Snake - The Concepting
4 mins
The First Task
Yesterday in my Practical I received my first project, to make the game Snake. The brief had some simple tasks I must meet to pass (such as a player controlled snake, scoring/progression and some menus) but the rest was up to me. I thought it could incorporate what we were doing in Play and Games with this so I began breaking down the game.
The Break Down
I started by dividing the game ‘themes’ into two groups; the appeal and the negatives. By doing this it allowed me to strip the game down to it bare bones and allowed me to understand in more depth what the game was about and why it is so well known. I came to the conclusion that the game provides a few cues of progression such as the snake growing along with a score. The score also doubled up by providing replay ability and a competitive edge giving reason to play it more than once. There was a sense of risk reward taking place which gave some tension at certain parts of the game. I then asked myself what is wrong with this game. What draws away from it being better? I came to two conclusions; repetition and the slow pace early on.
Ideas?
I began to think of methods to address these issues without losing the core mechanic of the game. I wrote a list of possible avenues I could explore while looking up variations of snake itself. I produced a range of ideas which varied from possible to damn right silly. The ideas I mainly developed were designed to be as simple as possible while providing a very limited chance of randomness. I started incredibility simple, teleporting holes (two points on the map where the snake could enter and reappear elsewhere). This fixed the pacing of the game being slow at the beginning in theory but did very little in sense of actually improving the game, it just poorly address the issue. I then began thinking about the ‘apples’ and how they could be used to make the game more entertaining. The strength in snake exists at the later stages of the game where the player is actively having to pre-plan their actions to avoid eating themselves. How could I bring this to the earlier stages of the game? The conclusion I came to was a form of multiplier for the points earlier in the game, the less changes of directions or the speed the player got the ‘apples’ would increase their score. I thought this provided more reasons for the player to think about their actions earlier in the game (much like later on in regards to not eating themselves) but would the more casual gamer notice it? Would they care? If the answer was ‘no’ to either of these then it wouldn’t have an impact. I put this idea on hold, it would be effective but not by itself as a feature. I conjured up serval other ideas, some were way too large and would just change the fundamentals of the game, others seemed too finicky to implement effectively with the resources and time I had. I thought about the multiplier again, could I do something similar to this but in a different way? I began to think, what could be a negative for the player if they didn’t get the apple within a certain time/movements? What could incentive them into taking more risks? I came to a possible solution, map changes. The more time or actions the player has to take the more the map will change, more obstacles will block their path. Wouldn’t the map become a maze though by the end? I thought this could be an issue, there is a limit how many times obstacles can be placed in an area. But couldn’t this double up as providing a more difficult mode? This is a question I feel I cannot answer at this period of time. Only play testing could tell. I went back to thinking how I could remove the obstacles. I felt the logical decision would be when the ‘apple’ was gathered. This allowed the player to know how to remove them with ease and made it easier to understand. I felt I was onto something with these two ideas (the obstacles appearing over time and the scoring multiplier). It kept the core principle of the game, the ideas were simple but should have a major impact on the actual gameplay.
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