The Wintertide Event 2019 is active between December and January to all players that reach stage 100 in Almost a Hero. Here’s a closer look at the design process!
Candies are the main currency of the event. We thought it would be fun to have them drop from dragons: that way they could pop up in the middle of any Adventure run, and trigger a minigame at any moment.
We decided to turn the dragon fight into a 40 seconds snowball fight. Each snowball impact would make the dragon drop candies and gold. We added a ‘snow’ counter to limit spam tapping and save everyone’s fingers in the process.
While the art team polished their ice-drawing skills, the design team was working on the mini game’s pace. We ran a few internal tests and found out that it felt that you lost precious few seconds trying to discover how to play it. But we wanted to make it as self-explanatory as possible on the first go!
This was solved by having the dragon start at a slower speed and progressively making it faster and adding more dragons. Not as many as in this picture from the testing phase, though!
We added some stats to the minigame and -after we found we really wanted to share our hits & accuracy stat– a sharing screen.
And with this, all the pieces for the Snowball Fight were ready!
Hope you liked our small insight into the main design challenges for Almost a hero’s Wintertide Event!
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