Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth launches on September 18

My name is Kristina, I work at the indie studio Hyper Games. We’re based in Norway, so you can be sure we know a lot about snow, which is great with our upcoming cozy adventure game, Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth.

It is our second Moomin game and it is coming to PlayStation 5 on September 18. Our first was the cozy spring and musical adventure Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley.

The main character, Moomintroll, wakes up from his hibernation, but winter is still lingering and no one else in the family is ready to rouse from their slumber. Our reluctant hero then decides to bring back spring to wake everyone up and get his best friend, Snufkin, back to Moominvalley.

The Moomins were created by Tove Jansson, and the first story was published in 1945. Having lived through World War II, Tove created a world away from war and facism. The stories of the Moomins reflect life itself and contain a mixture of darkness and humor, and how to get along with it all.

Tove was a private, but courageous person and in addition to war, she lived through a period where having a same-gender partner was illegal. She used concealed language and creative storytelling to express love in her stories. For example, in our game you meet a character named Too-Ticky, which Tove created based on her life partner, Tuulikki Pietilä.

The interactive storybook

It has been such a joy creating games from the stories made by Tove Jansson and we have done our best to bring to life a world that reflects both the softness and emotional complexity of the Moomins.

For Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth, we wanted to create a game that gives the players a storybook atmosphere with an aquarelle look, inspired by Tove’s own visual works. To achieve this we combined 3D shapes with proper 2D painted elements, using several shading and texturing tricks to achieve a coherent mix of the two. It is made to look like the watercolors have tinted the paper, but imperfectly like it typically can be.

We try to do as much as possible in our game development engine Unity, with shader and texture work, as this makes for a concise look of it all.

You can find references to Tove’s art, characters and stories in Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth. Did you see the carpet in the screenshot above? Let’s take a closer look.

You can find both the Ancestor, and the Hattifatteners on the carpet.

And then we have a beautiful red chair in the living room, and an X-ray of Moomintroll in his bedroom that some fans might recognise.

The snow of Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth

As mentioned, to get the storybook look, we have mostly flat structures, landscapes and items in the game, but we wanted the snow to feel like it has weight and move in relation to Moomintroll.

The game’s terrain is created from simple shapes, and a deformable layer of snow is added. The layer will respond to interaction from characters and other elements and give the feel of actually walking through the snow.

In the engine it looks like this…

In the screenshot above, you can also see bushes that are flat and maybe look similar to stage props used in theater? Clever use of perspective and camera angles are possibly the closest we come to creating magic.

The result are areas where soft snow gets brought up and thrown down as weighted and textured substances. It looks perfect to make snow figurines with.

Available from September 18

Thank you for reading our little art deep dive, we hope you find a lot of fun art and details when playing through Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth and feel the hygge, as we would say, of Moominvalley.

We leave you with concept art for a dark and cold winter forest and Moomintroll who realizes he is braver than he thought.