A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build

A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build
A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build
Developer(s)	Benjamin Davis; Alan Hazelden;
Publisher(s)	Draknek
Designer(s)	Benjamin David; Alan Hazelden;
Composer(s)	Priscilla Snow ;
Engine	OpenFL
Platform(s)	Linux, OS X, Windows, Android, iOS, Nintendo Switch
Release	Linux, OS X, Windows; 25 February 2015; Android, iOS; 9 December 2015; Nintendo Switch; 2 September 2021;
Genre(s)	Puzzle
Mode(s)	Single-player

A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build is a 2015 puzzle video game developed by Alan Hazelden and Benjamin Davis and published by Draknek. The game was released in 2015 for Linux, OS X, Windows, Android, and iOS.

Gameplay

A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build is a grid-based puzzle video game that tasks players with helping a featureless monster to build snowmen. Snowmen are built by stacking three snowballs of decreasing size. Rolling small or medium-sized balls over snowy ground increases their size. Building all snowmen in a room unlocks adjacent rooms which are all part of a hedge maze.^[1]

Players can undo one move at a time or reset a room.^[2]

Development and release

A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build was created by UK-based independent developers Alan Hazelden and Benjamin Davis.^[3] Its prototype was developed using Puzzlescript, an open-source HTML5 puzzle game engine, in 2014.^[4] The commercial release was written in Haxe and OpenFL^[5] and released for Linux, OS X, and Windows-based personal computers on 25 February 2015.^[6] A version for Android and iOS mobile devices was released on 9 December 2015.^[7]^[8] A Nintendo Switch version released on 2 September 2021.^[9]

For the game's 10th anniversary in 2025, the Itch.io release of the game permanently moved to a 'Pay What The Temperature Is' pricing model, where the price would be $1 for every degree Celsius it is in London according to OpenWeatherMap's tracking, updated every hour. For example, if the temperature was 2.5 degrees Celsius, the price would become $2.50.^[10] If the temperature in London drops below freezing the game will become freeware.