I’ll be entering for the first time, using Game Maker Studio as my tools. Not really sure what else I’m supposed to say here except good luck and have fun

Collecting snow (XXL clumps of snow for some reason)

Rolling snow ball into more snow to make it grow larger. (Appears after you collect a certain  amount of snow but is initially much smaller than the one in the screen shot).

Roll two balls into one another…

Bam. You made a snowman.

The idea of the game is that for some reason an infinite number of bullies will be coming from the woods to hurl snowballs at you and make you cold and upset. To fight back you throw snow balls at them, and make them cold and upset (genius I know ). If you have the time, you can make some items to help you out. So far this will include:

• Camp-fire: Keeps you warm (essentially healing you) but melts snow. Can be used offensively to take snow away from bullies or defensively to heal you.
• Snowmen: These will come alive and wander round, pelting bullies with snowballs. They will melt over time depending on temperature (day/night cycle, fire, or maybe a bully who uses firecrackers). As they melt, they will shrink, and throw smaller (less damaging but faster) snowballs. You can keep them cool by throwing snowballs at them, or use them as cover.
• Snow walls: A simple wall to crouch behind, no snowballs will hit you if you are crouching and the ball has passed over a wall. These will also melt over time, but there’ll be no way to keep them cool (not planned yet at least). May add two types, tall and short. You could stand behind tall ones and not be hit at all, but you wouldn’t be able to throw snowballs over them.

That’s all I have so far, and most of it isn’t implemented.

If you were wondering how it fits the theme, there’ll be one map which fills the entire screen, and no scrolling or anything, so it kinda works. Weirdly enough, I had most of the idea after the theme had been announced, it wasn’t just a happy coincidence that the theme fit the idea I had before the start. My idea before the start (assuming snowman would win) was a puzzle game where you have to roll a ball around as cover to not get hit by balls, but you had to take a certain path so the ball wasn’t too large to fit through a gap or so that you had the right timing to not get hit by snowballs (there would be people would throw a snowball at the same place every third/(any number really) step).

I’d only managed some UI work really, and some terrible art, by the time I went to sleep yesterday. On the plus side, I now have a very clear idea of all the mechanics, most of which should be easy to implement. I’ll be short on time though when it comes to balancing.

2x Speed, but you get the gist.

Despite a lot more work being done on the second day than the first,  I’ll be entering the jam instead of the compo. Unfortunately, I spent too long thinking about and half implementing extra mechanics and ended up still lacking one of the main ones, enemies. Luckily, just about everything else is done by now, so all I have to do today is added a few enemy types; stick some kind of dynamic spawner system in there so that the game becomes increasingly more difficult; and finally polish up some sprites and tweak some controls and collisions.

This image should give you an idea as to what I’ve managed to get done so far. Probably worth noting that the camp fire and hot coal melt snow around as planned. They also cast light, which wasn’t planned as it wasn’t originally supposed to be dark. Then I realised, “it’s clearly winter, surely it must be dark”. Took me an embarrassing length of time to get the light effects to work properly. Could’ve saved myself roughly an hour of experimenting if I’d done this before. But that’s what this competition is all about, forcing you to learn and allowing others to learn from you.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get my game up to a quality I want to release. I’ve spent most of my time over the weekend and today fiddling and fighting with game maker rather than designing a game. It’s unfinished and lacks polish. I realise that with just under an hour left, I could remove incomplete features and release something that is complete, but that game would be terrible. Instead I’m going to carry on with the project at least until the stage I would’ve released it at. I’ll upload it as I was going to and maybe even continue with it. But for tonight, I’m done.

On the plus side, despite not finishing my game by getting bogged down in things which I should’ve practised before implementing, I still had a great time. I’ve learnt a great deal from this experience and look forward to the next competition. Next time, I’ll be much stricter with myself. I’ll brain storm for at least an hour and devise all the mechanics and the UI etc. I’ll then implement said mechanics, in turn, not moving on from one to another until it is implemented fully. Then I’ll work on graphics and sound. And only once these are acceptable will I start to balance the game and add extra variety.

I’ll be using Game Maker, probably. It’s my second entry, hopefully I’ll finish this time.