I have long wanted to start creating a game on my own that could be fun, expansive, polished, beautiful world, full with 3d assets that I had crafted for a world with an enchanting story captivating those from all over. For now, I am going to just start out with new take on the classic game of snake.

I was working on Sole at the Gossamer Games office, when the director, Tom, came into work showing off his progress on his brand new VR title ScatterShot. He explained to me that he started working on the title after attending a meeting at the Philly Game Mechanics where they had officially kicked off something called the Profit Jam. This is a 2 month long game jam, in which you have a month to create a game, and a month to sell your game, the person who makes the most money at the end wins the jam. Looking at the incredible work he had gotten done in just a couple days was making me want to work on my own project more so than I ever had before.

It was at this moment that I had decided that I was going to start working on a game that I thought I could accomplish a polished, functional, fun game by the end of October. Because Tom was reworking the classic Breakout, I too thought it would be interesting to revolutionize a classic, retro game. Being a huge fan of snake and Pac-Man Championchip Edition DX, I thought that the marriage of those two games could craft something really fun and interesting.

It was at this point I realized I have no art skills. Thankfully, I am dating an incredible artist, Kelly, who I was able to convince to join me on this endeavor.

Thus the development has began, I have not gotten much time to work on the game, as class, Sr. project, work, friends and family come first, however, I plan to try and keep to my timeline as much as possible. I have had a few hours of development, and I have a little bit to show for it here. I have not gotten to anything too complex, however, I bought rewired and have successfully configured the package so that I can play with a keyboard or any controller I can find. I then set up some classes for the body parts of the snake, namely the head, middle and tail pieces. I found that treating the snake as a linked list of “Body Parts” would be the most efficient, that way I can simply tell one body part that instead of being in front of a tail, it is in front of a body section and the snake will grow dynamically in size whenever it needs to grow. This also means that regardless of the body piece, I can call the Move function and know that it will move properly with rotations accounted for.

The player controller simply changes direction to the head of the snake and upon each Tick it will move in the given direction. The body parts following the head move after the head has moved and they rotate based on the body part in front of it’s current direction.

Progress after second day of development on my snake game.

So, as you can clearly tell, I am pretty much done working on this game. JK. I have lots more to do and not much time left, I will keep working on it whenever I can and would love to keep a log of my progress as well. At this point, Kelly has made some concept art, however, she said they are just sketches and not ready for public viewing yet. We will see if I can’t get some of her artwork in the next devlog.

Thanks for reading, let me know if you would like to see anything specific to come out of these posts.

PS: Thank you whoever made this snake sprite sheet that I am using until I get my own art! Here is the link to the spritesheet.