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.
![](https://blog.almostahero.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/concepts_for_the_naughty_dragon.png)
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.
![](https://blog.almostahero.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/first_concept_for_bg_.jpg)
![](https://blog.almostahero.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/final_background_design_.jpg)
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!
![](https://blog.almostahero.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/relax_guys.png)
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!
Download Almost a Hero‘s newest update for free on Google Play or on the App Store, and join Almost a Hero’s Subreddit or Almost a Hero’s Discord server to discuss new strategies and ideas with the community!