Snowman Builder Extreme’s idea came about quite quickly and was shared by other participants: roll a snowball down a hill to make it grow while stuff happens. The twist in SME is that you pick up typical snowman stuff: carrots, pebbles and hats and they accumulate and roll down with you, similar to the Katamari games.

Create an Extreme Snowman right now!

The growing theme was thus growing the snowball itself but also extending the ball with a bunch of carrots and hats.

The two-control part was easy, the snowball moves forward by itself and you can only apply force to the left or right, which also helped in making you feel less in control of this thing thundering down the track.

Overall I’m very happy with how it turned out. My artistic skills are minimal so I used external assets from places like opengameart and freesound and a theme by Kevin MacLeod from incompetech, which I’ve always wanted to do, but I took the time to add a simple menu and other game-y elements, statistics and achievement titles.

Tip: Always take time to add menus and hud overlays where appropriate, I didn’t last time and it made the game worse for it.

The movie above is me showing you can get the highest title “Expert” in the game. Reaching the absolute end of the track is not easy. Try it yourself!

The Good

• Making use of assets allowed me to focus purely on the game and engine code (and I needed the time)
• I made a track generator that works with simple rotation and length instructions to create the track and wall mesh blocks and collision + direction information
• Creating the game showed me where some of the holes were in my custom WebGL engine and it got better just by being used for something new
• At the end of day 2 I was a bit demotivated, it still looked rather barren and most of the game wasn’t there yet, so on day 3 I started with pure gameplay and once I saw the carrots and hats rolling along with the ball my spirits lifted quite a bit. I could get this working and it was fun too!
• Adding the titles. When the game reacts to what you’re trying to do, it feels very satisfying. Always put in effort-reward points and/or cycles. BTW: there are 16 titles total, get ’em all!

The Bad

• My engine does not yet have built in collision detection and we all know how much fun that can be, especially in 3D. As a result, it is possible to fly through walls at certain angles and speeds but it happens rarely enough that it would just have to do. LD is not a time to spend 2 days fixing it, but the track gen + collision info gen took me a full day
• Like most LD entries, there’s a lot of low hanging fruit. Small improvements that would add good value. But Monday I had a 20-hour day and that was just enough to get to where I got now
• Good+Bad: It looks like a game from 1996 because of the simple 3D objects but I decided to own it and promote it as if it was a low-budget game from the early PSX days.

I had a good time, learned new stuff and improved my framework. It was great and I hope you enjoyed it as well. Now play the game and please rate!

-Arthur