's important to get out there and integrate elements of the real world into your work. I'm just glad I didn't have to experience a crash to truly connect with Kai's story!

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

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It is often said that visuals in games aren't nearly as important as the gameplay. We absolutely believe this to be true; however, when making a game where the story is the gameplay, those visuals suddenly rise in importance.

The saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is just as a true in a narrative game as it is in any other medium. In order to successfully craft a visual story, you must start with a solid plan. That doesn't mean you have to stick to it, but having an idea of where you are going is vital to getting somewhere worth going.

With story being so important in Arctic Awakening, we decided to make careful use of colors to support the emotional beats as well as to differentiate between areas of the game world, times of day and states of weather. This reliance on color lends itself to a stylized look; however, we didn't feel that an overly cartoony, low-poly or pixellated approach would sufficiently match the tone and scale of the story we wanted to tell. The ultimate goal is to transport the player to a place where they feel what the characters feel – the extremes of the environment, the mystery of the strange structures and the awe of jaw-dropping vistas.

We needed to find somewhere in the middle, and incidentally, many of our favorite indie games fit somewhere in this same spectrum. No art is created in a vacuum. You are always absorbing the media you consume, especially the ones you enjoy most. These and many other games inspired the art style, but they never defined it. We wanted to find our niche and break out of it with our own unique style. However, we needed a starting point, and the below images from other indie games helped us to get the ball rolling.

















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!

Das amerikanische Entwicklerteam von GoldFire Studios aus Oklahoma City hat im Rahmen der "Future Games Show" sein episodisches Story-Adventure Arctic Awakening vorgestellt, das euch in die unversöhnliche Arktis führt. Nach einem Flugzeugabsturz findet ihr euch mit dem Protagonisten Kai in der gefrorenen Wildnis [...]

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