Lou Bagel Saves Christmas!

This year I created a Christmas themed platformer!

I released it on Christmas Eve, which as you could guess, is probably a bit too late. It only got 11 plays so I figured I'd put in a dev blog about it to memoralize it.

Why create a Christmas Themed Game?

Pretty obvious, but thought I'd start here. Holiday games seem nice for sharing because you can share old games on a yearly basis. Each year I share my Thanksgiving game, even though it is way old and didn't think I was finished, and I get a handful of people telling me they enjoyed it each year!

This one might be a good one to make a small update or tweak to it every year, just to give return players a bit of a change. Should be fairly easy to achieve since it is a simple platform game.

Also, I have been meaning to make a classic Lou Bagel platform game, even a short one, so I thought this might help get me started.

Play it yourself!

Here is the link to the game on itch: https://loubagel.itch.io/lou-bagel-saves-christmas

But I will also put the project itself here so you can play on this page. That way if I do change it in years to come, this page can keep the original version.

Play it in the iframe below:

Character References

For those that aren't familiar with me and my gang*, here are some of the references that you need to know:

• Lou Bagel: Me. You are on my website, so hopefully you can figure this one out yourself. Main character of the game.
• NLD: Naked Little Dude. Don't blame me - this is all PixelShorts creation. It is a commercially released game on Steam, check it out here! NLD is an alterntative (and inferior) choice for main character.
• PigeonHat: Another pixel artists that goes by pigeon hat. I drew a character of him once, and he always stuck out to me as a villain type. Whether it is a middle-management type of annoying supervisor or the Grinch-like Christmas thieve shown here.

*gang: not really a gang. Some fellow pixel artists and indiedevs that are Lou Bagel's Known-associates, digitally.

12 Days of Christmas

As you can probably see by playing, I fell into a 12 days of Christmas theme.

Day 1: A Pigeon in a Pear Tree

I know it is a partridge in the song, obviously, but PigeonHat is the villain and I thought it has a nice ring to it.

In the first day/level of the game, Pigeon merely taunts you but does not attack. This is to let the player get the controls and such down, as well as set the scene with the trash-talking pigeon.

Though, there are a few gaps in the roof the player can fall to their demise.

Day 2: Two Turtle Doves

I didn't start out drawing a Turtle Dove.

My inspiration for these enemies/obstacles were actually the flying fish levels in Mario. For example, World 1 Level 3, I believe, of Super Mario (the first one).

I originally had them flying in from all sides. That was a bit too difficult to seem them coming. It is still a bit difficult now, but with only two, the player can get a beat on their path so they know when to expect them.

Art-wise for them, like I said, I didn't start out drawing a Turtle Dove. I didn't know what I was drawing, but I wanted it to look kind of goofy, so started with the big round eyes. Then went on to the head and wanted that kind of round and bulbous as well. So I felt like I was kind of drawing a duck, adding almost a bill but making that more of a beak.

Once I thought to make the game go along with the song, I found it perfect to, instead of drawing an actual turtle dove, to draw a hybrid of a turtle and a dove.

Note: just to be perfectly clear - a turtle dove does not look like this.

Day 3: Three French Hens

Since the Turtle Doves move horizontally only, I thought the next enemy or obstacle move vertically.

My first thought of vertical enemies came to Mario again, with either the fireballs in the castle or the swimming fish, both which usually pop straight up when you get near them. So you either have to bait them to jump and wait to jump until they start decending, or just make sure you get your full height of your jump when going over them. Either way, a simple timing of your jump.

Art-wise for the French Hens, I started with the classic pixel art chicken. I'm not sure if the reference was from Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon, or one of the Zelda games, but I feel like all pixel art chickens kind of look like them, ha.

To make them "French Hens", I added a beret, striped shirt, and smoking a cigarette, while sitting in a cafe drinking red wine. I'm not sure if red wine is the most accurate choice, but I chose it as the color would be easiest to see and didn't give it much more thought. I thought I was so clever making them "French Hens" but then on Christmas I watched Candy Cane Lane and they made that joke 2 years ago.

The Rest...

I won't spoil anything after Day 3 right now. Maybe someday, ha.

ToasterNet: The Discord Experience

You won't see this part on itch.io or here, but at first I actually made this a Discord Integration. Let me explain.

ToasterNet: A Discord Bot

Years and years ago I originally made a Discord Bot, which being Lou Bagel, this is my robot companion basically, so it is ToasterNet. The joke was regarding SkyNet, but I made this joke way before AI was trending - seriously, probably was in 2018 - where now I'm sure the name might be scaring some people!

Anyway, I brought it back to life! Not really, but I wanted to start messing around with it again. It still performed some functions that were done in Lambdas, but basically before I killed the EC2 server running it as it didn't seem worth the costs.

Now, I figure I'd spend $4/month for a bit to try some things out. Maybe the full details could be another post, so I'll get down to how ToasterNet applies to this and tell you about how it can deal you BlackJack later!

Construct 3 Integrated Discord Game

I wanted to explore multiplayer games and I thought a Discord Bot could take care of the auth. Basically, you ask the Discord Bot to let you play. It would put a token/key in a database then send you a link privately with that key in the query params. So of course this isn't secure if people share the link or whatnot, but it is also mean to be like a one time link.

When the game loads, it grabs the key from the query params and sends it to an API endpoint to verify it. If it is successfully verified, you get sent to the next screen to play the game. If the verification fails, you get sent to another screen that gives the error message or saying "You need to wait" or ask ToasterNet again.

The kind of concept I was thinking, with the "wait" part, was it could be like a contest on who can beat it first. So that is why in the text on one of the first screens it says you "only have one life." That part was from the Discord Bot as a I set it up like you could play once and if you died you had to wait 30 minutes to try again. That might not be fitting for this situation, but I was thinking about some multiplayer or idle type of game where you could load it up once a day to collect what not or use your actions - not sure exactly, but trying to see how the functionality actually worked before getting carried away with ideas on what to do with it.

One cool thing I really liked about the Discord setup was the messages back to Discord. So whichever channel the user asked to play in, ToasterNet would put messages back into that channel. The user's Discord name was passed to the project in a query param as well. So the channel would show messages like "PixelShorts started playing the game", "PixelShorts completed Day 1", or "PixelShorts failed to save Christmas! PixelShorts died falling of a roof!"

These Discord integrations were removed for the version uploaded to itch but the experimentation was fun and hopefully that experience with it will help me make more Discord integrated games! I think it was also very nice for getting people to play test something. I could easily put in a message that I updated something and see Discord messages about how they faired.

Next Christmas I'll give you my heart

I don't know what that means, but I kind of hope I make another Christmas game next year, but release it a bit earlier than December 24th!

One idea I had from this would be this game's origin story: How the Pigeon Stole Christmas. Play as pigeon sneaking around stealing Christmas presents, Christmas Trees, and anything else related, like the scene in that completely unrelated movie.