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 >:(

Full view mode, which offers a tactical advantage but is a little harder to play in.

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!

Playing with about 8 other people, game was pretty hilarious

My attention was divided! I swear! 😉 ps. haley is spelled with an i between the a and the l

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 RPG An 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.