Grandfather Frost - a 3D village adventure with bison riding and boar hunting (Three.js, free)

[oreumgames]

Hi all,

Grandfather Frost is a third-person 3D adventure set in a village in Belarus. A boy picks mushrooms, dives with a spear for fish, tames and rides bison and hunts wild boar with a rifle to earn 10,000 coins. That opens the way to an island in the lake, a torch, and an old man frozen in ice who grants one wish. A boar charge or a viper bite ends the run, and rubber boots let you kick the snake instead. It is in English, Korean and Russian.

Play (free, no sign-up): oreumgames.com/en/games/frost

Tech, since this is a dev forum: Three.js with plain JS files on top, no engine. The people are skinned GLB models with Mixamo clips. The boar and Grandfather Frost are generated by Blender Python scripts run headless. The first performance problem was my own flag. The mushrooms and flowers were InstancedMesh with frustumCulled turned off, so 490 thousand triangles were drawn every frame no matter where you looked. Splitting the instances by zone fixed that. Grass is built in 36 m chunks and only shown within 80 m, and trees swap to a simple version past 85 m. That got a frame down to 20 to 30 ms on an Intel Iris Xe laptop. The second problem was hitches the first time a new material came on screen. Calling renderer.compile(scene, camera) once after the title appears took the worst of those frames from 0.42 s to 0.08 s. The download went from 15.8 MB to 10.7 MB mostly by cutting the five villagers' textures from 2048 to 1024.

One animation lesson cost me an afternoon. The Mixamo clip for climbing over the top of a ladder lifts the hips about two metres by itself. I was also moving the character up in code, so the boy ended up floating three metres above the tower. Now I measure how far a clip moves the hips before I move anything. The same went for timing: the axe used to land beside the log until I logged the hand bone position every frame and set the contact time from that.

Made by a very small indie team in Korea.

One thing I would like to hear: how long does it take to reach the title screen on your phone, and does the forest stay smooth once you are in?

Thanks for playing!