Moomintroll: Winter's Warmth, an adventure game from Norwegian indie studio Hyper Games, launches on PlayStation 5 on September 18, the studio announced in a PlayStation Blog post on September 16. The post was written by Hyper Games' Kristina Haley and focused on how the team built the game's art.
Winter's Warmth is Hyper Games' second Moomin game. The studio's first was Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley, an adventure game with a spring setting and a musical focus.
In the new game, Moomintroll wakes from hibernation to find that winter has not ended and the rest of his family is still asleep. He sets out to bring spring back so everyone wakes up and his best friend, Snufkin, returns to Moominvalley.
A storybook look
The Moomins were created by Tove Jansson, whose first Moomin story was published in 1945. Hyper Games said it wanted the game to feel like a storybook, with a watercolor style based on Jansson's own artwork. To get there, the team combined 3D shapes with painted 2D elements and used shading and texturing techniques so the result looks like paint that has tinted paper unevenly. According to the post, the studio does as much of this work as possible in Unity through shaders and textures.
The game contains references to Jansson's art, characters and stories. The studio pointed to a carpet showing the Ancestor and the Hattifatteners, and said players can meet Too-Ticky, a character Jansson based on her life partner, Tuulikki Pietilä.
Most structures, landscapes and objects in the game are flat; the post showed flat bushes and compared them to stage props used in theater. The snow is the exception. The game's terrain is built from simple shapes with a deformable layer of snow on top, which responds as characters and other elements move through it, so the snow feels like it has weight.