A former UCA gradaute following his creative passions in game jams, artwork and mods.
Santa's Slaybells is my submission to the 2020 Yogscast Game Jam, which is a part of their annual Jingle Jam Christmas schedule. Because of this, most of the games made for the jam including this one revolves around a Christmas theme, though it is optional. In this project, I took the role as the coder and lead artist, and with the help of 2 of my friends, Jake Cheung (assistant artist) and Frank Taylor (musician and sfx), we created a first person shooter reminiscent of the classic 90s shooters like DOOM and Wolfenstein.
The final submission can be played in your browser (though downloading the executable file is reccommended) on the itch.io page HERE
Screenshot of the final build
Concepts
Like most Game Jams, the theme/prompt is revealed upon the start of the time limit. The prompt for this jam was "Surprise", and from this I concepted a few ideas:
First, was the idea for a simple platformer where you shoot presents. Each one with a random effect. The reason we didn't choose this one was because we felt it was likely that other participants would go a similar route, and we were aiming to stand out amongst the 200+ submissions.
We also did briefly consider a top-down stealth game, but I wasn't too confident in the idea, and wasn't sure on how to make the concept interesting.
In the end, we gravitated to the idea of a retro FPS game, believing it could be unique and interesting.
Artwork
For the artstyle, I wanted to keep it simple and not involve any shading or anti-aliasing to save on time, as I would be making 80% of the art assets and coding the game as well. The first assets I made were the weapons and went from there. I did not make the textures for the walls and floor.
Most of the game's art assets. Including the weapons, enemies and HUD.
To set the story, I drew up some "cutscenes" for the game and ending.
The story is very minimal, but helps set the stage
Gameplay
The gameplay is really straightforward, you have 3 weapons (melee, pistol and shotgun) to shoot evil snowmen with. You collect ammo, health and key pickups, and make your way through a singular level. The level ends with a boss, who you must beat to reach the presents and win the game.
Yellow snowmen are tougher.
Shortcomings and Conclusion
Overall, coding the AI to pathfind and render like retro shooters were the hardest obstacles to overcome in this project. And although the effort to make the game playable in browser lead to more people trying it, the challenge of playtesting it and ensuring both versions worked was frustrating. Not to mention there was a rare but game-breaking bug of the locked door using up more than one key, getting the player stuck and unable to finish the game.
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But, nonetheless the game came together in a way that succeeded my initial expectations, thanks to the efforts of me and my team. Our submission was the 7th most rated game in the jam, and placed 13th in the final resulting ranking. Out of over 200 entries, coming in the top 10% is not something to sniff out, even if we didn't make it into the winning top 10.
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In conclusion, this project was immensely challenging, but created something that I could be proud of and that others can find fun in. If I were to make this again, I would have probably tried to find a dedicated artist or coder to lift some of the workload, and produce a more polished (and maybe larger) experience.