Sunny is fed up with losing to Snowgirl all year long! Armed with circling sun orbs, Sunny determines to melt Snowgirl's icy barrages. With much patience and skill, Sunny is ready to end her year-long rivalry and finally achieve victory!
I Will Defeat Snowgirl was created during a game jam with the theme of "New Year's resolution". I interpreted the theme as resolving an impossible conflict before the New Year, which led me to think of the humorous internet song "Can't Beat Air Man" (Air Man ga Taosenai). The song is about a player struggling to defeat bosses in Mega Man 2, even with glitches and cheats. This inspired the story of a determined witch who, after repeated failures, resorts to tricks to finally defeat her enemy.
For the gameplay, I chose to create a bullet hell, a genre that's relatively simple to develop in three days. I wanted to incorporate a bullet-destruction mechanic inspired by Ikaruga and Touhou Fairy Wars. In Ikaruga, players switch between two colors to absorb matching projectiles, while in Touhou Fairy Wars, players freeze bullets to destroy them. Since the game jam had a winter theme, I adapted this concept to revolve around melting ice and snow with sunlight, represented by sun orbs circling the player. Although I hoped to explore what made Ikaruga and Touhou Fairy Wars so engaging, the limited development time meant the game’s design wasn’t fully fleshed out to explore these ideas in depth. Still, during the time, I learned some new programming concepts (singleton pattern, inheritance), how to loop audio, how to play pre-rendered videos within the game, and various Unity functionalities.
