Some things aren’t mean to be – Winter was originally pitched to Konami as a Wii-exlusive entry in the Silent Hill series. While Nintendo fans were hungry for their own survival-horror game, Konami believed there wasn’t significant enough demand. The demo was then shopped around to other publishers, but the response was largely the same – either there wasn’t a market for a survival-horror game on the Wii, or there wasn’t enough demand for survival-horror games in general anymore.
Graphically, at least, much of the demo came together in a matter of weeks. At the time, we were developing our second title for Nintendo, after Geist. At each major milestone, we would send Nintendo a copy of the game for review, and typically wouldn’t hear back from them for about a month. During that time, production came to a halt – there was no point in refining things, if Nintendo would (and they usually did) demand major changes. We all needed something to work on, and Winter became that something.
Apart from a few animations for the protagonist, my main contribution was the animation for the “stirrup girl”, including the demo’s final interactive cinematic. My initial attempts at the stirrup-girl’s movement ended up too smooth, so I tried a different approach – I imported a mocap animation of an old woman with a walker, and layered my animation on top. While it needed a significant amount of cleanup, this added some twitching to the character that made it that much creepier.
I was also tasked with rigging the stirrup-girl’s breasts, since someone had seen my personal work and decided I was the perfect person for the job. Lucky me.