Santa's Slip Up by Johnsensei
Meant for mobile but you can play on a computer by clicking and dragging with a mouse.
Santa was in such a rush to deliver this year’s Christmas presents that he forgot to tie his magical sack! Now he’s flying around all crazy not even noticing that presents are falling out and off the sleigh. As the helpful elf Alabaster Snowball, you ride on Rudolph just behind Santa’s sleigh catching the falling presents. Catch as many presents as you can to save the Christmas delivery.
Drag Alabaster around the screen to catch presents.
Made for Ludlum Dare 53.
Creative Team
John Gale - Unity Engineer
Nicholas Rankin - Music/SFX

Art assets from Open Game Art.
Santa’s sleigh and Reindeer Fun Gi Development https://opengameart.org/content/santa-and-reindeer Alabaster (elf) "[LPC] Santa" by bluecarrot16, Johannes Sjölund (wulax), Stephen Challener (Redshrike), Nila122, and Matthew Krohn (makrohn). Commissioned by Sander Franken (castelonia). https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-santa Presents x 4 Eliza Wyatt, Lanea Zimmerman (Sharm) https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-revised-christmas-pack Background objects Most of the objects LPC Winter Tiles by Demetrius (https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-winter-tiles). Obstacles Mountain 1: https://opengameart.org/content/natural-resource-deposits-and-mines-unknown-horizons-2d 2: Spring/Spring Enterprises https://opengameart.org/content/mountain-1
| Play in browser | https://johnsensei.itch.io/santas-slip-up |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/santas-slip-up |
Ratings
| Overall | 1013th | 3.113⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 980th | 2.975⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1202th | 2.256⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 944th | 3.462⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 423th | 3.461⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 794th | 2.737⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 836th | 3.25⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 46🗳️ | 85🗨️ |
I'm getting slight Ski Free vibes, which I love. Cool game! :smile:
It's fun to play although it's pretty easy. Music and graphics fit well.
I think it is bit off the theme since you are just catch the presents and nothing else!!!
For controls @Johnsensei, I would suggest making the hit-box for clicking / dragging the reindeer much larger (maybe 2 or 3 times the size of the deer), as well as adding something to indicate that the reindeer should be dragged. That would make it much more intuitive, especially on mobile.
Aside from fixing the presents going off screen, I'd also suggest limiting how far to the sides the presents can go. It's a little awkward dragging all the way to the sides on mobile, and it might trigger accidental swipe gestures for some phones.
The background objects should blend with the background more so that they're clearly differentiated from obstacles. It might be enough just adding some transparency / color filters.
Otherwise nice concept, and neat to see a Unity based mobile game.
But since retrying is so fast, I don't see that as a big problem. Only bad thing I could say is that I wish there were more levels!
That said, hugging santa's butt made it a bit too easy to beat the levels, and I would've loved a bit more variety in hazards. I appreciated the red glow on the mountain as an indicator. The length and pacing work really well for mobile, so well done on that!
About the changes:
1. The #1 comment was about Santa throwing presents off the side of the screen with 0 chance to catch them. Thanks to @fluburbio, @alex-chertilin, @khaokg, @cavedens, @pralista, @aschab, @dinoraz, @sudocoffee, @voodoo, and others who mentioned this. It has been fixed. A present won’t rotate in a direction where it flies off the screen if it’s spawned within a margin of the screen edge.
2. Another fix to deal with (1) above is that Santa won’t fly along the side of the screen for a long time anymore.
3. Thanks to @cookiezz, @snesgaard, @a1stakesauce, and @poshdan for pointing out that the mountains weren’t obvious hazards. I thought the red glow and helper text at the level start made it obvious. But I watched @poshdan on stream crash right into a mountain and realized it wasn’t so obvious. There is now additional helper text and an image on the level transition screen. The red glow’s alpha has been increased too.
4. I added a “magic dust trail” to Santa to keep the player from ridding his @$$ and collecting presents easily.
There are other changes like adding fonts, a score system, a bit of polish, etc. but there are too many to list. Thanks to everybody including @nuin, @nail, @ardorugus, @helen, @random-ideation-studios, @smoky01, @alisher-fazilov, @lychee, @lucas-taniolo, @jakelazaroff, and @kiguel182 for playing.
I’m considering whether or not to pursue this game for commercial release. Check out the latest version and feel free to leave any feedback on the itch.io page. See you at Ludum Dare 54!