Over the last week I’ve been writing a very basic game for the Fantasy Console Game Jam over on itch.io. The theme was “Union”, and I decided to write a “snake” type game where you control two snakes, and have to join them up by reaching the goal at the same time.
The twist is that you control both snakes at the same time, with the same controls, only one is a mirror. When you press up, one snake goes up and the other goes down, and so on.
You’ll see that this is v0.99. It’s playable, but there only four levels. I realised that the task involved with coming up with levels – interesting levels, that aren’t just all one-go simple or virtually impossible – is massive. I spent as long designing two of the four levels as I did writing the entire game “engine”, so there was no way I’d manage a complete set of levels in the allowed time.
I could easily add more levels, and I’ve ideas for other things to do as well, such as different start locations, wrap-around levels, or rotated controls (so when you press up, one snake goes up but the other goes left, for example), but my aim was to create a playable concept and I’ve done that.
It’s not going to set the game jam alight, and certainly looks way less professional than the other submissions, but I think there’s something here, at least. Importantly, I’ve learned a few new techniques that might be useful for something else.
If you want to play it, it’s on itch.io:
Nice work 😀
Well, it’s very simple. It’s conceptually very different to all the other PICO-8 games I’ve written so it was useful doing something entirely new with hardly any shared code for a change.