Winterfest and Visual Themes
The second special project is a winter festival with mulled wine, a Christmas market and a chain of fairy lights. It also introduced visual themes – designs players can unlock with crystals that change the look of the whole game.
After the World Cup came the second special project: a Winterfest. Where the World Cup is about speed and sport, Winterfest is about atmosphere: lights, warm drinks, music in the snow.
Seven businesses, four phases
Winterfest has seven businesses: a mulled wine stand, a Christmas market stall, an ice rink, a winter village, festival grounds, a stage and a light park. They open over four phases. Completing it brings +50 % offline earnings, 250 crystals and five reputation.
Unlike the World Cup, which scales with the player's best region, Winterfest has a fixed size. Its prices are the same for every player, right after the World Cup, no matter how far their regions are. That makes it predictable and keeps it from becoming trivial for players who rushed their regions.
After the World Cup is completed, it stays in the game as a trophy, while Winterfest takes the project tab. The project icon is a decorated Christmas tree.
Animations that need care
Each Winterfest icon has two guests and its own animation, and almost every one needed a second pass:
- The mulled wine stand first showed smoke rising from the fire while the kettle stayed still. It should be the opposite: the fire flickers without smoke, and the kettle steams.
- The Christmas market stall had blinking lights so big they covered the stall. Now they are smaller and subtler, so the details stay visible.
- The winter village has windows that light up one by one, each on its own schedule, and steam above a marshmallow fire.
- The ice rink's lantern flickers.
- The light park has a chase effect: a wave of light runs along the bulbs in order, like real fairy lights.
Designs: the whole game in a new look
The bigger addition of the day was visual themes. A theme changes the look of the entire game: the mountains in the header, the falling particles (snow, stars or lights), the colours of buttons and frames, small ornaments on business cards and a frame around the project tab.
Two themes exist, one for each project: a World Cup theme with race banners and a Winterfest theme with warm lights and decorations. The rule for designing them: 90 % the existing look, 10 % theme. A theme should feel like a festive version of the same game, not a different one. Gold is used sparingly.
Themes are bought with crystals (150 each) and are mainly offered where they belong: on the project's detail page. A "preview" button closes the dialog and shows the whole game in the new look for a moment, with a bar to unlock it or end the preview. Ending the preview returns to exactly the dialog it came from, so it feels like part of that dialog. After buying, the theme is switched on immediately – a first version made players activate it separately, which felt like a missing step.
Owned themes can be switched in the settings at any time, without prices or shop. A theme is never an advantage in the game; it is purely cosmetic, and I want it to stay that way.
Painted theme assets
The theme assets were painted in the same style as everything else: wide mountain panoramas (with optional night versions for dark mode), corner ornaments, particle sprites and a nine-slice frame. A script cuts them out and also handles painted light halos, which would otherwise leave a pink ring when the magenta background is removed. One of the first frame prompts produced something unexpected – which turned out to be the particle sheet, filed in the wrong place.