Gerda: A Flame in Winter and Liva's Story (DLC)

Gerda: A Flame in Winter and Liva's story (DLC) is a narrative dialogue driven RPG-lite game, developed by Bird Island (i.e Portaplay) and published by Don't Nod Entertainment.

 

Engine: Unity

Platforms: Windows (PC) and Nintendo switch

Development time: December 2021 - September 2022

Official publisher webpage: Gerda: A Flame in Winter


The game was a finalist nominee in various categories and won multiple awards specifically for narrative, most notably in Spilprisen 2023 and Indiecade 2023.

 

I joined the company in the later development of the game, nine months prior to its release, as a generalist Unity game developer in a team of four programmers.

 

Features and tasks that I was involved in: 

  • Quality of life and all round systems such as:
    • Game settings setup (video, audio, accesibility). Both functionality and UI.
    • DLC Content Management.
    • Achievements (Steam).
    • Setup of a simple private server and database for tracking player narrative choices throughtout the game. These were used to display statistics and compare similarities with other players' choices at the end.
    • Input management handling for switching between point-and-click and controllers.
  • Gameplay features such as:
    • A current objective player reminder prompt.
    • A UI and VO montage sequence for the game's story introduction
    • Expansion of the player's notebook (UI) which is the main progress and data tracking tool for the player.
  • Maintaining and expanding the in-house custom tools that drove the production of the game. The most significant one being a visual graph/node tool called Graphenheimer, that powered the designers and writers to create narrative branching and manage the dialogue that was featured in the game.
  • General debugging of all aspects of the game (UI, logic, performance related etc) in coordination with the internal and external QA team

 

New technologies that I got familiar with during this project:

  • Nintendo Switch development kit and API
  • Steam API
  • Custom build pipelines
  • Basic server and database setup, and communication with Unity via webrequests.
  • Custom Unity editor tools and package management
  • Localization solutions