Hi Newgrounds!

I wanted to formally announce a small game I am developing called Pingbert's Snow Ride!

[Credits to PrimaRoxas for the logo!]

It's been in development for some time, and I've posted snippets on my Twitter account, but I've never officially announced it. It's a game I'm developing in my free time using Godot 4!

After using Newgrounds for a while, I feel like this is the right place to make announcements like this and hopefully continue posting dev updates.

Okay but what is it?

Pingbert's Snow Ride is a high-speed platformer snow sliding game where you control Pingbert, a mail carrier penguin whose job is to find and deliver mail across multiple mailboxes on a snowy mountain. The player must slide, jump, and glide through procedurally generated snow slides to deliver as much mail as possible without falling off.

Falling off will respawn the player at the nearest checkpoint, unless all available lives are lost! The score recorded upon losing will be a combination of mail delivered and distance reached.

Cool, but how does Pingbert control?

Pingbert can slide and turn. When going too fast, he can brake to prevent himself from falling off.

Pingbert can drift to make sudden turns, gaining a burst of speed the longer the drift is charged, similar to games like Mario Kart and Kirby’s Air Ride.

Pingbert can glide through the air to cross large gaps or save himself from falling off. However, this can only be done once per leap, and gliding is slower than leaping without the glider, so use it wisely!

Pingbert can spin while sliding, which allows him to break objects found during the game, such as crates. Destroying these will give you mail, and possibly other items! Additionally, spinning can be used for faster horizontal movement when sliding, similar to strafe controls.

Pingbert can also dive on air, kind of like a ground pound. This allows you to quickly drop to the ground so you don't miss a platform!

Procedural Generation?

The slides are procedurally generated with dynamic properties such as varying dimensions, angles, border radii, and other planned features. This ensures that gameplay is unique in every playthrough! It will take some time to fine-tune this process to prevent unfair terrain generation or strange shapes. What you see now is already procedurally generated, and the final game will be even more dynamic!

What's next?

• New crate items/effects
• Big update on level generation
• Achievements/Medals
• Visual improvements
• SFX (initiated but not completed)
• Music (see Help Needed section)
• Main game state (game over screen, title screen, options, etc.)
• High score saving
• Upon losing or quitting, mail score is converted into coins
• Coins can be exchanged for new costumes
• Special Stages (to be elaborated in the future)

! Help Needed !

I am currently looking to collaborate with musicians for this project.

My vision for the game's soundtrack is something that feels like Y2K Drum 'n' Bass Atmospheric/Jungle (probably not the best way to describe it) to match the high-speed gameplay. If you think you have some ideas for this, I would love to talk!

These contributions would be paid and credited in-game. I'm open to discussing the details, so if you're interested, please send me a DM!

Demo plans

While Godot has some web export limitations , and it's likely the demo web version won't perform as well as the desktop version, my plan is to create a small playable vertical slice demo of the game here! This way, I can gather feedback on the controls and visuals (minus effects that aren't supported in web exports) before the actual release.

I would also like to integrate some medals into the demo, though I don't have experience with this, so I'll probably ask for some help.

Thanks for reading!

That's it for now! Please let me know if you have any feedback and ideas that you think would help the game. And if you haven't and want to know more updates, feel free to follow me!