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DevLog #6: Development Progress

18 Mar, 2021

With this DevLog we want to share with you some of the development progress that’s happening in Red Frost. What are we working on, how it goes and where do we stand with the game.

The past months we made a lot of progress on making the game world. As you might know, the game world in Red Frost is handmade, which allows for best possible quality. Is is however also a very time consuming process and we expect to spend at least another 4-6 months working on it.

That being said, the outside is just part of the workload when it comes to the game world. Red Frost will also feature lots of interior locations for you to explore and this is something we also put a lot of work into. We have a list of planned interior locations divided into locations we must have for storyline and questing and additional locations that once in the game we would feel comfortable with the amount of interior locations for the exploration we envision. Then there is our wishful thinking list which contains all sort of interior locations we wish would make it into the game given the time will allow for it. Right now we are making good progress within the “comfortable list” and create location after location on basically a weekly basis.

Over the past 4 months a lot of work also went into improving our visual tech to make the game world really shine. Yes, Red Frost was already looking good, but there was still room for improvement and that’s what we did.
While we are not finished with the new tech just yet, we already accomplished the vast majority of what we wanted to achieve. However, the changes were so significant in terms of visuals as well as performance, that it made us face a different problem: testing everything. While internal testing is great to find issues early on, when it comes to tech and performance you optimally want to test it with a larger audience.

We are however not ready to make a demo of Red Frost just yet, so we found another solution to take the new visual tech for a spin with a larger audience: Winter Survival Simulator. Is it a much smaller survival game we have been working on for a while now and figured we port the new tech from Red Frost to Winter Survival Simulator and release a demo. That worked very well and the few issues we encountered could been easily fixed. This in turn meant we now have a better understanding how far we can go with the world building in Red Frost while still maintaining good performance.

Another part of the team spent a lot of time on creating new enemies and enemy types. This is a very important area of development for us since we face a bit of a problem here. Many people think of Red Frost as a zombie game. Yes, we might have featured the infected too predominantly in the video footage we released, but in reality the infected drive the main storyline while human and wildlife are by far the more common enemies you’ll encounter.
We are also in the process of creating new types of infected enemies that are less zombie-like with very interesting combat behavior and AI.

Yet another big area we are currently working on is quest based content. As you might know, apart of the main storyline, there will be lots of side quests and side storylines to make Red Frost a great action RPG experience on its own and aid the exploration of the large game world even further. We are about to increase the amount of human groups and settlements you will encounter in the game, each of them featuring their own content ranging from a few quests to entire storylines that are independent from the game’s main storyline.

As you can see, Red Frost’s development went very nicely so far and we are pretty happy with the progress we achieved. There is a lot in the works and quite a lot to be done before the game is finished, but we hope to be able to present you a first playable glimpse of Red Frost in a demo toward the end of the year before the game’s release.

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FrostFall becomes Red Frost

15 Jul, 2020

We decided to change the name from FrostFall to Red Frost. FrostFall has always been a working title and given the large interest in our game, we decided to settle on the final name while also announcing a slew of changes coming to the game.

Joanna Tynor, our CEO, did put it nicely: “FrostFall was the working title we have chosen for our game and when the time came to go public with it, we decided to take it for a spin. Now however that we see the great level of interest in our game, we decided to give it its final name: Red Frost”

Red Frost is getting a significantly larger and even more important, more detailed, hand crafted game world. We always wanted exploration to be a major part of the game, but now we decided to go a step further and bring more content into the nooks and crannies of the game world to give players a reason to explore even the most remote places.

Along with the expanded game world we will add a lot more quest givers and side quests than we initially planned. Some will hook into the main storyline, but most will be completely independent and follow their own little storylines.
There will also be a lot more human NPCs into the game overall, both friendly and hostile. Apart from the cultists new groups of hostile and neutral NPCs for the player to fight and interact with will be coming.

Red Frost will also see an expanded skill system with more skills and talents. The corruption system, too, will be receiving additional effects and a lot more corruption abilities for the player to use. These changes go nicely along with an overhaul of the sneak system making sneaking an alternative, full fledged approach in most situations.

While we are very happy with the survival system as it is, we decided to spice it up a bit by expanding the amount of diseases and adding illnesses. These will come in different stages with different effects on your character increasing the immersion of living in an harsh environment. Some of the new additions to the corruption system will also nicely integrate with illnesses giving you an optional approach for remedies.

With all the new things coming to Red Frost, we will however postpone its release date to 2021. That being said, we plan to still release a demo for Red Frost in 2020.

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DevLog #5 “Combat, Enemies & AI”

1 Apr, 2020

A game often lives up or dies with the enemies it provides or rather how those enemies behave, especially when combat is involved. We view Red Frost no different here, hence enemy AI has always been a major focus in the game’s development. Beside the AI, there are also two other aspects of enemies we pay close attention to: types and reactions in combat. While enemy types like AI are topics frequently covered, we felt that how enemies react to being attacked deserves more attention.

To achieve a certain level of immersion, the enemies need to react properly. Certain enemy types like a deer you would expect to spook and sprint away when shot at. An infected you would expect to quickly turn and move immediately towards you to attack, no matter how futile. A human enemy on the other hand you might expect to first seek cover before attacking back. Those are things covered by the AI.

The other aspect is how they react when you hit them. These we pay more and more attention to as the development progresses. While we started with simple hit reacts, partially generated based on body physics and the usual trickery you see in games, we felt that especially on certain types of enemies we want more. Hence we started creating special animations just for the way an enemy reacts to being hit. As the amount of these animations increases over the next months, so will the visual variety of reactions in combat. When you consider that hitting different areas of a body has an actual gameplay impact in Red Frost, combined with additional hit reaction animations we expect combat to be visually very exciting, soon.
And before you ask, yes, when you shoot an infected into its legs it will fall and try to slowly crawl towards you. They don’t give up easily…

All those things require different approaches for different categories and types of enemies. In terms of enemies we are looking at 3 categories: humans, animals and infected. They are however not uniform groups of enemies. As a matter of fact, each of them consists of different types of enemies with their distinct combat behaviors. While we all can easily imagine different types of humans or even animals where some are more aggressive, some flee and some only attack when in a pack, the infected are differentiated by means of team play.

Each infected has its own behavioral profile in combat, but when the different types come together they develop a distinct dynamic that changes based on amount of type and size of the group. Take the screeching Attractor from the teaser. Unless left with no other choice, she will avoid combat. Instead, she will call other types of infected. She hence acts more like a leader than a warrior. The warriors then have different roles to fulfill making combat with a diverse group of infected feel completely different than fighting each of them on their own.

Red Frost

DevLog #4 “Processing Mats”

13 Mar, 2020

Scavenging, gathering and hunting are major gameplay elements in Red Frost. Given the desolate post-apocalyptic environment the games takes place in, every item and resource can be of great value and finds its use in the game’s crafting system. While we’ll cover the crafting itself in a later DevLog, we want to have a look at collecting items or rather how some types of collected items need to be processed first, before they can be used for crafting.

If you collect berries from bushes or roots from the ground, you can use them right away by eating them or use them within the cooking mechanics without doing anything with them beforehand. When hunting an animal, you are looking at a similar situation where you can use the meat of the animal right away and cook it or use various ingredients, chief among which salt, to preserve it.

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The game’s crafting system, as opposed to the cooking system, often requires that resources/materials are processed before they can be used. Sticking to the above example with hunting, you not only get meat from animals, but also pelts. While there are a few uses for a pelt as it is, leather is used significantly more often. To get leather, you have to process the pelt.

To turn a pelt into leather, you have to clean it and then put on a tanning rack for a few days before you can turn it into leather that you can use for crafting.
We don’t expect you to lug a tanning rack around. You will find them at some settlements or remnants of such, hunting lodges and some camp places that were used by hunters in the past.
You can also build them at sites you build up as your camps/bases and your mobile base of operations, the boat-plane, has enough room for multiple tanning racks once you discover it.

Our approach to scavenging, cooking and crafting in essence is quite simple: we try to keep a certain degree of realism, without turning it into a simulation. You could say we try to emulate certain steps rather than simulate them. Turning pelts to leather is just an example of how certain mats will have to be processed before they can be used. We will cover more examples and go into more details when we create the DevLog for Red Frost's crafting system.

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DevLog #3 “Deep Snow”

12 Feb, 2020

Deep snow is a visual effect we always wanted to have in Red Frost. Since snow influences so many aspects of the gameplay itself, chief among which is making you travel slower through snow the deeper it is and consuming more stamina while doing so, we are now tweaking its implementation.

As you can see in the video above, deep snow is a visual effect where you see the depth of the snow as opposed to the snow on the ground just being a flat terrain texture. While the system can handle snow that is really deep, we will limit its usage mostly to snow that is about knee-high.
There are good reasons for us to not make snow any deeper, such as being unable to spot many objects in the snow or even simple things like being unable to hunt a rabbit as considering its size it would look and feel very odd. Making the snow about knee high presents the perfect compromise between realism, visuals and gameplay.

You still get the feeling of wadding through snow, the visuals make certain to increase the immersion of moving slower and exhaust quicker while not missing interesting things that would otherwise be covered by the snow.

Deep snow is also great for another thing: tracking of animals. Rather than create an artificial tracking system, we rely in Red Frost on a more organic and immersive approach: foot tracks. What wouldn’t really work well in most games, in the winter setting of Red Frost foot steps remain visible most of the time allowing you to track animals and enemies alike, without the help of additional systems.

This obviously gets really interesting when the snow becomes deep as you won’t often be able to determine the foot steps themselves, but rather see paths and may often not be sure what you track since the size of the tracks left will mostly be the only indicator about your prey.

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DevLog #2 “Weapons & Gunplay”

15 Jan, 2020

Gunplay and weapons play a major part in Red Frost's gameplay. Given the harsh nature and its post-apocalyptic setting, you rightfully expected combat to be very important. Here we aim for a solid and familiar shooter approach which makes a lot of sense considering Red Frost is a 1st person perspective game to begin with.

While we decided to not go with simulated ballistic projectiles, we implemented all the important elements of gunplay such as aim sway, recoil, accuracy, shooting from the hip or iron sights. This approach is in our opinion optimally supporting the dynamic combat we envision for the game and the choice of weapons that reflects it. Pistols, bolt-action rifles, sniper rifles and assault rifles all have their purpose and place.

While you won’t be able to craft entire weapons, you will be able to modify your weapons. We just don’t think crafting a complex thing like a firearm would fit the immersion we aim for, but modifying and improving a weapon you have found is a lot more reasonable.
Apart from internal components to improve a weapon’s performance or reliability, you will also be able to alter the externals of a weapon. Yes, you can mount a scope or if you are lucky and find a sound suppressor, you will be able to use it, too. Well, if you aren’t lucky to find one when you think you’ll need it, a long can, some bits and pieces and plenty of filler material will allow you to craft a makeshift suppressor. Won’t be as good and especially not as durable, but it will do the trick.

Speaking of durability, it is another important aspect of weapons in Red Frost. Weapon performance is based on weapon condition. If you want your weapon to perform at its peak, you need to take care of it. Every now and then you will have to clean your weapon and occasionally perform some maintenance to keep up accuracy and prevent malfunctions or your weapon jamming. Should it come that far, you will need to perform repairs and cannibalize some other weapons you might find in the world for parts.
The entire weapon maintenance mechanics is progressive, so you won’t be annoyed by constantly having to clean your weapon to keep it at 100%, it is something that you supposed to do occasionally.

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Red Frost DevLog #1 “Dynamic Environment”

11 Dec, 2019

One of the awesome features in Red Frost is its dynamic environment. Like any good game, Red Frost has a full day-night cycle and a fully dynamic weather system. The dynamic environment however goes one big step further where the entire game world reacts to the weather system.
When it snows, the terrain and objects in the game world such as buildings, wrecks, crates etc. get covered by snow. You see a dynamic, gradual build-up of snow. How fast it happens or how much gets covered depends on the intensity and duration of the snow falling.

When the weather changes and it gets warmer, the snow begins to melt. When melting, it creates wet surfaces on objects and puddles on the ground. Should the weather change yet again, those puddles will begin to freeze. The snow also reacts to heat sources so for example when you make a campfire, the snow around it will melt away.

These dynamic changes to the environment also affect you. The deeper the snow the slower you move and walking and running consume stamina quicker. Then there is the obvious temperature factor that ties in with the survival elements of the game and hypothermia.

Our goal with the environment in Red Frost was to make it as immersive as possible, that’s why we decided early on to go with a fully dynamic environment. It is also important to us to provide varied landscape visuals despite the winter setting. We just didn’t want everything to be covered by snow to the same degree all the time. Given that you are likely to spend countless hours exploring the detailed game world we are creating, we felt a winter setting should not only provide visual variety, but also change when you revisit places. Where you once have been struggling making your way through deep snow you might now see the same area looking a lot less wintery…or not. The beauty of dynamics.

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