Hi!
First of all, thanks so much for playing Velvet 89, with 45 000+ of your it makes our developer hearts very happy. Secondly: tools! Velvet 89 was a first hidden object game for us, which meant we had to adapt and come up with new software solutions to the issues such as "create a huge crowd, but make sure its diverse and ensure that there are not two target characters".

Hence, this post, where I’ll show you some of the special tweaks our very own Tereza made to Unity engine to make our life way easier. We will look a bit under the hood, but if you have any other questions, leave them below and I’ll get back to you.

The most important thing: our protesters! Each of them is composed of various interchangeable parts: heads, torsos, legs, hairs, glasses, signs or flags. Ondřej Javora drew them, put them together in Adobe After Effects and then imported into Unity. Tereza then made this menu that enabled us to quickly iterate different versions of each character type, experiment with different parts and let the engine generate many variations quickly, without us needing to assemble them by hand.

With the characters set, our squares and streets needed populating! Hence, the crowd generation tool. First, we created what we call "Figure Bundle", a list of characters needed for a particular scene. The tool Tereza made also enabled us to set how often each of them should appear. And then, we could generate our crowds! All we had to do was to set the amount of people in the scene (hundreds in Teplice, thousands and thousands in Letná/Ostrava), how spread the crowd should be and how tightly packed protesters should be.

But we could not leave everything on the computer as we wanted to polish each scene the best we could. To that end, we got "Figure Brush" to quickly draw handpicked selections of characters and delete them, refining the crowd to our liking.

To ensure we did not have any baffling doubles of our target characters (then ones you are tasked with finding), Tereza made a special tool to help us. Either to spot those exactly the same characters as the target ones or those that are very similar: we did not want to make players hunt for almost the same doorman with only difference being a small hat.

There is of course a lot of smaller things happening under the hood (layering, hints, animations and much more), but these are the big ones that made Velvet 89 happen.

I hope this was an interesting foray into how the game was made! Thanks for playing and all the feedback you’ve been giving us and let us know, if you’d like to see another hidden object game by Charles Games in the future or perhaps an expansion to Velvet 89. Who knows!

Have a great day,
Ondřej
Charles Games