As I said on the game page, this game was a part of my tradition to make a game every December. However, I didn't entirely make it in one month. Here's a quick look into what it took to make it.

The whole project technically began with a sonic-inspired Minecraft map I made maybe 8-9 years ago. At the time it was just that, a map, but this year I thought it would be a good idea for its own game since the level design is already done.

Here's what it looked like once I started the game late October. LÖVE isn't designed for 3D so I reused a lot of the 3D code from last year's game, Hoarder's Horrible House of Stuff. I also repurposed some old 2D physics code to make the 3d physics you see here.

By the beginning of November I had some very basic gameplay and a placeholder level. You can see the grass effect I was trying out based on the classic fur technique, but unfortunately texture alpha doesn't play nice with layering and it would've had too much of an impact on performance to fix that.

Jumping forward to mid-December, I polished up most of the code and finally got around to working on some of the assets. First up was the player model. I learned how to model, rig, and animate over the pandemic so it was a relatively smooth process. Notice the rim-light effect I tried emulating from Super Mario Galaxy.

A few days later the game is almost done. All that was left was finishing up the remaining assets and polishing the presentation. The level texture is changed in real-time to animate the water and grass.

And after many hours of hard work, here's the final product. All the textures were digitally painted rather than doing pixel art as usual.

I skipped over many of the problems I faced, but I hope this gave a good look into the steps it took to make this game.