Pengu Survives Christmas

I’ve made an arcade highscore game based on Pengu Saves Christmas by STANNco on Newgrounds

This wasn’t originally a Pengu game, it was actually an original minigame being made for the Neopets private server Neopets Classic. Titled “Jump Bruce”, it had mostly the same gameplay and obstacles, just originally made using a Neopets skin.

The idea was for a pixel-art arcade game that would progressively get more difficult the longer you survived by adding more obstacles. I love those original score-based arcade games and I feel like it’s a form of gameplay that a lot of these kids MMOs base their minigames on, so I thought it’d be fitting

These are some of the original assets. Pengu went on to replace Bruce, Quiggle was replaced by a piranha fish, and Pteri never got reskinned. Rather than having an enemy who flys through the sky, I settled on replacing Pteri with the seal from Pengu Saves Christmas, who now resides on the bottom platforms.

This brick got replaced with an icicle, and the fireball’s sprite got remade and reused. The Brucicles would eventually become the varied Christmas treat pickups in Pengu Survives Christmas.

It’s a real shame that none of these assets got put to proper use, because I’m fairly proud of how they came out. The game was actually near completion, but it unfortunately got canceled because the Neopets Classic developer that I had been in contact with decided to start ghosting me.

It was a nearly completed game that I thought had potential though, so I decided to reuse it for another now canceled project called the Newgrounds Bootleg Pack.

The idea of the Newgrounds Bootleg Pack was to make a Newgrounds themed minigame collection based on those bootleg NES game packs. Y'know, the ones that hilarious mistranslate and misname classic games, also sometimes containing some of the stankiest bootleg homebrew known to man such as “Angry Birds” or “Plants vs Zombies” NES roms. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look up some videos of them, they’re hilariously terrible.

Anyways, Jump Bruce got reskinned to be “Fulp Hero”, which was just a direct reskin of the game.

Rather than Bruce, you played as Tom Fulp’s avatar and collected Beers

You’d avoid bullets shot at you by Pico

And dodge flying envelopes and Tom Fulp’s cat, Sherbert. I kinda had a difficult time coming up with obstacles related to Tom Fulp and Newgrounds, but the strangeness of it fits with the bootleg theme in my opinion.

The Newgrounds Bootleg Pack was going to be released for April Fools 2022, but unfortunately wasn’t finished in time. I might end up making a blog post dedicated to the bootleg pack itself just so I can share some of the minigames I made that never saw the light of day.

2 canceled remakes of my first released Newgrounds game Egg-Legs and 2 more canceled Christmas projects (that I cannot talk about right now because they might still be finished in the future) later, we’ve come to Pengu Survives Christmas. I really wanted to get something out for Christmas, and considering that Jump Bruce/Fulp Hero was already nearly finished, reskinning the game and releasing it for Christmas wouldn’t be a very tall order.

Turns out I wasn’t entirely right

The original code for Jump Bruce goes back as far as 2021, and dear lord I was a bum-ass programmer back then. A lot of the code was kinda buggy so I tried to fix it, but it was just so poorly made and shotty that attempts to fix it resulted in even more broken code. The organization and build of the project itself was so poorly organized that trying to navigate it to fix its issues was such a headache.

The jumping felt terrible and was such a pain to fix without rewriting it. My system for having platforms you can jump through the bottom of was just amateur, but the organization of the actual scene was so poor that I’d have to go through each and every physics object individually and fix each one. The platforms also weren’t instances of one platform, but each an individual node. I’d have to fix each of the 5 platforms individually. Like what the fuck was I thinking when I originally made this.

Overall, I decided to simply remake it from the ground-up. I felt it’d be easier to make the game feel the way I wanted it to feel if I just remade it all rather than trying to sort through and fix my shotty work from over a year ago.

I don’t know how entirely right I was to do this, if it really was faster and more efficient, but overall I’m proud of the product that I’ve made. In addition to remaking the original game (minus the flying enemy on the top of the level), I also added new obstacles in the form of the seal on the bottom platforms and the rising water. Overall, this version of the game feels and looks way better than any of the previous versions. It’s also a much cleaner project which will make it easier to make additions to if I decided to update it in the future (which I’m already thinking of doing, as I’d love to implement a hard-mode and potentially more level layouts)

You can play the game here if you’d like, sign in to Newgrounds to be able to unlock medals and post your highscores to the scoreboard!

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