Here's my (very long...) game design postmortem / playthrough of this game!
Play game
Sunny New Year: Death of Snowman's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Gameplay | #1 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| How much do you enjoy the game overall? | #1 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| How well does the game fit the theme | #1 | 4.400 | 4.400 |
| Audio | #1 | 3.200 | 3.200 |
| Overall | #1 | 3.680 | 3.680 |
| Visuals | #4 | 2.800 | 2.800 |
Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
I am not the one to save Christmas. Under my supervision magic will disappear! :D Fun game, The turn-based aspect worked well in combination with the urgency from sun melting everything! Besides having too few doors for a casual gamer like me, the game is supper well balanced! Worth waking up early for this ;)
The story isn't quite that, you're not trying to save Christmas, but do... something else I won't spoil 😅
During the gameplay your goal is just to survive as the Christmas magic that brought snow to California fades with the New Year, rushing to find a walk-in freezer to avoid melting in the sunlight.
And yeah, there's a heavy element of RNG to how quickly you find the brick + door. Sometimes it only takes like 30 seconds, sometimes upwards of 10+ minutes, but that's the nature of randomness. If I had more time, I would've made the game smarter with its map generation, increasing the likelihood of bricks/doors spawning over time for example, reacting to the player health's in determining the next map portion, etc.
Loved the game! The way you break into the restaurant and the ending cracked me up.
At first, I wasn't aware that the sunlight only moves whenever you make a move, and didn't treat the game as such ("aAAAAH SUNLIGHT!!" was probably my only thought). But once I realized it, I was pleasantly surprised, cause it's actually such a cute strategy game!
Despite me misunderstanding the nature of the game, I kept restarting until I beat it though, so that's a good sign! I also really liked how the music and sound effects fit the overall mood of your game!
Submitted
Color RollerI enjoyed it very much, you packed a good variety of mechanics into it that all work very well together! Riding on a long track of ice feels so cool - pun intended! Having the sunlight approach only when you move makes it a strategy game, not a reaction based one, which is in my favour.
The sound effects are rather simple and abstract, though IMO they fit the game's style and theme. Some catchy music is all that's missing.
There's one thing I don't get: what's that yellow line in the middle of the screen? Sorry if it's explained in the game's description, I didn't read it all.
(I also like it because it reminds me of my first ever game jam game. :D)
Submitted
Towers Of PlusonedorThere is music at all points during the game... did it not play for you? That probably had to do with the HTML5 audio system, which is finicky, it always wants to stop audio unless it's sure you have focus on the HTML5 app. What web browser are you using? Try again clicking on the game window again, or the Windows version if you can... It's the first time someone alluded that they couldn't hear the music. I made custom music for the intro, game, and outro haha!
And yeah, I wanted to have more fitting sound effects to realistic snow, ice, water sloshing, etc., but I needed to use no pre-made assets for this jam and I couldn't really make those sounds effectively even with more than 3 hours for the music/audio, so simple 8-bit SFX it was.
And the yellow line is dumb, it's just a vague little dotted road separation line haha! Just to give the background a bit more flavor, it's silly. The world tiles don't make a ton of sense obviously.
Thank you for playing!
Ah, it was my bad, sorry! I use a script-and-other-stuff blocker, and apparently this engine loads the music tracks as "media" which is blocked by default. Didn't have this before. Well, I liked the intro and outro music - the main track has some spikes that are uncomfortable to my ears (they're quite sensitive), so that one won't go onto my favourite list.
I realised you can actually win the game while watching your postmortem - missed the parts with the door and the presents in the description. The outro text is a nice twist! I like it if seemingly happy go lucky themes turn dark, and this one really fits the game's theme. Guess there will be an army of snowmen with nuclear winter coming and all. ;)
Fantastic game. It was fun to play and I enjoyed the humor in it. RNG screws you over occassionally, especially if you can't see far enough ahead when sliding on ice.
I'd say you hit all three of the categories for the Trijam because I kept wanting to play +1 more run. Great job!
Submitted
Bella and the Gum Drop InvasionThank you so much for playing! I really appreciate it ^-^
Yes, the level is continuously generated every time you take 8 steps upward (which is really the world shifting down). I have a list of ~37 8x8 PNG image files (frames of a sprite in GM) that I drew out a bunch of sample levels in. These images make up the map chunks which are laid down one-by-one as the game plays in a random order (meaning they can repeat a bunch if RNGesus wishes it). I read the RGB values of each pixel to determine the game objects that should be spawned, though there's also another layer of randomness, flipping the levels sideways 50% of the time, making presents less likely to spawn, and every tile has a 1% chance to randomly not be placed to add a bit more variety. The patterns are definitely recognizable and the it's not a smart system, doesn't react like an AI Director at all, but it's quick and cheap. Makes it so the game loads very fast even on web and stays at a high FPS, at least on my machine. It's a really simple process, only about 20 lines of very readable code.
And thank you so much! I think it came out fairly well. It's a silly story, but I like silly things.
And yes, I made all the music with FL Studio during the 3 hours allotted for music creation for the jam, and during that time I also threw together the SFX using sfxr (the more modern successor being bfxr).
I recorded a full playthrough/postmortem of this game. I thought it would only be like 5 or 10 minutes, but when I stopped recording I found out I talked about the game's design and development process for a solid 40 minutes...
So it's taking a long time to upload haha! I'll be posting that video here and on the game page, and maybe in the community tab as well when it's finished uploading!
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