Hi all!

It's been a while, but it's time for a new devlog for Pingbert's Snow Ride! Hope you all had a great start of year so far!

There are some cool new additions to the game that I will talk about in the following four sections!

HUD and Score System

Style improvements for game HUD were added to make the fonts more visible and the panels more stylish with checkerboard patterns!

Additionally, added a score system that you can see in the upper left corner in game footage. There are many actions the player can do to increase score:

• Delivering mail
• Crate destroy combo
• Bouncing off walls while spinning combo
• Natural landing (leaping off air and landing without use of glide)
• Perfect charge (doing a full charge drift)
• ..and more planned!

When you do any of these, a text label is displayed with a description and amount of score that the action adds. Want to make it satisfying to stack these labels with multiple stylish actions!

Boost Pads

A fast-paced game wouldn't feel right if there wasn't a kind of pad or ring that gave you an instant boost! So now you can find these boost rings (model is wip) spawned randomly so you can use to your advantage to pickup speed! Be careful though, some can boost you off the floor!

(note this was recorded before skybox changes)

Skybox Improvements

One of my biggest issues with the game was feeling the world too empty. Given the game's levels are procedurally generated, it's hard to add elements to decorate the game that feel natural. If you look at past devlogs, you can see that the skybox suggests the game takes in space even though the environment is intended to be up high on snow mountains.

Which is why I worked on overhauling the skybox! As you can see, the skybox now contains:

• Clouds: These move slowly and are generated by noise which allows for randomness. Also can adjust cloud density and size, which could be used in the future for a weather like system!
• Shooting Stars: There were shooting star particles before, but these were spawned randomly to look like they were far away but this looked a bit weird at times. They are now instead drawn in the skybox!
• Far off mountains: Im not a great 2D artist to be honest haha but I tried my best to paint some snow mountain sillhouttes rendered on the skybox horizon. This plus fading adds to the effect of depth in the levels.
• Mist: Lower hemisphere of skybox now draws mist like noise to darken the "fall area", where the player would lose a life and respawn.

Will revisit in the future, but happy with how this changes the game's visuals!

Items

To start work on items/powerups that Pingbert will obtain, I also worked on designing a HUD for the inventory. I wanted to make it more alive so I coded a "circular UI" that pivots around the player icon as an array. The player can have up to a maximum of 6 items at a time, and can cycle their list to use them! Added a slight position shift to add life to it, inspired by my very recent Balatro addiction.

On the 3D side of things, a "bubble item" is spawned and orbits the player to display the items in Pingbert's inventory.

With that done, I worked on some backend work to make adding powerups much easier using Godot's signals (very recommended!).

Item bubbles spawn randomly for now and can be picked up. Planning to make Rare items be more difficult to obtain. Such as random spawn when you bonk a tree, or when you win a minigame.

Now onto the first item implemented: Magnets!

Magnets can be used to attract nearby mail simultaneously! It is a consumable and should be used wisely to maximize the amount of mail obtained!

With the core item framework now done, it's time to work on many more powerups that will make the game more fun! Already have some items in mind that have synergy together! If you have an idea for an item that you think would be cool, let me know!

In case you miss it, you can now wishlist Pingbert's Snow Ride on Steam! You can also signup for playtesting, which will launch very soon!

As always, please let me know your thoughts and feedback.

That's it for now! See you in a hopefully much sooner Devlog!!

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Hi all!

I hope everyone is winding down as the year comes to a close and recharging their batteries to start 2025 with great energy! As for myself, I've been taking a break from work and getting addicted to Balatro. It's been a while since a game has hooked me like this, so if you haven't checked it out yet, you definitely should!

Anyway, I wanted to write a little post to reflect on this year.

Art

After being a longtime lurker, I joined Newgrounds this June. Initially, I wasn't sure how my 3D art would be received, but I was pleasantly surprised by the positive reception! It motivated me to keep working harder and improving myself.

It's been great to see so many talented people here with different art styles!

Collabs

Another thing that I feel sets NG apart is the many collabs ongoing. I joined my first collab in the Newgrounds Wii Collab!

It was really fun to see art, music, programming, and many people come together to make things like this possible! I'm looking forward to joining more collabs in the future!

Music

One of the things I wanted to challenge myself with this year was learning video game-style music composition. This is something I'm still not very confident about, as I never took any classes during my teens nor have any formal training. However, I started self-practicing piano and transferring melodies I liked into FL Studio. It's taken a lot of trial and error and a lot of practice, but I feel like I've hopefully improved.

This Halloween, I had my first track front-paged and received good reception. This made me really happy since I was starting to lose motivation, but having people listen to and enjoy your music is really exciting!

Of course, my music still has a long way to go, so I am looking forward to making more music in 2025! My goal is to eventually make music for collabs!

Gamedev

Finally, my biggest ongoing project this year is Pingbert's Snow Ride. While it's still not close to release, I am happy with the progress made this year! Additionally, as I mentioned before, Newgrounds has a lot of talent and people willing to work together. Meeting people here and working together on the game's art and music has been great! I'm looking forward to working together with more people in the future!

Unfortunately, developing this project plus my full-time job has made it difficult to find time to post more art and music. I'm hoping to balance it more next year so I can post more content and join more collabs!

While I joined mid-2024, I feel like it's been an eventful year so far! I'm excited to be more active in 2025 and connect with others! Thanks to everyone I've collaborated with, and thanks to the Newgrounds crew for making all of this possible!

That's it for me now. I wish you all a great 2025!!

Hi everyone!

Wanted to share that Pingbert's Snow Ride is now available for wishlist on Steam! Please check it out!

Expect more news and Devlogs here early next year! Excited to showcase many features planned!

I would like to give thanks and give a shoutout to the following for helping me make this project possible so far:

• @CanineLotus
• @RyanAvx
• @MYYA
• @Dynamic0
• @vtncomics

Also wanted to thank everyone that has helped with feedback and volunteered for help! Let me know what you think about the project!

Finally, wanted to wish you all Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. Hope you have a great time with friends, family, and delicious food!

Hi everyone!

Winter is here, and so is a brand-new devlog update! It’s been a while, but I’m excited to share some progress and updates for the game!

Footage

Trees

Point Rings

What's new?

• Ramps, slopes, and walls: These features are now procedurally generated and seamlessly snapped to the terrain surface! Their dimensions include random variations, adding a unique touch to the terrain in every playthrough. The primary goal of these structures is to introduce verticality and obstacles to the game. Pingbert can use ramps to launch into the air at high speed. Mail points are strategically placed along the paths of generated ramps and slopes, rewarding those who slide through them. I’m also planning to add even more structures in the future to further enhance the diversity and uniqueness of level generation.
• Point Rings: These can now spawn at random and when passed through by Pingbert triggers a chain of timed rings. Pingbert must go through these in time in order to get a reward. The player will need to be quick and get them in order!
• Trees: Been looking foward for these and finally added generated pine trees! These also have some variety so they don't look like massive copy pasting. Main purpose of these trees mechanically are just obstacles. But visually, I think it adds a lot of life into the game's visuals. The world doesn't feel as empty now I feel. Proud of the wind shader that manipulates the tree's transform.
• Control Support: Pingbert is now playable with controllers! Even has rumble (will be toggable in the future) when smashing through crates!
• Visuals: Colors and shading adjusted for better visual clarity. Glow was too excessive on previous versions so hopefully this makes it better for some monitors.

Art

• Pingbert has new cute pixel art icons used in the game, done by @vtncomics. Thank you again!

Music

• @Dynamic0 composed 'Snow Wandering' for the game🎵, thank you again!

What's next?

While there are many other gameplay mechanics planned, the focus now is on implementing the core gameplay loop (such as fall-off logic, game over mechanics, and the main menu). This is because I’m preparing to release a playable demo for playtesting soon! While the demo will lack many features and the polish of the final game, I believe it’s a great opportunity to gather feedback on the overall game feel. Your input will be invaluable for shaping the final game.

To make this playtest as accessible as possible, I’m experimenting with Godot’s web export. However, as I’ve mentioned in previous devlogs, this approach comes with certain limitations, and there’s a chance it might not work out. Regardless, I’ll do my best to make it happen! My goal is to release a demo on Newgrounds, complete with medals and leaderboards, which I think would make it even more engaging.

On another note, many have asked about Steam Wishlist. The Steam page is currently in progress, actually it's already created and approved just in private. I’m holding off on promoting it because I’d like to add marketing videos and images to make it more appealing before sharing the link. I’m torn about the timing—on one hand, I’ve heard it’s good to promote Wishlists as early as possible, but on the other, it might be too soon. For now, the plan is to share it when the playtest demo is released. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

Contributions

Right now I am mostly looking for artists that would be willing to be commisioned for promotional artwork for the game!

Additionally, I am looking once again for musicians for gameplay music. And also sound designers for some sound effects.

If you are interested in any of these categories, please send me a DM!

That's it for this Devlog! I hope I can keep creating these more frequently and that for the next Devlog I have a deliverable playtest! As always, please let me know any feedback and requests that you have for the game!

Thanks for reading! Hope you are staying warm and comfy!

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Happy Halloween! 🎃👻

Hope you have great plans to go out in costumes, watch spooky movies or play some horror games tonight.

 To celebrate this year I created a song and a 3D animated visual for a Halloween-like prankster character. Check it out if you haven't!

For the track I am really happy how well it was received. To be honest I finished it feeling unmotivated and wasn't happy with it initially. I felt like stopping music for a while (maybe I just got tired of listening to it over and over again lol). But I am glad people liked it regardless. Thank you so much for the support, makes me feel motivated to make more music! It's almost a year since I started composing music and even though I am still far from where I want to be I am happy with the progress this year!

On another subject, Pingbert's Snow Ride development is going well. Planning to make a new devlog in the following weeks to show off the new features added. I feel confident that the Newgrounds demo can come out around the end of next month (fingers crossed).

Also recently I created a Bluesky account and post there regularly. Please follow if you are interested!

That's all for this post, if anyone has any recommendations on Halloween movies or games let me know!

After working on this recent gif:

I started thinking it would be fun and cute to make a small game about controlling a mom duck and finding small ducklings to join you. With your mouse you would be able to command these little ducklings to go somewhere, or pickup an object to solve puzzles and go through levels like this. Say for example to open a gate you must press two buttons simultaneously where each button needs the weight of 5 ducklings each to be pressed.

Then I realized this is basically Pikmin but with little ducks. I think this could be a fun project to work on in the future though, what are your thoughts?

Also, I don't know if I haven't looked properly but it feels like there is a lack of Pikmin like games or clones? Think specially with mouse on PC there is a lot of potential. Maybe it's because Nintendo has these ideas strongly patented, who knows lol.

Hi all!

Following the mass exodus of X/Twitter I've opened a Bluesky account. I am planning to post more WIPS and snippets there, while keep posting completed/higher quality work here on Newgrounds. Would love to reconnect with y'all there!

What are your thoughts on Bluesky? So far it's been a nice experience and definitely different vibe.

Hello everyone!

Im back to share some updates on the development of Pingbert's Snow Ride! The past two (ish) weeks have been mainly working on feedback from the previous footage showcase but also some nice visual effects to make Pingbert's world more alive.

Physics

To address feedback on movement, there was a big overhaul to the player physics and controls to make the character much easier to slide. Not only that, but velocity is determined much more realistically which was a big issue before. The player vertical velocity wasn't working as expected on ramps which made it seem unnatural, basically the velocity wasn't calculated according to the current player angle on the slope. Now the player is able to rotate and strafe without having too rely too much on the drift mechanic while also making ramps much more fun and realistic. There are of course some parameters to be tuned but can say that this overhaul was worth it and definitely changed the game's feel. To compensate with the player's greater speed and movement terrain generation was also adjusted.

Some new gameplay to demonstrate this!

(sorry about lag spikes, don't know what's up with Windows 11 recently..)

Also, if you are wondering where the background music is from look at the Music section below!

Procedural terrain generation

A big goal these weeks was also updating the procedural generation to have more dynamic levels. Before terrain randomness changed:

• Length
• Rotation (left or right turn)
• Vertical Rotation (the angle that makes it a half pipe or plane)
• Ramp (determines if the segment is a ramp or not)

Now adding to the previous there is now the following new components:

• Width change: Every segment used to be the same width before which made it monotone. Now, the width changes throughout the generation which can make bigger and safer areas while also more narrow segments that are harder to traverse if you aren't careful.
• Vertical change: Using almost the same logic as ramps but without gaps, there is now vertical change both upwards and downards to add more verticality into the levels! Think this is one of the nicer looking changes because it now looks more like actual slopes in a mountain rather than a flat half pipe all the time.
• Gap Distance changes: Minor change but since the player can now go much faster the ramp height is used to add to the gap distance so that the higher the ramp the greater the distance between the gap of two segments so that it's easier for the players to land on the other side.

While it may seem little this already adds much more variety into the level, the next planned short term steps to add to the procedural level generation:

• Mini Ramps: Small ramps that spawn on the terrain, think of Excitebike like ramps. A trail of pickable mail or other items would be spawned in the ramp so players are motivated to take it.
• Trees: With the bigger terrains now, it can feel empty even with all the crates, mail, and mailboxes. Now it's time to start adding more obstacles. And I think nothing would fit more than snow pine trees.
• Score Rings: I am planning to add these "rings" which spawn at random and if you slide through one of them, the next one spawns and so on. They have a timer though so you better go through them in order before the timer is out. Kind of like red coins from Super Mario 64. I am pretty sure there are a ton of games with this exact same idea but I can't seem to remember one specifically lol.

World Environment

Okay maybe this devlog has been too technical so far. Let's change it up with some visual new stuff. To make the world feel much more alive (there are other things to work on with higher priority but it's always fun to work on visual effects lol), the following was added:

• Aurora Borealis: I've always wanted to see one in real life.. so atleast I can now do it ingame! These spawn kind of rarely to make them more outstand more. There are some performance concerns with the shader so hopefully this can be kept in the web version of the game.
• Flags: There are now added to the checkpoint banners to make them more visible from far away. Planning on adding more type of flags across the terrain to have more objects be affected by wind. I've seen flags with knots on snowy mountains but I forgot what they are called and haven't been able to look it up without their name, but the idea is to add those too!
• Wind Particles: Pingbert slides very high up the mountains, so it's only natural that there is alot of wind gusts visible. These were inspired by Wind Waker's.
• Shooting Stars: Also spawn kind of rarely, but if you look up at the night sky you may spot some shooting stars.
• Night Sky: Speaking of the sky, a new shader was created to replace the previous skybox which was a still image. The sky is now procedurally generated, which makes it possible to add effects such as colorful variable galaxies patterns and stars that twinkle overtime. Small details that makes the world feel more alive I feel.

Watch the following video too see these new effects!

Music

I wanted to share a sneek peak of the game's soundtrack! The full soundtrack is a work in progress but I am really happy with how it's coming up. I was able to meet through Newgrounds different musicians that have now added to the game's music! I really think this site is great for meeting talented people open to working together like this, and I am looking foward to do so again in the future. Thank you so much again @CanineLotus, @MYYA, @RyanAvx !!

Please check out their work.

https://caninelotus.newgrounds.com/

https://ryanavx.newgrounds.com/

https://myya.newgrounds.com/

While it feels like the end goal is still far off I am happy with the progress so far. These past weeks were a little busy personally but still think there was a great amount of progress on both visuals and core game mechanics. Excited to expand on this now with new props and mechanics ontop of the terrain generation (especially the trees and score rings mentioned before).

That's it for now! Have a great one!!

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Hello everyone!

Wanted to share the newest Pingbert's Snow Ride progress and the start of a attempt to document the project's progress!

** Note that the gameplay music is not from the actual game's soundtrack, and rather the following playlist.

Here is a preview of the current gameplay as of right now! Many behind the scene work on the visuals and gameplay experience. Already have some feedback to address for the next devlog (please do share what you think though!) but I think there was a good amount of progress these past following weeks. You can take a look at some of the following developments in the video attached above.

Developments in the past two weeks:

• Large World Coordinatees: This might be a little too technical to start with but a huge improvement. There were some issues with physics being wonky after some playthrough time. This was finally discovered to be because Godot's physics get weird when the CharacterBody is away from the world's origin, or in other words have big number for coordinates. The game is meant to be infinitely procedural generated so this was a huge issue. However, the World Shifter-nator (not actual name) is now working and shifting the world and player seamlessly without the player even noticing! Testing this allows for consistent physics without the player even noticing!
• Checkpoints: Of course, the game wouldn't be fun if everytime you fell off you started from the very beginning which is why checkpoints are now implemented. These spawn separated on N terrain segments of separation (the number is subject to change, don't want them too separated but also not too many checkpoints). Visually I find them appealling. When Pingbert passes a checkpoint, the terrain behind him is cleared for performance sake.

• Music: Thanks to my previous posts, the first two songs for the game are now composed by NG contributors! Excited to share these songs and the credits to the authors once it's time (very soon). There is still some room for composers for the gameplay DnB songs though, so please hit me up if you are interested!
• Web Export: First tests for web version (which will be playable here on Newgrounds) have started. The game runs well for the most part but there are noticable lag spikes seems to mostly caused by particles. Plan is to reduce some of the visuals and particles so that the web version remains stable. Additionally, the shading and colors will be noticeably different to the desktop version because of the different renderer compatibility. This is unfortunate but the main gameplay will remain the same! Hopefully I can share some screenshots and videos of the web version in the next Devlog.
• Hit Impact: Minor but necesary detail. Pingbert now bounces back with animation when hit against a wall or a crate. The impact now feels more natural and gives a penalty to player for not dodging obstacles. Mainly just wanted to use the squeak sound effect (see video attached)

• Fog and terrain depth: Fog particles are now added to the bottom of the generated terrain! I think this looks much better than having nothing like before. Plus it gives the player a visual marker of where the death zone area is. Additionally, the terrain opacity gradient now has a alpha scissor effect instead of a simple gradient. Might tweak this in the future but think it fits the snow theme.

• Fall off death and animation: Related to the previous, but now players "die" when falling off to a certain height level (close to the fog level, or to be exact the current lowest terrain generated level). Even if Pingbert is gliding, once he goes below this level he is gone (unless he has extra lives!)
• Terrain Pop In Animation: Small detail, but generated terrain now has a "pop in" scale animation when generated instead of just awkwardly spawning out of nowhere. Planning to do the same for disapearing terrain.
• Terrain Segments Dynamic Angle: With all the previous nice additions and visual tweaks, now comes the next part of the project. Making the generated terrain more dynamic and more fun. The first change which can be seen on the video is that the tube angle of the terrain segments now change throughout the game randomly. This makes terrain much more dynamic than before. Similarly, plan is to do add more of these kind of variables to the terrain creator so that terrain better! Next task planned is dynamic width for the segments and more curve kinds.

As for the feedback I mentioned before, the ones I've received the most and planning to address:

• "Leap off ramps feels weird, almost like vertical velocity is reduces when leaping off"
• "Player can get a little too fast and far from camera"
• "Hard to know where I am supposed to go, can't see much with the current terrain and camera"
• "I want to see Pingbert enjoying himself more" (actually did get this lol)

While still far from a release, I do think the web version demo is getting close! I want to thank everyone for the feedback and comments so far. Excited to be able to release this hopefully soon, and in the meantime keep posting Devlogs! Probably biweekly. Hope in the next one I can share less technical updates and more exciting changes!

In the meantime if you haven't feel free to follow me here or my Twitter acc for updates.

That's it for now, have a good one!

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Into the dataverse 🤓☝️

Some footage of me testing collisions at high penguin speed that visually looked kinda cool for Pingbert's Snow Ride). Also I finally realized how to record high quality footage.

Posting a new Devlog in the following weeks by the way!