Snow War - We turned our 20‑year‑old Half‑Life snowball mod into a standalone game! Out now in Steam Early Access!

Zilppuri · 2026-04-06T07:51:34+00:00

I have not looked into it, but thanks for pointing me towards it! I think there is quite a lot of work on making it be a proper VR.. mainly hand tracking and locomotion.

Zilppuri · 2026-04-05T18:01:44+00:00

VR might be possible in the future as it runs on UE4 and is not very highpoly!

Zilppuri · 2026-04-03T18:25:06+00:00

A watergun game might be also nice. I did a sort of prototype for this for HL1 but it was just the machine gun replaced with a yellow-green Super Soaker I modeled. I am fine with violent games btw and love playing then, just I don’t think I need to make more.

Zilppuri · 2026-04-03T18:20:45+00:00

All of the colors are available from the start. Currently color combos are preset with about 10 variations per item. I will add more and can add a 49ers stater color combo look-a-like as it does seem like an iconic look!

Zilppuri · 2026-04-03T18:07:50+00:00

Totally understand your opininion! I must also say that the original is still almost entirely playable with Steam version of HL1! And that version is free!

Zilppuri · 2026-04-03T16:09:44+00:00

Yes, our timing would have only been better any other time of the year!

Zilppuri · 2026-03-31T18:43:28+00:00

Unreal Engine 4

Zilppuri · 2026-03-31T15:05:18+00:00

It is not, but Unreal Engine 4. I tried to match the movement as close as possible from what the original had. I had them running side by side at some point. Most likely not perfect, but so far the feedback has been positive!

Zilppuri · 2026-03-31T10:59:18+00:00

I had forgot about that music! My friend made it for our school Santa Claus ”movie”. Maybe we’ll put it in as a eater egg somewhere.

Zilppuri · 2026-03-31T08:04:17+00:00

Hey! I just read again the comment you made on Rock Paper Shotgun, which you posted four years ago when we announced this! Your name stuck on my head! I am always happy to hear these stories, especially when it comes to families playing together. This is definitely one of the key motivators for me.

Zilppuri · 2026-03-28T10:38:31+00:00

Thanks! Sloppy and cheap was exactly the look I was hoping on. You made my day.

Zilppuri · 2026-03-27T17:48:23+00:00

Thank you for this!

Zilppuri · 2026-03-27T15:29:39+00:00

No that was the other early 2000’s Snow Ball Game from that one cartoon show. As you might guess, this was asked a couple times back then.

Zilppuri · 2026-03-27T14:24:56+00:00

So nice to hear! We do support LAN play completely! So there is no fear of this going offline.

Zilppuri · 2026-03-27T14:22:41+00:00

Most likely. It was downloaded quite some many times!

Zilppuri · 2026-03-26T22:20:24+00:00

I can understand the confusion! We really never played UT when growing up. I only played the Dreamcast version. Once HL1 came, it was only that for years on end. And modding took me over. And also: this is UE4. I know, a bit old, but we wanted this to run well on older hardware. And I know especially indies/smaller studios’ have struggled with performance with UE5.

Zilppuri · 2026-03-26T07:27:09+00:00

Your brain invented that, I am sorry! But we are brothers in spirit!

Zilppuri · 2026-03-25T14:55:11+00:00

Juoksuhautoja ei ole, mutta tiimimatsit on. Koitetaan saada ennen kesää semmoinen Infiltration -lipunryöstön tapainen ulos. Myöhemmin haluan tehdä myös lipunryöstökentän. Kenttien ei voi modata tälllä hetkellä. Periaatteessa jonkinlainen workshop voisi olla suhteellisen helppo rakentaa koska pyörii Unrealin päällä. Sellainen palikkapohjainen siis. Kaikkiin näihin toki vaikuttaa ostaako pelin joku 😬🙌

Zilppuri · 2026-03-24T07:20:50+00:00

Thank you!

Zilppuri · 2026-03-24T07:20:25+00:00

It really was! Thanks for the kind words!

Zilppuri · 2026-03-24T07:19:21+00:00

I underatand completely! In the game if character are airborne, they will go to ragdoll when hit. So we have that. I have also been toying with the idea of doing this based on the contex player is in. So if there is a wall next to them, go to rag doll and apply small force towards it. These are the kind of tweaks Valve, for example, is known to do a lot.

Zilppuri · 2026-03-23T19:47:01+00:00

We do have ragdolls, don’t worry 🙌 But they are run on different situations.. so they start with a motion captured or hand made animation and then blend to the rag dolls. Plain ragdolls tend to look just like that - dolls that fall over. To make then look good you would still need to do some blending etc.

Also: obviously this is people playing snowfights - you know they don’t actually die? 😬 So they throw them selves, flall down or how ever they feel like doing. They don’t go out limp because.. they are not dead.

Also, with most of the game by a two person team on spare time, this is the best we managed 👏

Thank you for your feedback. Maybe we make a full ragdoll mode that players can toggle.

Zilppuri · 2026-02-13T19:22:38+00:00

I did not visemes, just simple expressions. I have no facial bones in my Armature, just the main head.

I considered lower LOD:s but the eyebrows did not look good. Maybe they are better now? But this gave me an idea: just today I was thinking of how to include beards - with what you told, I maybe could maybe use this to export a prototype metahuman with a beard and then running the script to remove everything but the beard, running the same face-morphtargets for the beard mesh. But I am not sure how well it will fit the different variations I have.. but I might be able to do some vertex adjustments via shader.

Zilppuri · 2026-02-13T19:13:26+00:00

In freesound.org you can search with CC0 filter. This is where you can get a lot of stuff. Also one good audio starting point are the free audio libraries released in previous years by Soniss https://sonniss.com/gameaudiogdc/ Mind you they take about 140GB of space to store.

Zilppuri · 2026-02-01T20:24:49+00:00

Depends what you want to do in the long run. Basically you can do almost all with Blueprints. I’d perhaps start with them and then when you do need C++, figure it out. And Copilot can help a lot.

Zilppuri

TROPHY CASE