Hi!
I’m Alex, Lead Developer and 50 % of Studio Gauntlet. Me and my partner (Christer) figured we'd share some clips from our progress with SNØ so far. Hopefully you'll find it interesting. Also, we view this as a sort of celebration. Someone once said to us that it is important to celebrate the little victories. Today we choose to believe that, and live by that, so join us in patting our backs as we celebrate a little victory we've chosen to call...
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🎉 The Official 3 Month Anniversary of SNØ 🎉🥳
It feels long ago, but we only have to go back to March 15th this year (2024) to find when we first came up with the game concept that would become SNØ. In less than a month we went from an inspirational Youtube-video to two playable prototypes, one in which you controlled each ski separately. It was pretty wild!
^Yum yum, deep fried 🍤
II want to say that we scrapped the dual ski controller because we never managed to solve the pun “Twin tip” + “Twin stick” + something something = a great title, but the truth is that the other player controller was simply more accessible, streamlined and fun to play.
Looking back on our process with SNØ, we can highly recommend developing with simple shapes until the core gameplay loop is properly established. This is not a revolutionary new idea, but it is very easy to slip up on this point. In many ways, making things pretty is easier than making things playable, so it is tempting to just start making things look nice as soon as you hit a bump in the game design process.
The problem with going beautiful too fast is that it becomes harder to understand why stuff feels off, if something suddenly feels off about your game (and trust me, stuff will feel off, often). The less moving parts you have, the faster you can solve the N-body problem that is your game. So until the gameplay is tight, use only the simplest of placeholders!
We established pretty fast that SNØ (or at the time "SKI GAME") should be a fairly simple, infinite runner score attack type of game. Do risky stuff to score points - die easy with instant retry. Finally we could start making it look less like Unity-poop, so we added snow spray, sunsets and some FOV-effects. Voilá - The Movement feels faster and the mountain more tactile.
The next big thing was rigging the player with arms and legs that reacted dynamically to inputs such as degree of leaning, velocity and whether ya grounded or not. We used inverse kinematics to procedurally animate the skier to react to to these parameters. Also we upped the fidelity of the foliage a notch.
We've done tons more, and going forward we will post more specific in depth diary entries on the features we think makes SNØ such a great experience. If you don't want to miss those you can follow the game to get notified. Or just check back later.
We hope you'll leave a comment if you have a question, feedback or just like what you see. It's always nice to hear from our players. We read it all, and we try to answer to the best of our abilities.
Thanks for reading.
Until next time,
Alex & Christer