spin attack

Above Super Snowman fights eight black blobs at once using his new spin attack. My design plan is to keep the game play 2D and fast paced, like the old arcade games of the 80's. Many modern 3D games have slower game play than the classic 2D games, and that pisses me off. I was recently watching Super Mario 3D World on youtube, and the game play looked so slow compared to what I grew up with, I was very disappointed to see the player often having to rotate the camera - that slows down game play! I also noticed in the new Mario the density of the enemies is pretty low compared to the original where Mario is fighting and jumping every step through the level.

The ice is now textured using a procedural GLSL shader, simplex2D by Ashima. Next up will be making a custom exporter for Blender so I can start prototyping and testing levels.

gameplay preview

One of the best games I have ever played is the original Metroid for NES. It was an incredible mix of adventure and platform shooter. Nick Kooy, has an very insightful blog post about what made it's sequel "the best game ever", take a look at his article here.

Inspired by the classic Metroid, my game design plan for Super Snowman is to have the right mix of non-linear adventure and platform shooter. I am still very early in the development stages, testing out different ideas, making tools, and prototyping.

super snowman - first prototype

Above is the first prototype of "Super Snowman" the game, running in Google Chrome. Sorry about the frame dropping, it runs smooth, but screen recording slows down my laptop, I will post some new videos soon recorded from my phone. It is written in Python and transpiled into JavaScript using PythonJS.

Why I ditched regular Python

Like many other Python coders, I started off doing my own independent games using Pygame, it is simple to use, and you can do 3D with it using OpenGL. You can use Python with extension libraries to make any type of game you want, and from Linux it is very easy to get started.

But when it came time to release my first independent game built with Pygame + some extension libraries, I ran into various problems getting it to work and easily install on Windows and OSX. Python fails to provide a good way to build and deploy applications to all platforms.

The Python Software Foundation has a very low priority on Windows support, just take a look at IDLE the official integrated development environment for Windows, it looks like it was abandoned in the early 90's. Python3 is another failure, over 5 years old and I still haven't met anybody using it.