Free Christmas Game 2024 ► Ludology Now!

In the recent Best Christmas Video Games & Levels issue of Ludology Now! I spoke about creating my own small free Christmas game. Well, here it is. Happy Holidays, everyone – I made you something janky.

Christmas Recall is not the best game I’ve ever made, but it is not the worst, either. I like the story: because of a clerical error made by one of the elves, it turns out that all the gifts Santa just delivered were actually full of the North Pole’s coal reserves and not actual presents. Because of this, Santa has to go on a massive “Recall” mission to retrieve all the coal and replace them with real toys.

It’s a simple story with an understandable premise, one which I could almost see being an actual Christmas book for children. I’m no artist – if you check the credits.txt file you’ll find that Santa’s sleigh is an edited free-to-use PNG asset from the internet, for example – but Christmas Recall begins with little mock-up of what that could look like inside the game itself, just for fun.

Making Games Made Me A Better Critic

This is the first free Christmas game I’ve ever made, but it’s far from the first actual game. I’ve been making games on and off since 2012, with my first actual public release being Welcome to Pineview, a mystery text-based adventure that I’m still actually rather fond of. A few years later I followed that up with The Arys Expedition, a point-and-click sci-fi game that ended prematurely and eventually got a sequel in the form of an animated video series on YouTube.

Since then I’ve continued to make mostly free games of varying scopes and sizes, often falling into the trap of attempting too much and actually finishing too little. Doing this work has helped immensely in multiple ways, but more than anything else it has given me a better understanding of the difficulties developers go through. I’ve never not been interested in creating interactive experiences, and the more I learn how to actually do that the better I become at examining the experiences others create.

Improving Without Intrusion

In the past (and, likely, in the future as well) I’ve applied to jobs at different game studios. However, those have almost always been for Narrative positions, not design ones. Not only do I know where my skills lie – writing, not coding – I likely wouldn’t be able to create and distribute a free Christmas game like Christmas Recall for fun if I was working for some large development company. And I like doing stuff like that.

I’ve made 15+ tiny game projects this year and each one has taught me something. As you can see in the video above only a few of them are large enough to actually be counted as “games” and some, like my Slugdog Blackjack project or Grass Snaker, are entirely unoriginal. Still, I’ve come away from this year a better coder, a better designer, and (most importantly) a better planner. That’s why I’m so proud of my most recent major game launch, Spaceship Typing – it represents a culmination of all the things I improved upon over the past year.

Giving The Gift Of Advice & Inspiration

Play Christmas Recall. Enjoy the jankiness. Try to get all the achievements. There’s even cheats that you can activate by entering the correct code – I’ll say nothing more about those, except that if you know your gaming password/cheat code history, you should be able to find them all.

Really, though, when you play Christmas Recall I want you to think “I could make this. I could do better than this.” Then I want you to do it. I want you to download Godot or GameMaker Studio 2 or Unity or Unreal Engine or any of the other dozens of free game engines out there. The barrier to entry is practically nonexistent if you have a computer and you are willing to learn. You can make your own free Christmas games too.

Happy holidays.

THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED MEDIA

About the Author

Christopher J Teuton

Administrator

View All Posts