‘Tis the holiday season, and one of our favorite ways to celebrate is with a custom-made game. Alas, our Games team has been fully occupied with other projects and getting a game done in time wasn’t in the cards. Luckily for us, our developer community is full of self-organizers–individual developers came together, brainstormed concepts, and eventually formed teams that competed to submit the best holiday-themed games by the relatively short deadline. We agreed that our Games and Marketing teams would take a look at each of these submissions, choose the most solid entry, put it up on our official ROBLOX Games page, and add brand new hats for earning badges in-game! We’re pleased to announce we’ve made our official selection: ROBLOX presents the Siege of Quebec by Team Rudimentality!

Longtime friends of the blog, Team Rudimentality are often featured for creating games that push the boundaries of our platform, particularly in terms of visual aesthetics and character movement. The Siege of Quebec continues to push the envelope with stellar snow-monster designs, a huge and layered level, in-depth gameplay mechanics, and badges that can earn you exclusive ROBLOX winter-themed hats.

The premise is simple enough: you and a group of teammates are tasked with defending a small town of gingerbread homes (and people). Luckily, the gingerbread people received amply warning that the dastardly snowmen from the outer world have acquired quite an appetite, which is why you start in a protected fort with a shovel and a rifle. Surviving each swarm earns you points, which you can turn around and spend in the store to upgrade your weapons, buy more ammo, and purchase turrets, among other things. There’s a ton of heavy-duty weaponry to stop the snowmen from tearing down your defensive perimeter. There’s also a great deal of strategy involved. Sure, you can play it safe in the beginning and stay elevated, but eventually you start running low on ammo, meaning you’re going to have to jump down into the fray to collect bullets and power-ups that the slain snowmen drop.

As the swarms of evil snowmen become larger and more powerful, you’ll find yourself running loops, sort of “passing” hordes of snowmen off to friends who have the ammo or weapons necessary to put them down. You lose points every time you get knocked out as well, which is an extra incentive to stay alive (continually buying newer and more powerful weapons and abilities is the only way to keep the fight going). Play your cards right, and you’ll have a fortified line of defense surrounding the town by about the tenth round, which you’ll need when the big guys start showing up.

To mark this festive holiday tradition, I thought I’d sit down and have a chat with two members of Team Rudimentality about developing their holiday title.

ROBLOX: This game feels really familiar. What games in particular did you look at as influence when developing Siege of Quebec?

Wheatlies: I was just totally enthralled by the idea of defending something with other players, as well as bashing in the heads of snowmen. As for inspiration, I would say the snowmen were really inspired from Calvin & Hobbes comics.

ROBLOX: No wonder they looked so familiar! This game presents quite the challenge–Shedletsky and I played with the entire Games Team and all of us agreed it’s harder than your average ROBLOX title. Was this intentional?

Wheatlies: You’re going to have to give me a minute. I need to let the fact that the one and only Telamon played my game hit me.

ROBLOX: Ha! He was confused by how you earn points. I don’t know what SolarCrane was doing, but he was scoring way higher than everyone else. The map is so big I didn’t see him often, and I couldn’t get him to tell me his secret.

Wheatlies: He was probably using turrets, those things totally milk points. You have to make a concentrated effort to stay alive as well, because those points you lose really add up. We definitely had trouble balancing out the rounds relative to the amount of players. Ultimately, we wanted to make sure that there were always snowmen left to fight.

WhoBloxedWho: Hitting snowmen in general is just a fun thing to do.

ROBLOX: What is the best survival strategy?

Wheatlies: You need to have some pretty decent sword fighting abilities and find ways to attack the snowmen from behind.

WhoBloxedWho: Also, make sure to create a solid foundation of turrets. That really helps you progress. And steer clear of the snowmen that explode, they’re dangerous.

ROBLOX: What would you say was the biggest challenge you had to overcome when making this title?

Wheatlies: Definitely handling all of the AI scripting, and actually physically building the snowmen. There’s only so many different things you can do with a snowman, not to mention all of them are run by one monolithic godscript that sometimes appears in my dreams. Or nightmares.

ROBLOX: The AI seems to be focused around a sort of “swarm” mentality. So much so that I noticed the snowmen actually stacking on top of one another to form sort of a ladder to get over the wall.

WhoBloxedWho: It’s a simple but effective system that makes each individual snowman follow the closest player. If there isn’t a player nearby it’ll target a construction object like a wall, a house, or even one of the tiny gingerbread people. When we gave the snowmen the ability to jump, everything changed. We didn’t think that such a simple feature like jumping would change the AI so much.

Wheatlies: It gave them the appearance of climbing over one another like mad beasts, but that was just sort of a happy accident. The script for the snowmen is only eight or so lines of code.

ROBLOX: Well, listen guys, the game is great. Thanks so much for all your hard work.

WhoBloxedWho: No problem! Any time.

Wheatlies: Thanks for talking to us!