Ary’s Powers
In our upcoming game Ary and the Secret of Seasons, Ary possess the ability to cast Season Spheres. What are these ‘Season Spheres’ you might ask, well let me tell you all about them!
The Seasons Spheres
Season Spheres are a local area that have a different season inside than the world around them.
In 2D games it’s easy to do because on screen, you only show a glimpse of a level. Therefore, changing seasons is just changing one “flat image”.
On the other hand, in 3D you still have the entire environment, thus it starts to get complicated with more than one season at the same time.
That’s how we introduced the spheres of seasons. The player can make a sphere wherever and whenever they want. As you can see in the video above, seasons directly have an influence on their environment; the tree loses it’s leaves, snow covers the grass, the water hardens to ice, Flowers bloom in spring, butterflies bring life to the region.
Seasons spheres have a few simple rules:
- They can never intersect
- There can only be one seasons sphere of each type active at a time
- Their size is dependent on the distance to all other spheres
seasons spheres can have a huge impact on the environment. You could say they’re a snapshot of the same location several months apart.
The change of the season allows us to add new layer to platforming. We can ‘hide’ the conventional solution and the player is forced to explore. Season spheres do much more than show here.
Read our next blog posts to find out more about how other elements in the game react to the seasons.
