
With more than 4 players, the game gets super hectic!
>>> SNOWMAN’S LAND: SNOVERCHILL (yes, that is seriously the name) <<<
Finally breaking the (one time) trend of making sequels to Low Battery, this time I decided to make a multiplayer deathmatch game involving snowmen, snowboards and wicked sick tricks. I regret nothing, I’ve had the most fun making this and playing it with other people out of all my ludum dare entries! It helps that I had a group of people behind me available for testing, and making fantastic gifs. Here’s how I felt things went:
Things that worked out:

The chat is one of the things I’m glad I added, thanks to gems like this.
- Multiplayer – YES YES YES the best idea ever was to include multiplayer. I had so much fun coding it and I’ve been having a lot of fun playing it with the people rating the game (when they pop up! I have to watch like a hawk so they’re not playing solo) and it was totally worth it.
- PxTone for music – Thanks to the simplicity of PxTone I was able to compose nice sounding music in about one hour (right before submission, again) – at the cost of it kind of sounding the same as everything else I’ve written!
- SVG Parser for collision – Obviously simple tiled collision wouldn’t work for a game like this, and I can use fireworks to make vector graphics super quick. I could also design the levels around the collision paths!
- Fireworks for graphics – never change, fireworks
- Using my internet friends as slav- i mean testers – Really helped me get a feel for how the gameplay was turning out. I wouldn’t have been able to balance the scoring without them!
- Particles – I’m never going to stop spamming particles everywhere.
- Customizable snowman – My favorite is the snowman with the aviator’s cap, melted face and purple scarf. Everyone else just seems to use the default though >:(
Things that didn’t work out:
- Sending player info packets every frame! My raspberry pi basically caught fire the first time I tested with 5 people, I had to quickly post compo re-evaluate when to send player updates. (it was only a few lines changed, thankfully)
- I kind of put all my money on Unicode Snowman winning, but thankfully my idea works on one screen anyways!
- I only have one level!
I wanted a few levels to put on a map cycle to keep the game interesting for longer, but thanks to the needless complexity I added to the first level’s graphic it would have taken way too long to add additional levels.
- I wanted to include some sort of special weapon system, where a weapon spawns in the middle that has a special function, like burst snow bomb, ramming invincibility etc. Didn’t have enough time!
- I wanted some extra gamemodes like capture the flag, maybe a kind of “juggernaut” game too. If there’s enough interest, these can become a reality!
- That one background .fw.png that’s like 20MB because I duplicated that one tree like 3000 times
- No instancing and no player limit! Right now if there are more than 8 players, the initial spawn will spawn two people in the same place, and it’ll be hilariously difficult to play!
But the fun doesn’t stop there (rating games, my faves)!
For the past two days I’ve been rating a few games between watching my game’s userlist like a hawk, and I found some pretty sick entries:
- Tightrope Theater by AdventureIslands – AdventureIslands’s games are always fantastic, this one is no exception! There is a shocking amount of content and the platforming handles really well.
- Super Snow Girl by Christina Antoinette Neofotistou – The game is nowhere near complete, but the artwork and concepts are phenomenal!
- Lazy Hero by mybluecorners – Hilarious game, you should definitely check it out. Met one of the devs on a twitch chat, they really enjoyed working on it too!
- Summoning of the Santa by Slothmachine – Very cool art and animation, interesting puzzles!
Twitch Plays RPGAn adventure on my screen by Erhune – I spent a lot longer than I’d like to admit playing this! Progression works pretty well, if you played TPP the delay should be like nothing for this game.
To conclude, I’ve had a lot of fun, and yeah, I would definitely do it a seventh time.
Your game looks awesome. I’ll have to play it later
that was so intense, thanks for playing everyone!