Santa Ski

15 November 2015 (Last update: 10 December 2021)

This game was made in 48h, for a local game jam that I organised with friends when I still was in University (good times).

This game is a remake of a Microsoft classic: SkiFree. The protagonist is supposed to be Santa Claus, in case you were wondering.

I consider game jams great experiences for learning how to be pragmatical developers.

Given the short time available one needs to focus on implementing features that matter. You do not have time to waste on writing code that solve problems that are already solved by a mature media framework. Loading assets, audio and video access, are all problems that can be solved immediately and not something worth spending time on like I did for earlier game projects.

In 2 days, you barely have the time to build the core features of whatever idea you come up with.

For this project I decided to use C++ with SFML which provides access to graphics and input with very few lines of code.

I have drawn all the game art, and I am really happy how it has given the game a consistent look&feel, as opposed to downloading a bunch of random images from the internet and mixing them together.

Overall I am quite satisfied how productive this project has been compared to other ones where I decided to reinvent the wheel by building my own graphic framework from scratch. It is a testament to how building on top of well-established libraries saves time.

The source code is available on GitHub and it can be compiled on Linux.