Snakey, snakey, snake, snake.
Community Forums/Showcase/Snakey, snakey, snake, snake.
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| OK, I've completely lost my mojo and haven't done any programming in a few months. :( Anyway, I was working on an idea *based* on a 3D version of a snake game. Due to my lack of motivation, I can't seem to get past my initial idea and develop it into a full game. So, any ideas about how to take this thing forward? Here's the simple demo code I've got so far: http://big10p.mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/electrosnake.zip The game ideas I've had so far: - The snake is liquid metal and has to make contact with the points in order to make *something* happen. - Have the snake roam around on something like a sheet of bubble wrap. All bubbles have to be popped in order to progress. - Er, I dunno. I'm stuck :( I'm pretty sure there's a good/original game in there somewhere, I'm just feeling a bit burnt out so am unable to focus on what that might be. Suggestions anyone, to motivate me back into coding? Oh yeah, controls: Left/right cursor keys - Turn left/right Up/down Cursor keys - Move 'bulge' up/down snake body SPACE - Press repeatedly to speed up R - Change camera N - Hold to view normals in non-chase cam mode. BACKSPACE - toggle wireframe S - Stop snake G - Grow snake P.S. Sphere map texture is by Pongo. Oh, and here's a screenie, not that it's very impressive (please ignore the FPS - it generally runs a lot fater than that).  |
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| Error: ".BCA ArchiveFile not Found!"... |
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| That's odd. I just downloaded myself to test, and it seems to run fine. Anyone else having probs? |
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| I just downloaded myself to test HAH!Runs fine here... camera controls feel a bit weird, and perhaps you should do something about the draw distance before anything else. Need a boundary that the camera and objects can't travel beyond which is smaller than the camera's range... perhaps some fog could make it look a bit more tidy, too. |
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| Same as degac. EDIT: dont run it from firefoxes download manager, go to the actual folder and run it |
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| ..working fine here.. |
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| OK, I've just uploaded a new exe. Any better? Mr P: This is just very basic test code to try and see if there's a game in there worth developing. Thanks for input, though. :) |
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| Error: ".BCA ArchiveFile not Found!"... |
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| Same as degac and Regular K |
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| confirm. Run from Download folder and not from the Firefox basket... |
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| OK, I've changed the download to a plain old zip. See original post. |
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| Oooh, this could be changed into a grow your own sausage game. |
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| Generally you should have an idea for a game before you try and code one ;) However, how about you ramp up the difficulty level and write a Mercury clone? |
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| Generally you should have an idea for a game before you try and code one ;) True, that's why I haven't started writing the game yet. :) This is just some test/feasibility code I did to see if I could do a 3D snake. I was originally just going to do a 3D version of that other snake game I started, but I decided I want to do something a little more original. However, how about you ramp up the difficulty level and write a Mercury clone? Yikes! I've never played the game but looking at the screenies I'm guessing there's some pretty hefty physics involved. Anyway, I prefer the dynamic of controlling a snake-like thing, rather than just a blob of mercury. :) |
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| Oooh, this could be changed into a grow your own sausage game. Frighteningly, that is actually a pretty good idea.Do it! :P |
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| I'm not doing a sausage sim just to keep Puki amused! :) |
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| Right, now the plan is - you start of with a small sausage and then the more you play with it, the bigger it gets. We need a good way of how to make it get bigger. Could have it were you have to steer/guide your sausage between 2 mounds - sort of slalom - also some tunnel sections where you have to get your sausage in the hole. Yeh, perhaps with both of the above - you guide your sausage in/through, then pull it back out again at a crucial point which causes the sausage to stretch - ie, the sausage grows. Yeh, we are onto a winner here. |
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| forget it puki.... noone can out-Warpy Warpy for weird games. |
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| Hmm, I can see a Mario game like that where that green pipe keeps getting longer and longer, and a warp into the pipe would be game over, better not give Miyamoto ideas again, sorry... |
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| someone called? I was looking at this thread before, and I thought it'd be good as a snake-in-reverse game - eat the fruit to make your ever-growing snake (well, mine is, don't know about yours) shrink, with the goal being to shrink it down to nothing. RE sausages: obviously, the way to grow a sausage is to stuff pork in one end. This pressure will straighten out the sausage, so you'll want to stop doing it when you need to do some tight manoeuvring. |
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| and blackjumper - are you my stalker? you live really alarmingly close to me :S |
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| [sinister]mwah hah hah ha ![/sinister] @big10p: reflective gold snake looks good. Hope you find a concept to hang it on |
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| How about a little terminator 2? Do something to keep the blobs of metal solid(turn a valve, use a frostbeam coming out the front of your snake?) and collect them before they coalesce into an enemy that comes after you and chops you up? (lots of heat effects - bursts of flame in the background - hellish laughter? The odd demon jumping about?) |
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| yeah the snake looks cool. So how about a snake obstacle course and you need to eat different food for different effects, kinda Alice in Wonderland style. So some food shrinks you to get you through small holes, other makes you go faster so you can make jumps, some slows you down for tricky negotiation etc? |
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| Some interesting ideas. Keep 'em coming. :) I actually want to move away from the traditional 'eat fruit to grow' concept, and develop something original, if possible. The half-arsed idea I have at the moment is to have the game take place in a kind of Tron style circuit board environment, populated with various electronic components that are activated by controlling the electrified snake so that it connects all the contact points connected to the component. Doing so would activate the component, such as a door, or whatever. However, some components would have many contacts, spaced apart meaning that you'd have to grow your snake (somehow?) to make it long enough to make contact with all points. I have a couple of problems with this idea, though: - It could get frustrating. e.g. discovering that the snake isn't quite long enough to make all contacts meaning the player has to go back and try all over again. - It makes it more of a kind of puzzle game. I really wanted to go for 'pick up and play', fast paced arcade style gameplay. |
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| What about making the areas of you collect... er, whatever you collect, unpassable when the snake has moved off them. That way, you need to plan more which areas your snake goes to. The only way to keep the area from becoming un-passable, is to keep the snake somewhere on that area. It would probably be better making larger slabs though, in stead of tiny squares being unpassable. |
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| The effects are superb. Way cool snake. But for prospective pickup and play arcade action I much prefered your 2D retro demo. Unless its a racing game of sorts or explore/puzzle solving I dont find 3D stuff is anywhere as much fun as 2D for pickup and play. |
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| Interesting idea, Ross. I think it would make the game too puzzly for my liking. I think I wan't to go with something more 'twitchy' - I'm even considering having the snake able to shoot globs of molten metal, or something. Meh, I dunno. I really can't get motivated about this, really. :/ Geehawk: I haven't ruled out having the game played with a top-down view, effectively making it 2D. We'll see. |
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| I guess you could go with the `eat something and you grow in length by the number of the thing you ate` angle. |
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| but he said he didn't want to do the standard eat stuff and grow thing. |
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| Snake: Ouroboros edition! Whoops. You've started eating your own tail. But! Turn this to your advantage: use your new circular shape to roll and bounce down the cliffside, to the Adorable Rodent Colony below. Eat more of yourself to become smaller, making you more rigid and able to fit in smaller gaps. Regurgitate some of yourself to absorb bumps better and roll quicker. Entirely throw yourself up so your mouth is free to grab on to hanging vines or whatever, when the need arises. (this is the very opposite of eat-and-grow: throw-up-and-grow. Just thought I'd point that out.) |
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| This looks wonderfull! I love the metal it's very well done. I like the spitting idea very much, maybe you could have AI opponents that eat small mice blobs. Each level would hazve more mice blobs(Blobs with mouse ears maybe) and you compete to eat the most. Perhaps you could use your body like in Tron to block your opponents. It migt be fun to make the plain have random terrain like low polygon hills and such. Just some ideas.... |
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| Warpy: if anyone else had posted that suggestion, I'd know they were taking the piss. As it's you, I guess you're being serious. :) Ryan: the cool metal look is mostly down to Pongo's excellent sphere map texture. Making the snake metal was just an experiment, really. I already have the code in to allow the snake to go up/down slopes so having some kind of hilly terrain is a possibility - just not sure it adds much to the game. Anyway, still really struggling with interest/motivation so it's looking likely that nothing will come of this. :( Oh well. Thanks anyway. |
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| gadzooks, I've got it! Snake inhabits a hilly terrain, which has many tunnels in it. Travel through some tunnels, then start eating your tail, squeezing the hills until they pop, releasing thousands of juicy animals. Get bonuses for making complicated knots (a bit of knot theory should make recognising these easy). Sort of puzzlish, but if new hills keep popping up and the pace is fast enough, nobody should notice. |
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| This game reminds me of something I played on the Intellivision Lives compilation for my Xbox. Not too sure if this was based on that game... |
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| gadzooks, I've got it! Snake inhabits a hilly terrain, which has many tunnels in it. Travel through some tunnels, then start eating your tail, squeezing the hills until they pop, releasing thousands of juicy animals. Get bonuses for making complicated knots (a bit of knot theory should make recognising these easy). Sort of puzzlish, but if new hills keep popping up and the pace is fast enough, nobody should notice. After reading this yesterday, I actually had a dream about it last night! I remember playing some weird game where I was collecting 'juicy animals' that burst when collected. :/ I love your 'out of the box' thinking, Warpy, but I think it's a bit too much for my feable brain to handle. :PRAM: Never played an Intellivision game, but there's a version of Snake on pretty much every platform. :) |
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| One thing's for sure, this game looks like Xbox Live Arcade material. |
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| I wish! |
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| Here’s an idea I had: What if the entire arena were coated, at first, in metal? As the snake travels through the liquid metal it grows constantly. (There could be different colors that make the snake grow at different rates.) The player must pilot the snake from a start point to an end point without crashing. This could be made harder by obstacles. (For example something that the snake must loop around x times or a 'spike' that raises and lowers that splits your snake it two if you pass over it while raised.) Some could be more puzzle oriented than others so you could really dictate the pace of the game. |
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| How about a "painter" type game where you have to coat the arena in metal all over to complete the level. Or leave a trail to connect some electric points... |
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| "Right, now the plan is - you start of with a small sausage and then the more you play with it, the bigger it gets." LOL. I can see where this is going :) |
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| OK, ta for all suggestions, but snakey's going into hibernation until my enthusiasm/motivation comes back from holiday. :/ Hmm, maybe I should just melt him down and make an ashtray. :P |
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| Shame, cause it looks cool :o) |
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| Big10P Your unfinished-Snake-game count just went up again :-) |
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| Another one bites the dust... |
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| Your unfinished-Snake-game count just went up again :-) I'm going for the hatrick! :PI haven't binned this for good. I definately want to do something with the code I have so far. I put some effort into optimizing it to run fast enough so to just chuck it would be a waste. |
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| "early optimisation is the blah blah blah, etc." |
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| Well, it wasn't optimization just for the sake of it. Without it, it was unusably slow. The snake mesh is completely re-built every frame, including setting normals correctly, etc. UpdateNormals is WAY too slow. |
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