Snakes?
Solo Project
Overview:
Design:
The design plan was to to make something small, that could be finished over a weekend, and was still interesting. I made a basic Snake, which only took about 3 hours to get something playable and buildable. And then, I decided to put an interesting spin on the Snake formula.
I sketched out three different ideas. In the first game idea, whenever the player’s snake overlapped itself, it would turn the remaining part of that snake into food and decrease the body’s total length (e.g. Slither.io). But that wasn’t very interesting. It didn’t affect gameplay in any meaningful way, and just set the player back a bit.
In the second game idea, whenever a snake overlapped with itself or another snake, it would split off a new snake that would be controlled by an AI. This idea was really cool, and someday I will probably return to it. But, during testing, it quickly became too complex for the time limitation I has set. In the third (and last) game idea, when the player’s snake overlapped itself, the snake would split off into two different snakes (as shown above). One snake can only rotate left and the other only rotate right. If the snake collides with itself, another snake, or a wall, then it dies, and the snake left alive returns to being able to rotate left and right again. I liked this last idea the most because it was a nice balance of easy to complete in the limited time window and made an interesting impact on gameplay.
Overview:
This game was a departure from my other big projects, which all seemed to be have the same fate. I would start with a big idea, spend a weekend building and bashing things together until I had a mechanic that worked, and then… lose interest. The project would sit on my hard drive collecting dust and would never see the light of day.
When I started the Snakes? project, I told myself that I wouldn’t let it get any bigger than it had to be. I would devote a weekend to it and nothing more. I wanted to see if I could make something worthy of an itch.io page. After 30 hours, I accomplished that goal.
Design:
The design plan was to to make something small, that could be finished over a weekend, and was still interesting. I made a basic Snake, which only took about 3 hours to get something playable and buildable. And then, I decided to put an interesting spin on the Snake formula.
I sketched out three different ideas. In the first game idea, whenever the player’s snake overlapped itself, it would turn the remaining part of that snake into food and decrease the body’s total length (e.g. Slither.io). But that wasn’t very interesting. It didn’t affect gameplay in any meaningful way, and just set the player back a bit.
In the second game idea, whenever a snake overlapped with itself or another snake, it would split off a new snake that would be controlled by an AI. This idea was really cool, and someday I will probably return to it. But, during testing, it quickly became too complex for the time limitation I has set. In the third (and last) game idea, when the player’s snake overlapped itself, the snake would split off into two different snakes (as shown above). One snake can only rotate left and the other only rotate right. If the snake collides with itself, another snake, or a wall, then it dies, and the snake left alive returns to being able to rotate left and right again. I liked this last idea the most because it was a nice balance of easy to complete in the limited time window and made an interesting impact on gameplay.