The Night Before Christmas

‘The Night Before Christmas‘ is the second Christmas game by Sokurah and is an original retro-inspired Christmas themed game where the object of the game is to collect presents and put them under the Christmas tree.
Download for Windows XP and above. (5.32MB)
Download for Mac OSX (Intel). (5.8MB)
MAC OSX note: Please be aware, that the games I’ve ported to OSX doesn’t run on newer OS’s. I bought my MacBook Pro in 2011 and have never updated it, so I can assure you that the games still work. BUT Apple has removed “Legacy support” from their operating systems, and since the language I’ve used hasn’t been updated to support newer OSX versions, the games won’t run on on newer and updated machines. The game was inspired by Mission Elevator but the gameplay is very different and will have you rushing around to make sure there’s enough presents under the Christmas tree and not too many kids sleepwalking around at the same time.Here’s two screenshots from the game.
The titlescreen In-game screenshot

Gameplay description:
The object of the game is to collect presents and put them under the Christmas tree. But that’s not all – you also have to make sure not too many kids are awake at the same time. In the game there is an alarmclock and once 65% of the allowed kids awake is reached it will start to ring, to warn you that there’s too many awake. You can control this by zapping the kids with your trusty sleepgun and sending them back to bed. As if that wasn’t enough – items will appear in the house and kids will eat most things they come across and the more they eat the more full they will be – and the fuller they are (shown by a bar over their heads) the longer it will take to send zap them back to bed. If the kids are completely full they will stop up and start to cry and only stop after a lot of zapping with your sleepgun. Be aware that crying kids make a lot of noise, so they will count for 1½ kid and make the alarm go off faster than normal…no time to waste then. 🙂

You also have to eat yourself – to keep your stamia up…which is also a good reason to keep the number of kids down, because they’ll eat the things you need. Luckily the kids knows what Santa likes the most – milk and cookies, so they won’t touch them at all. Those are also the things that’ll give you the most energy.

You use the lift in the middle of the house to go from floor to floor. It will run by itself but you also have limited control over it, so if you step into the lift on the middle floor, while the lift is going up, you can press down to take the lift down instead of going all the way to the top first.

It may start slowly in the beginning but you will be rushing about in no time, having to make choices such as going away from the christmas tree even though you’re carrying a present, to zap kids somewhere else, to make sure their number is kept down. Santa is a busy dude. 🙂

Installation:
Unpack the ZIP file and you’ll end up with a folder called ‘The Night Before Christmas’ that contains the game files. Run the file with the Santa-icon to run the game. The game has been tested and is works on (at least) Windows XP, Vista & Windows 7. Make sure that you have full access to the game folder, as the game may have problems writing the DAT file if it can’t get full access to the folder.

Controls:
Use the arrowkeys to control Santa and Left Control to shoot your sleepgun. All keys can be redefined.

Legal Blurb:
This game is FREEWARE and must remain freeware. The game can generally be distributed however you want, as long as all the files are included and unchanged. It shouldn’t be sold or given away on any kind of compilation without my permission. I would like to ask, that if you’re going to include this game on a CD for a magazine or somewhere else, that you contact me first – I would like to know what kind places my little project goes…also it shouldn’t be asking too much, but then I’d also like a copy of the magazine or CD.

Copyright:
This is an original game and the rights to the game are held by;

S. Borgquist (aka Sokurah) for the gameidea and the coding (http://tardis.dk/wordpress/).
Lobo – graphics
Spacefractal – music (http://www.spacefractal.com/).

Notes:
This game is the second year in a row I’ve decided to make a Christmas game, and I started a bit late so this game has been coded from scratch in less than a month, so if there’s any bugs or if any part of it seems a bit rushed – that’s why. 🙂 I do think the game plays quite well and is relatively bug-free, though.

However, if you do find any bugs, or if you just want to give me some feedback on it, you can write to me at the e-mail address at the top of this file.

If you get a good score in the game you can upload it to here from the ‘Scores’ menu,
and have it compared with other peoples scores. Remember to set your name first.