Snake Run

A fast-paced survival shmup where light is your ally, bananas are your lifeline, and snakes are always watching.

Controls

Arrow Keys: Move character
🅾️ (Z): Fire bullets
❎ (X): Drop bombs

Rules

Head into the grass to collect bananas and increase your ammo. The riper they are, the more ammo you get. Watch out for the rotten ones though!
The more ammo you have, the clearer the map becomes... but you might not be able to hang onto it for long when the snakes emerge.
Bombs illuminate the darkened areas of the map for a short time.
You can clear the grass by walking through it or using your bullets and bombs.
Grassy areas that have been cleared grow back over time.
Different snakes have different personalities and behaviours, but in general, they prefer being in the grass or near their favourite bananas until you're nearby.
Lost a life? Search for a heart. Beware of the red snakes... they're quick.
The longer you play, the more snakes you will encounter.
The snakes become more aggressive over time.
Survive as long as possible!

Behind the Scenes

This is my first game. I wanted to explore working within the constraints of PICO-8 as a forcing mechanism to actually complete something but didn't really have a well-formed idea to start.

I had big ambitions in the beginning... Trying to build an isometric platformer; and quickly realised this would be a bit too challenging for the time I had available. Eventually, I settled on the challenge of trying to have an 8-direction movement system for the player in an open world. The snakes came later. The bulk of this was completed during a week of summer vacation in 2025.

As much as this was primarily a learning exercise and still has some rough edges, I believe Snake Run is in a playable state (and quite fun as is), which is why I'm releasing it in the hope others will enjoy it too!

There are certainly things I would like to optimise and extend, particularly around the mechanics for:

the environment
- a more granular tiling grid and finer growth transitions for the grass
- a bigger map
weapons
- adding some form of power-up, for example
snakes
- a more nuanced snake AI and better collision handling when crowding occurs
- creating the NE, NW, SE, SW sprites so they look as good as the player when moving around in all directions
music
- a full-on high-intensity drum and bass soundtrack
effects
- better transitions & lighting
- right now there is a very basic foreground effect, which I'd like to improve to give a better sense of depth
- unified camera & collision controls - this is still messier than I'd like
- perhaps evolve this into more of a first-person shooter
- maybe add some mini-games at certain checkpoints in time to break the tension

The cart already uses pretty much all of the available tokens, so some heavy refactoring would be needed before work on a future update could begin.

All feedback is greatly appreciated! I'd be open to collaboration if anyone would like to work with me on creating future iterations of this game.

Credits

8-directional-gameboy-character-template – The main character is a lightly modified version of this, which was a great help in building momentum from the start.
paulds – Everything else, with some heavy Googling & patience.

Changelog

1.0.0: Initial release
1.0.1: Attempt to fix audio issues with mobile web viewer not experienced on laptop.
1.0.1: Audio fix attempt 2. Not sure what the issue is. When running PICO-8 locally I don't experience the clipping. The music will all be replaced in a future version.
1.0.2: Modified hash function to get cart working with fake-08 as well.
1.0.3: Various optimizations to reduce CPU & memory utilisation.

action shmup survival snakes shooting running