You ever think of a title first and work backwards?
Breakout + Snake. Bounce around, eat apples, don't hit your tail, or if you do ... dodge.
Sounds are from Gruber's rad SFX pack. I have a little bit more planned, but happy to have any feedback in the meantime.
What a brilliant idea. It seems that the snake falls off the side too easily, but it's not bad.
How come my length keeps shortening? I can't see what's causing that to happen.
I can confidently say I have no idea what makes the snake lose segments!
I never got above 8. Multiple times, I had this happen:
- At 7/8, snake bounces off paddle, goes up, collects apple. Now I'm at 8/8.
- Snake hits top wall and bounces off, then immediately loses 3 segments. I'm at 5/8 before the snake ever gets to the paddle again.
But at 5/8, the snake seemed to be able to hit the top wall and bounce off without losing anything. Does the top wall become a danger zone once you hit a certain number of segments?
okay, yep, that's what I was afraid of, thank you. 😂
the problem I was trying to solve is that I want the snake to lose segments when its head collides with them -- but that happens all the time after a bounce.
right now I'm trying out a grace period (currently a quarter second) after bouncing where it doesn't check for head-segment collisions. in practice, that means that segment-eating only happens when the snake is longer than how many segments it collides with during the grace period ... usually five or six, depending on how fast you're going.
but as you both noticed, that logic is totally invisible to the player, so I think I need to try something else. what I really want is to bite segments off only when you hit them from the side but I'm not sure how to express that in code. maybe if you hit segment n without hitting segment n-1 first?
or I could go a totally different direction and say the snake gets hungry if it hasn't eaten an apple in a while, and only bites segments off while it's hungry. more different from original snake, and maybe unnecessarily complicated, but it's a fallback.
either way it definitely needs a clearer indicator of what's happening.
really appreciate the feedback! I will keep iterating.
Yeah, now that makes sense. I think a lot of times it happened to me, the snake was going almost precisely straight up and down, so the head would have hit multiple segments on the way back down.
This feels like a tricky problem to solve, or at least one where a good solution didn't pop into my head quickly. Definitely be curious to see what you come up with!
right, exactly.
I just uploaded a new version with an attempt at "bounce forgiveness" -- it tracks the most recent segment it hit, and as long as you're not skipping ahead then nothing happens (so you can hit segment 2, 3, 4, and that's fine, but if you suddenly hit 10 you'll chomp your tail). it's still not perfect -- when you're bouncing at a very sharp angle, sometimes you'll leave the collision range for 10 briefly before entering the collision range for 11 -- but I think it's an improvement.
to make up for how much easier it is to continue that way, I also picked up the pace a little (you start with more segments, get two per apple instead of one, and speed up slightly faster when you eat).
if you have time to check it out, let me know what you think!
This feels much better to play! Growing the snake quicker was a good choice I think, it gets you into the heart of the gameplay a lot faster, which to me is having to plan your shots to avoid bad angles that shrink you. I got up to 26 segments at one point and then mishit the head and ended up chomping off 12, but it felt fair because that was 100% a skill issue on my part and didn't seem like I was at the mercy of the game.
I love the new update. Much easier to keep getting longer.
I think the failure state could be better conveyed to the player if the losses were a bit more "juicy". If the lost parts didn't just disappear but if the "bite" were indicated by a flash and the lost parts stayed on the screen and fell down, perhaps cascading from the one eaten and moving to the tail. Something to convey to the player that they just did something bad and here's the consequence of it.
Looking good so far.
added a bunch of particle effects including falling segments, and made the paddle shrink when you lose some of your tail, which I think helps a lot with making the difficulty more interesting and variable. (I have one other idea for that too, we'll see whether I want to procrastinate more on pickups or on sound, which are the only things left in my to-do list)
thank you! that's really helpful to hear.
I added a couple of pickups -- speed in particular both gets higher and varies more. love to hear how the pressure and difficulty feel now.
(also the paddle is now curved, which has always been how it behaved, and hopefully this will help make that intuitive)
I like the idea of starting from the title and will follow suit. Let’s check the last page of published pico-8 and mix two simple titles/concept…
Edit :
My next game will be
Tic Tac Toe Invaders !
I have no clue what it will become.
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