Eventigames · Free to play in the browser

Frosty Dash

Twenty-eight bookings, three lives each, and a trailer to reach at the end of every one.

  • Side-scrolling platformer
  • One player
  • Free · no account · no install
  • Written for Frosty Rollers

Frosty Dash is a platformer about getting to work. Twenty-eight bookings, one to a level and read in order they make a season — a festival, a wedding, a corporate day, a night market, a fairground, a farm, a reef, New York, a cruise ship, and an ice palace that is always last. Frosty crosses the whole of each event on foot to reach the trailer and get behind the counter, on three lives, with one Golden Roll hidden off the fast line in every one of them.

Play it nowIn this browser, nothing to install What It IsTwenty-eight side-scrolling levels, three lives each, and a trailer to reach at the end. Every gameThe catalogue

It was written for Frosty Rollers, who sell rolled ice cream, made in front of you on a frozen plate and who are the trailer at the end of every level. Eventigames hosts it because it is worth playing, not because it is ours.

The rules it was built under

No image files
Every pixel in the game is drawn to a canvas at run time — the hero, the crowds, the trailer, the New York skyline, the ice palace. There is not one picture file in it.
No audio files
Every sound is synthesised in the browser as it plays. There is not one audio file in it either.
No libraries
No engine, no physics package, no sprite framework. The world model and the renderer are both written from nothing.

Side-scrolling platformer

A season of bookings, one level at a time

The premise is small on purpose. An event has been booked, the trailer is already parked on the far side of it, and Frosty has to get across on foot before service starts. Everything in between — the crowd, the scaffolding, the marquee ropes, the fairground rides, the sea — is in the way rather than out to get him, and that is a different feeling from a game about enemies.

He builds speed the longer you hold a direction, so the game is mostly about committing to a line and then living with it. Sprinkles are the health bar: getting hurt scatters them rather than deleting them, and how many you scramble back before the next jump is what decides whether you make it. That is why a single hazard changes the difficulty of every jump after it, not just its own.

The shape of it

Type
Side-scrolling platformer. One player, keyboard or touch, no account and no save server.
Length
Twenty-eight levels. Each one is a booking, and the order they are in is the order of a season — the ice palace is always last.
Lives
Three a level, everywhere, on this site and on the site it came from. There are no extra lives to pick up mid-level: three is the budget for the whole booking.
Collectables
One Golden Roll a level, twenty-eight in all. Every one of them is deliberately off the fastest line through the level, so going for it costs you time and is meant to.

Keyboard or touch

Five controls, and two of them do more than one thing

Everything is bound twice so it works on a laptop and on a full keyboard, and all of it can be rebound in the game. These are the defaults.

The controls

Run — arrow keys, or A and D
Hold to keep going. He builds speed, and speed is what most of the level is asking for.
Jump — space, up arrow, or W
Hold it longer to go higher, and press it again at the top for a second jump.
Ice roll — down arrow, or S
At speed it spins you along the ground. Standing still it winds up instead, and letting go fires you off. Held on a lit grate it drops you into the tunnel underneath.
Punch — J, X, or either shift
Knocks anything thrown at you out of the air.
Pause — escape or P. Mute — M
Both fire on the press rather than being held.

Three lives a level. Lose all three and the booking restarts from the top rather than from a checkpoint, which is the whole reason the levels are the length they are.

Twenty-eight levels

Twenty-eight levels, and each one is a job in the diary

The levels are not numbered stages with themes bolted on. Each one is a booking the business took, and reading them in order gives you a working season — the small local jobs first, the big travelling ones later, and the ice palace at the end of the winter.

They are homage rather than licence. A level built out of a film or a place is drawn in the game’s own vocabulary, and no protected mark or character name is printed anywhere on screen. What you recognise, you recognise from the shapes.

Some of what is in there

  • A festival, a wedding and a corporate day — the three jobs the trailer actually takes most.
  • A circus, a school prom, a night market and a fairground.
  • A western, a heist, a mine and a manor.
  • A black-and-white level, and a level that runs like a simulation.
  • A reef under the water and an aircraft carrier above it.
  • A tour of New York with the sights in it — the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Coney Island, Harlem.
  • A cruise ship with inside and outside sections, which is two levels of ship in one booking.
  • An ice palace, which is always the last one whatever else gets added.

Every level hides exactly one Golden Roll, and every one of them is placed off the fast line — on solid ground, reachable, and never on the road you would run anyway.

How it was written

The levels are somebody’s actual life, in order

Frosty Dash was not designed from a list of platformer themes. It was written out of its developer’s own life — the holidays, the town, the places, the films and the music — and once you know that, the running order stops looking like a difficulty curve and starts looking like a diary.

The clearest evidence is in the small things, because those are the things nobody invents. One level ends with a walk down Timber Street, past the rope, into a club — a named street and a named door, written the way you write somewhere you have actually stood in the queue outside.

What went in

The holidays
The cruise ship level was asked for with inside and outside sections and a list of what is on a modern mega-ship, in the detail of someone who had walked around one rather than seen a brochure. New York was asked for as a tour of the sights, by name — the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Coney Island, Harlem.
The films
A time-travel level, a black-and-white level, a heist, a western, a twenties party, an aircraft carrier. None of them are named on screen and none of them need to be — they are built from what a film looked like, not from what it was called.
The music and the decade
There is a nineties level and there is a nightclub, and the club is the one part of the game that is not a booking at all. It is what happens after the shift.
The work
The rest of it is the job. A school fête, a wedding, a corporate day, a festival, a night market, a gale in the tent — that list is not invented either. It is what a catering trailer actually gets booked for.

That is the part of the story the game itself can prove. There is more of it — which town, which holiday, which records — and it will go here as it is written down rather than as it is guessed at.

frostyrollers.com

Both web games were written for a real business

Frosty Rollers sell rolled ice cream, made in front of you on a frozen plate. Frosty Dash and Roll Rush were both written for them, about them, and are theirs — this site hosts the two games because they are good, not because it made them.

They trade weddings, festivals, corporate days and parties, from a towable catering trailer or a pop-up tent. There is no van and no food truck anywhere in the business or in either game, which is worth saying plainly because it is the detail people get wrong on their behalf.

What that means in practice

One source, two sites
The games are not forked or rebuilt for this site. They are built out of the Frosty Rollers repository into one self-contained file each and dropped in here, so the two hosts cannot disagree — three lives a level on frostyrollers.com is three lives a level here, because it is the same code.
Free either way
Both games are free to play in the browser on either site. No account, no download, no advertising and nothing to buy.
The trailer is real
The trailer Frosty is running towards in every level of Frosty Dash, and the counter you are working behind in Roll Rush, are the actual business. That is why the details are right.

frostyrollers.com — the business itself