Weekly Wisby 18: Project Snowflake

As my exchange is coming to an end, I gotta start planning for the future. What kind of car should I buy? How many kids do I want? Are 7 cats laying on top of me enough to keep me warm during winter or should I get another 3? And, of course: what will I do for my graduation project during the next 5 months? This blog will answer one of those questions.

3 weeks ago I mentioned that Julius and I, together with 2 artists Vlada and Timon, created a snowboat game for the 48hr chill jam.

You can play it on here: https://casey-hofland.itch.io/the-legend-of-the-new-years-wish.

The game jam was a huge success… but afterwards, when all was said and done… I wanted more! Blizzard sailing is cool! Exploring the landscape is fun! I want to give people more of it!

So… I started digging. This is the story of how project Snowflake came to be.

What bothered me most about the game jam was the fact that snow tracks looked awful. They kept flickering and didn’t work at all. And it was… kinda sad, because I really wanted to do more fun stuff with it. In my mind, I was dreaming up these mini treasure hunts where you had to step off of the boat to look for treasure by digging in the snow, or follow a sprite that has you draw a heart in the snow tracks. It got me interested how to do tracks in Unity and it led me straight to Trax:



By the gods does it look good.

This was 100% what I wanted. But we were done with the game jam… what possible grounds could I have to buy this asset?

Well… it was 50% off.

Look, there was a new year’s sale going on at Unity and I got suckered in okay? But also: it had so – much – more to offer! I bought a whole collection containing snow, puddles and streams, terrain blending, tessellation, wind and glitter… all for the price of 55 euros! It’s awesome!

And the best part of it all is that it has HDRP integration! Long story short, HDRP is Unity’s solution for making realistic games. And it comes with a lot of benefits: it is super high detailed, can create beautiful skies and clouds, comes with all kinds of professional effects and frankly blows my mind every time I look at it.

Beautiful tracks and beautiful graphics… so what? I’ll tell you what! I wanna build a game that’s so beautiful that you WANT to explore it! I wanna build great vistas all from the tip of my fingers with a free engine and 55,- euros worth of assets because I am KING amongst men! Nah but seriously I wanna make a game where you have fun seeking out vistas. With your snow boat. The snow boat stays.

And to keep to it, I was gonna need some free assets! First and foremost: free terrains. Because I don’t do terrains. I’m the code-guy. I don’t know anything about terrains! Luckily, the internet does. And the internet has ways to generate terrains based on real world data. Armed with powerful tools like this, the impossible… becomes easy.

I put the K2 mountain in Unity!

Of course it needs to be texture painted, but this is trivial: getting highly detailed terrain like this for free is incredible!

My interests extended further. Because what is everybody going to expect in a winter game? An aurora. Luckily aurora’s are incredibly easy to create and OF COURSE THEY’RE NOT THEY’RE ONE OF THE HARDESTS THINGS IN GRAPHICS! I only found 1 good one: the rest look like garbage.



Even though this aurora looked pretty sweet, putting it in Unity was a whoooole different story. Since it’s quite old, I suddenly had to learn shader programming so I could make it compatible with modern Unity. And even though I have known about shader programming for 4 days now, I feel qualified to say:

DAYUM this code is bad!

Every part of it is clobbered and clustered together like a big ball of sticky spaghetti! It took me 8 hours to organize everything! And the worst part about it is… IT STILL DOESN’T LOOK GOOD T_T . The video doesn’t show that the effect looks terrible once you see it at the horizon. It doesn’t show that the aurora is so bright it completely lights up your terrain, making night scenes look unrealistic and sometimes even blinding you. So I gotta do all that from scratch. But… at least it was good practice to learn shader code.

And I put that practice to good use! Armed with this newfound knowledge I set out to create something else special. Interestingly, the moon is orange. But this hardly fits our perception of reality. Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you the moon is white, or even blue. The reason is Scotopic Vision, or “the Purkinje effect”, and you would be forgiven having never heard of it. It means that our eyes adjust in dark environments to better see our surroundings. Implementing this effect takes years of study, countless hours of effort and many long nights trying and failing. Luckily, someone has done all that for me, and online I found an incredibly high-quality paper, written for the Avalanche game engine, going into incredible detail into all kinds of effects! So, after blatantly stealing it, here is what it looks like:

Changing colors with changing brightness.

Now there was only one thing left to do: convince Julius to go on this crazy endeavor with me. It took a bit of pushing and shoving in the beginning. Julius wants to work on archeology, while I want to make this game more about the vistas. We decided we could do both by working separately, together! If I work on the terrain, the weather and the big moments, Julius can populate it with ruins, history and depth. This should create a nice contrast between epic scale and small detail.

I personally couldn’t be more excited. This week marks a brand-new inroad for us to spend our talents on, and it’s one that pulls no punches! To new beginnings!