If you know Frostpunk – an acclaimed city builder survival sim on the frozen apocalypse – you also know there’s snow all over the game. But with the upcoming expansion The Last Autumn, which launches on July 21, we flipped the table and messed up with the basic visuals of the base game. Green leaves replaced white snow, and since we never imagined Frostpunk without it, it turned out to be more difficult than just changing the weather.
In 11-bit studios, we create games in which art amplifies the design message. In Frostpunk, we used artistic design to establish that ominous, ruthless, and palpable sadness that resonates throughout the events we portray. The lighting and the colors, the stylized parts of the user interface, the particles or even the architectural forms – all of these served this purpose. Shades of royal blue and steel dominate the Frostpunk palette, and all of the colors are cool and bleached.
Every morning in the daily cycle of the game is a silver lining, so we’ve made them a little different and uplifting. But then minus 60 degrees comes in and everything is back to hopelessly normal. Meanwhile, dark UI splashes in the Book of Laws or on story event screens, which can look like smut which is, after all, the game’s main resource, accentuated the dark tones. And details like dirt on buildings, frozen edges of the screen, sharp shards floating in the air have proven to be very helpful in maintaining the mood.
All of those aspects have to fit together, and they did in Frostpunk. That’s why the decision to make The Last Autumn a prequel story in which players oversee the construction of the generator from the main game, was such a big step towards something different. Being snowy is, next to being steampunk, Frostpunk’s main visual identity. Players see in-game screenshots and recognize them immediately, and we were just about to drop this ingredient. At least for part of The Last Autumn’s story, since winter is an imminent threat and delicate snowdrops start to strike at some point.
As I said before, during the development of the main game we never imagined Frostpunk “green”, but tweaking the palette was only a minor task. More importantly, the entire environment, all of the 2D artwork in the game, and all of the buildings had to be adapted to their “fall” versions. In fact, the weather changes in the game rely on delicate and intricate smoke and mirror tricks. Conditions change during storms, but despite this we still move inside the winter. As a result, snow removal, which may not seem important, required a lot of work. Just like making it reappear since we know what the result will be and also need to fix it.
Basically, Frostpunk was designed by a lot of custom systems and it’s not as flexible as we would like. Take the roofs for example. The red roofs are cut nicely from the set and the terrain green, but in the base game we didn’t have any roofs in the building models at all, as they were all covered in snow. We also didn’t have many types of terrain other than snowdrifts as we just didn’t need it. In addition, new types of buildings like the dock for ships, which disembark and as the main source of resources in Last Fall, had to be true to the art style and visual structure of the game. an already paved visual identity does not mean restricting creativity. Knowing the limits of your game can stimulate it even more. This happened during the development of The Last Autumn, and we think it’s a huge achievement for the 11-bit studios art division.
But The Last Autumn isn’t the only Frostpunk expansion to debut on July 21. While The Rifts and On the Edge don’t stand out as well in terms of visuals, as both are properly snow-covered, they also introduce some interesting new gameplay mechanics. Rifts add a new map for Endless Mode and Bridges, a new type of build for gathering resources scattered across islands. On the Edge narratively follows the events after the Great Storm since the end of the base game. Players are tasked with building and maintaining an outpost outside of town, without the generator, to mine resources from recently discovered military warehouses and maintain trade routes with settlements of other survivors.
All three Frostpunk expansions will launch for PlayStation 4 on July 21. The Last Autumn, On the Edge, and The Rifts are available separately or as a bundled Season Pass.