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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