Download Santa’s Crazy Christmas Night from itch.io
For Konisoft’s Christmas game jam challenge, for the theme of “Santa” I made an arcade platformer game… Wait what? What happened to HEJ? Nothing special, I just happened to find an other jam and I joined. It is possible, that I can reshape a bit, to fit the theme(s) of HEJ December, we’ll see.
So, it happened to be that I immediately had some ideas for a Santa game. At the weekend I made a page of small drawings, wrote some ideas and pretty much brainstormed the whole game. On the next Monday, I started to code, repurpose some elements from my older games (redrawing a character to Santa), draw some tiles, and in a course of one and a half week, I finished the game with slight cuts (8 levels instead of 9) and with ideas to improve. After submitting, 3 days before the deadline – as I was travelling to my girlfriend’s place, next day to my mom’s – I still was able to fix some smaller problems. And hey, only one crash happened, when the organizers played the game (already fixed it: a later addition to the game, so the giftbox won’t just float over Santa’s dead body caused a crash if you already thrown or delivered some giftboxes. It WAS tested but in “labor-clean” circumstances, so no delivers happened and I never died when played with the game).
The basic game loop is simple: run to the sleigh, grab a giftbox, find the color coded chimney, deliver by walking on top of it (or throwing on top of it) and repeat. There are 5 colors, each level has more and more of them and more and more to deliver per color. There are platforms and roofs to jump and walk on, nothing real precision platforming, though there are some tighter jumps to make. One of the player’s enemies is time: you cannot just stand around, you have to move and complete the task. Then I added two type of krampus characters spawning from hellgates, a smaller one, that just runs left and right and jumps, try to get Santa, and a bigger one, that also fires fireballs time to time. You can kill the small ones by throwing the boxes at them, but the big ones only gets stunned and damaged (3 hits required to kill). On top of this I made cookies to collect, that spawn in one after the other. Killing krapmpusse will lower this timer, so the cookies spawn faster. After 5, a glass of milk appears and picking that up turns Santa to Buffed Santa. Bigger, better, stronger, he won’t fit in too tight spaces, but can throw farther, and is able to punch enemies, for the same effect that a thrown giftbox would cause.
Technically there are no big things here. I used objects for colliders with move_and_collide(), on top of some normal collision detections. Enemies seem to follow Santa up to the roof, but in reality, I placed down jump objects, and upon touching one, the enemy decides from a couple of ifs, if it should jump and in what direction. This works well on early levels, but on later ones not so much. So I also added a teleport on lower places, that teleports them up on the roof (though carefully avoiding the closest exit to Santa, so they don’t “telefrag” him). For some reason, big krapusse starts to jitter at some places. You also can stick giftboxes under platforms, but these just elevate the retro charm in my opinion. Most levels are mostly vertical, but the last one is horizontal, and I changed up the function of the brick walls: on this level: they block movement instead of just being a background element. For this reason I added its own color for the bricks, so players would be less inclined to question this mechanic.
The graphic of the game is very old school, arcade style. I even added a glow to it, but it’s requires so much resources that I added some lines and the game turns it off, should the FPS drops significantly. The doors and windows are objects, so I can place them wherever they are needed or fit. For the sounds I again used Chiptone by SFBGames as it’s a great tool to make 8 bit sounds. For the music, I searched and downloaded a bunch of midis from BitMidi, and used Beepbox to re-instrument these for a more chiptune vibe. It is hard to credit the people behind creating these midis, I do hope none of the creators are angry with me for this. But hey, the game is free, so fingers crossed. 🙂
All in all, this was fun to make, the game turned out to be quite good. It even won the contest and I got some steam games I had on my whislist for a long time (praise the Discount Gods). 🙂
PixelKrajcár 