DevLog 5 - Season and Sun Redesign

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Overview of Project Updates

The past few months of development have used a real-time sun system (i.e., 5:00 pm in the real world is 5:00 pm in-game). This system was inspired by real-time game elements such as those found in The Longing (2019). However, after some design discussions, it showed that players might not be able to experience some of the interactions with NPCs (i.e., those who visit the bakery before sunrise and after sunset). So, a system which progresses thirty times faster than in the real world (i.e., each game day takes 48 minutes to play) was decided.

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Day Division System

The days Flour & Fortune draws inspiration from Animal Crossing: New Horizon (2019), Stardew Valley (2016), and similar games with time-dependant locked areas. In Flour & Fortune, the market is only available between the afternoon and before sunset. Additionally, each village resident can only visit the bakery between certain parts of the day due to them being busy or sleeping. The five parts of the day in-game are:

(T) Twilight (Between 00:00 and Sunrise)
(M) Morning (Between Sunrise and noon)
(A) Afternoon (Between noon and Halfway until Sunset)
(D) Day (Between Halfway until Sunset and Sunset)
(N) Night (Between Sunset and 23:59)

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Celtic Season Influence

The actual times of sunset and sunrise vary between seasons (as happens in real life). Each season in-game is seven days long (or 5:36 hours in real-time). The game took inspiration from the eight Celtic seasons with the position of the sun at different times (sunset, sunrise, and the height of the sun) of real-world data mapped to the game world: sunset during Yule is 5:00 pm, but it is 9:00 pm in Litha; similarly the max height of the sun is 6° in Yule and 14° during Litha. The eight seasons in-game (which below include the real calendar dates) are as follows:

Imbolc (1st February - 20th March)
Eostre (21st March - 30th April)
Bealtaine (30th April - 20th June)
Litha (21st June - 31st July)
Lughnasadh (1st August - 20th September)
Mabon (21st September - 31st October)
Samhain (1st - November - 20th December)
Yule (21st December - 31st January).

These traditional Celtic seasons will be concluded with a celebration (NPCs dancing around a bonfire and playing time-exclusive music at the orchard - section 4.1), and the player will be awarded a small gift (i.e. a piece of art or seasonal fruit).

The position of the sun is highly variable on the time of year, just as in real life. As the importance of the sun is present in Celtic and Neolithic beliefs (such as Newgrange), a semi-realistic depiction of the sun (i.e., following a parabolic curve which is affected by the seasonal tilt of the Earth), this representation is integral to incorporate. The real-world angle of the sun varies between 80° in the summer and 40° in the winter. However, in-game, these angles were remapped to 6°-14° so that the sun’s presence was more regularly visible in the bakery.

Figure 1: Season Breakdown with Sun Positions

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In-Game Variable Sun Position

To create the parabolic curve for the sun, a quadratic equation was designed to fit the variable parameters of the changing sunset and sunrise values. The sun completes one full (360°) rotation every 48 real-world minutes. The sun moves up and down in the sky throughout the day, and to prevent a black sky in Unity, the sun’s lowest point is limited -12°. The quadratic parabolic equation for the game’s position of the sun is as follows: