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Cart #olatannenbaum-3 | 2020-12-15 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA
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Hola! I thought it would be cool try making a Christmas-themed game, so here it is. Ola! Tannenbaum is a quick arcade game where you're going to need good timing, lightning reflexes, and absolutely no sense of colour-coordination to create the most chaotically decorated Christmas tree ever. Start by placing baubles, tinsel and fairy lights and top everything off with a star on top. Will you be a bauble boffin or a yuletide liability?

Ola! Tannenbaum is an accurate simulation of what it is like to decorate a tree after too many glasses of sherry and with your eyes closed.

I tried to make an in-game tutorial that explains everything reasonably well but here's what you need to do in more detail if you're planning on min-maxing this.

  • The closer you are to a target the more points you will get. Miss the target and you drop the decoration.
  • Baubles only need one target. Accurately place two in a row and you'll gain a bonus bauble that's worth double points.
  • Tinsel needs to be draped across two targets, one at a time. The longer and closer to horizontal it is, the more points you'll get.
  • Fairy lights are similar to tinsel but don't need to be placed horizontally.
  • Once all your decorations are gone or you have filled up the tree, you can place the star on top.

Top tips for a truly terrific tree:

  • If two targets are next to each other, place a bauble so one target will move somewhere else (hopefully further away so you can place a long piece of tinsel)
  • The longer you take to aim a decoration, the faster it will move, making it much harder to place accurately.

  • The star is worth the most points, don't drop it!

  • A well-placed decoration is worth double points, a well-placed bonus bauble is worth quadruple points.

Patch Notes

1.03 - Fixed a couple of bugs during the tutorial and made the start of the game much easier.
1.02 - Fixed a different crash when placing tinsel/fairy lights on the last three targets. You no longer get bonus points when you miss the second stage of tinsel/fairy lights. Also removed some debug crap I'd left visible.
1.01 - Fixed a crash when placing tinsel/fairy lights on the last three targets (Thanks @2bitchuck for spotting this!)
1.0 - Initial release

Development


I started this a couple of weeks ago but really set my mind to it on 26th November. I tried to treat it like a game jam and work towards the deadline of getting the game finished for the 1st December. I went sailing past this deadline as it's now 4th December, but still I'm counting my self-imposed deadline as a success as usually my Christmas-themed creations are getting thrown together on the 24th.

There was a lot of surprisingly tricky parts in coding this, which I wasn't expecting seeing as I envisioned the game being fairly simple (it's 5,728 tokens which is pretty small for one of my 'finished' games.) I quickly realised I didn't have the maths ability to create nice-looking curved/draped pieces of tinsel or fairy lights. This was pretty disappointing but I'm glad I didn't waste a day trying to get this in.

I was initially thinking of making a sleigh-based present bombing kind of side-scrolling shooter game. However, I saw a couple of similar projects on Twitter so thought I needed something more original. I was delighted to discover a few days into development that someone else was also making a Christmas tree-based game on Pico-8. So much for being original! Maybe I'm being too hard on myself, are there really that many different ways to make a Christmas game?

The two most fun things were composing the music and coming up with absolutely awful Christmas-based puns.

I'll probably add to this or write it up into a full blog update later.

Cheats

You can enter a famous cheat code before the title screen

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This is super fun and the music is spectacular. Great job!

I did run into an error while playing, I hope you don't mind me posting the screenshot, I figured it might help you squash it quicker. This happened when I hit X the second time trying to place the gold tinsel in the upper circle in this screenshot.
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@2bitchuck thanks for posting this, that's a new one :)
There has been some really stubborn bugs on this one, looks like something slipped through, hopefully I can get it sorted out quickly. :)
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Just came across this interesting game. Has mechanics similar to a crane machine. You specify the vertical and then you must pinpoint landing the ornament on the tree.

It's harder than it sounds. Good puzzle and very festive for this time of year. Have a gold star to hang on your tree, @extar.



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