Stuff It We Snowball

Stuff It, We Snowball was made in 28 hours for the 2025 Tech Fest / Riot Games Game Jam, in which it won the theme for “most intuitive game”. The theme for the jam was “enlarge”.

It was such a success that I am currently developing it as a mobile game for iOS and Android.

Technologies Used

Lessons

• Physics Isn’t The Enemy (With Much Tweaking). I’ve previously had painful experiences with game engine physics (which, who hasn’t?), so I was relatively worried about making Snowball feel good — bearing in mind that the physics is the core mechanic, so if it wasn’t fun, the game wouldn’t work. I’m ultimately extremely proud of how Snowball feels to play, which is as a result of a vast number of tiny physics tweaks (which I am only barely restraining myself from discussing in detail). Of the 28 hour jam, easily 2 or 3 hours in total were spent just rolling down the hill and tweaking values. User testing with my long-suffering family was extremely helpful in this regard, too.
• Perspective Is Everything. A problem I ran into while developing Snowball was that it didn’t feel like you were rolling down a hill. Even when the slope was pointed downwards so steeply that all that one could see of the skybox was the brown ground colour, the game didn’t feel downhill — it felt as though the ball was moving across a flat plane, propelled forward by some unknown force. The solution to this was provided by Mr Luke Ledwich of Riot Games, who diagnosed the problem as a lack of vertical references. Game obstacles, at the time, were perpendicular to the slope, as opposed to being directly vertical. Changing this made a world of difference to the game feel, and taught me that — much like other forms of game design — simply being physically accurate is rarely an objective to strive for; rather, I needed to explicitly demonstrate aspects of my world that I want players to notice.
• Simpler and Polished is Better. This is a lesson I first began to learn with The Hacking Minigame, however I think I applied it here to great success. Having a simple game which was quick to implement left me free with plenty of time to polish — particularly, the aforementioned physics tweaking (along with other related values) was, to my mind, crucial to Snowball.
• Sleep Isn’t Actually That Important. Exhaustion is temporary. Winning is forever.

All em dashes in this post were ethically sourced. No LLMs were used in the creation of these, nor any other punctuation marks.