⚠️ This has been superceeded by the latest version here.

SNOWBALL2

The GLFW version of Snowball.mobi with MSAA. A novel speed run game akin to a platform loop/buzz wire game.

How to play

You have to roll around collecting snow and avoiding trees until your snowball is large enough to continue to the next level. The snowball turns pine green and begins to softly flash like a beacon to identify when it has become large enough to continue to the next level.

Once the snowball is large enough the poles (obelisks) will turn into teleportation pads to the next round; the aim is to complete each level or a sequence of levels with the highest score in the shortest time.

The larger the snowballs you collect higher the score. Gold snow is double the reward of white. Picking up snow increases your speed temporarily; the idea is to enter a flow of collecting snow so that your speed stays up.

Try not to hit the trees as they will slow you down and reduce the mass of your snowball, unless your snowball is large enough to consume them, then they slow you down but also add to the mass of your snowball. Trees will shrink slightly as you approach them to show that they can be consumed.

Your score is updated in the program title bar at the end of each level.

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Mouse Controls

Mouse 1 (Left)  = Toggle Control
Mouse 2 (Right) = Change View
Mouse X1        = Decrease mouse speed
Mouse X2        = Increase mouse speed

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Keyboard Mappings

ESCAPE        = Close Game
Any other key = Toggle Menu

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Video

https://youtu.be/sKOROqzYqck

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Snapcraft / Software Center

https://snapcraft.io/snowball

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AppImage

https://github.com/mrbid/SNOWBALL2/raw/main/Snowball-x86_64.AppImage

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[x86_64] Linux Binary (Ubuntu 21.10)

https://github.com/mrbid/SNOWBALL2/raw/main/snowball2

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[ARM64] Linux Binary (Raspbian 10)

https://github.com/mrbid/SNOWBALL2/raw/main/snowball2_arm

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Windows Binary

https://github.com/mrbid/SNOWBALL2/raw/main/snowball2.exe <br> https://github.com/mrbid/SNOWBALL2/raw/main/glfw3.dll

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Prerequisites

sudo apt install libglfw3 libglfw3-dev upx-ucl gcc-mingw-w64-i686-win32

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Compile & Install

gcc snowball2.c glad_gl.c -Ofast -lglfw -lm -o snowball
sudo cp snowball /usr/bin/snowball

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Make & Install

make
sudo make install /usr/bin

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GLFW 16x MSAA | SDL2 GLES NO MSAA :-------------------------:|:-------------------------: |

Launching as ./snowball2 1337 0 1 1024 1024 0.3 1 1.0 1.5 is pretty cool. (video)

ADDED

• Joystick Support
• Dual Joystick Support
• Window/Borderless mode

Joysticks

By default, the game will boot in double joystick mode, although you can enable single joystick mode via the command line.

The mappings are designed for an Xbox 360 gamepad.

When using joystick mode, the input/mouse sensitivity becomes a master input sensitivity. You can also fine-tune the sensitivity of both Joystick 1 & 2. I personally like to have Joy 1 as a slower fine control and Joy 2 as a double-speed reflex control. If you have both set to the same sensitivity when they are both engaged you will get double the speed.

JoyPad Button1: reduce master sensitivity<br> JoyPad Button2: increase master sensitivity<br> JoyPad Button3: change view<br> JoyPad Button10 (LT): change view<br> JoyPad Button11 (RT): change view

When a joystick is connected to the computer the mouse is disabled, the joystick takes priority, but hot-swapping is allowed, so just unplug from the USB port to get the mouse back.

Possible additions:

• Inverting individual sticks rather than both at the same time.
• Inverting on an axial basis, os only horizontal or vertical invert.

Honestly, I don't even know how anyone could play this with inverted sticks, let alone one stick inverted and one not, or one axis inverted, etc. Hence not adding this feature, seems like unnecessary complexity for the UI. Although I could add this functionality as command-line arguments or via a configuration script in the future if desired.

TODO

• Audio system
• Particle effects
• JoyPad control for the menu?

The shader program... Well, this time I am going to make one shader program that executes all four of the shading modes that I make use of. Why? Well if this article is anything to go by (which I hope it is) GPU inner workings then technically these if statement switches would be inter-subgroup branching and not intra-subgroup branching which means that when all threads execute they will all be executing the same branches/pathways. In the past, my belief was that no branching in shaders should be performed if possible, and I am sure there is still truth to this statement but Snowball is not Crysis and inter-subgroup branching is probably going to be just fine. Also, I would imagine inter-subgroup branching would be more performant than state changes for the shader program.

For anyone confused by that terminology (ref):<br> The prefix intra- means "within" (as in happening within a single thing), while the prefix inter- means "between" (as in happening between two things).

Footnotes

Lore

I wanted to create something that had that Windows 3.1 Ski Free simplicity but without the scary monster and pooping dogs. I had always liked simple puzzle games such as Neverball and wanted to go in this kind of direction, and really in a way Snowball is the product of these two games combined. It's the simplicity and style of Ski Free in 3D with the sphere-centric concept of Neverball. Looking deeper into the history of video games you could say that Snowball is also essentially very much akin to a ghostless Pac-Man. Snowball itself is designed to be a competitive speed run game or just something to play when you want to kill time. Snowball produces console output which can be used in competitive games where players compete against one another in a given period of time.

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Attributions

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:946172<br> http://www.forrestwalter.com/icons/<br> https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/computer-mouse_1385<br> https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/tree-growth-diagram-green-leaf-nature-1299130129<br>