Snake Strike by steve
Snake breaks shiny things! A tale of love, loss and shiny things!
__ Controls __
Best played with a 360 controller, but keyboard works fine.
Left stick/WASD/Arrows to move.
A button/Space/Enter to attack.
F11 to toggle fullscreen (borderless)
__ Notes __
The audio is a little quiet, there isn't much sound but you might need to turn your volume up to hear it; if there's no sound whatsoever and you're on an older verison of windows then it's possible you don't have a recent version of xaudio2, if that's the case I've added a win7 version of the game to the zip file which should hopefully solve the issue.
The game may be a little dark, if you start the game and don't see anything, try moving right.
I dithered on the theme, changed my mind a thousand times, and panicked at the end when I realised what I was doing was going to take too long and changed direction with two hours to go! Nevertheless I somehow managed to finish, so hopefully someone will enjoy this mess :)
__ Short Postmortem / Explanation __
I wanted this game to be more than it is, however time pressure got to me this compo and sadly I didn't have time to implement any gameplay from my original plans outside of the main characters control method.
In the last few hours before the submission deadline I decided that it was time to cut my losses and work what I had into some kind of game, which is why there's something of a dissonance between the visual/audio styling and the gameplay.
My rescue plan was to turn the game into a small playground for the monster, but I'd made the call to switch a little too late and even making those simple changes really pushed the time I had available.
Overall though I'm fairly happy with the final thing, it's incomplete and a bit of a mishmash but I was tackling something outside my normal comfort zone, so I feel this was a good failure to learn from :)
__ Controls __
Best played with a 360 controller, but keyboard works fine.
Left stick/WASD/Arrows to move.
A button/Space/Enter to attack.
F11 to toggle fullscreen (borderless)
__ Notes __
The audio is a little quiet, there isn't much sound but you might need to turn your volume up to hear it; if there's no sound whatsoever and you're on an older verison of windows then it's possible you don't have a recent version of xaudio2, if that's the case I've added a win7 version of the game to the zip file which should hopefully solve the issue.
The game may be a little dark, if you start the game and don't see anything, try moving right.
I dithered on the theme, changed my mind a thousand times, and panicked at the end when I realised what I was doing was going to take too long and changed direction with two hours to go! Nevertheless I somehow managed to finish, so hopefully someone will enjoy this mess :)
__ Short Postmortem / Explanation __
I wanted this game to be more than it is, however time pressure got to me this compo and sadly I didn't have time to implement any gameplay from my original plans outside of the main characters control method.
In the last few hours before the submission deadline I decided that it was time to cut my losses and work what I had into some kind of game, which is why there's something of a dissonance between the visual/audio styling and the gameplay.
My rescue plan was to turn the game into a small playground for the monster, but I'd made the call to switch a little too late and even making those simple changes really pushed the time I had available.
Overall though I'm fairly happy with the final thing, it's incomplete and a bit of a mishmash but I was tackling something outside my normal comfort zone, so I feel this was a good failure to learn from :)
Ratings
| Coolness | 100% | 1 |
| Overall | 3.33 | 299 |
| Audio | 2.74 | 455 |
| Fun | 2.68 | 700 |
| Graphics | 4.51 | 16 |
| Humor | 2.05 | 733 |
| Innovation | 2.87 | 548 |
| Mood | 3.81 | 66 |
| Theme | 3.14 | 626 |
Personaly pick.
And - that's some crazy graphics! I really like the visuals.
Great graphics and design man!
Gameplay was a little dull, there didn't seem to be any way to fail so there was little in the way of a challenge.
I know you designed with controller in mind, but perhaps you should consider using the mouse to guide the movement instead of the arrow keys and then click to attack. I feel like that would give a smoother experience and would fit better with the winding, serpentine animations since the arrow keys make the movements kind of jerky.
As for gameplay, the controls feel smooth and polished, so it is a pity that the game, due to the woes of development (we've all been here some time T_T), lacks a proper challenge because it certainly deserves one.
It would be really cool if you tried to make some good use of this post-jam, because it seriously was promising something amazing. Have you got any plans about it?
Congratulations!
In terms of the gameplay, I really ran out of time on this one, I had other plans (possibly obvious because of the visual style not really fitting with the kind of game that I ultimately made), so in the last couple of hours of the compo I did a complete 180 on my design and just threw in the gameplay you see as quickly as possible so I'd have something to submit.
I felt that the control method ended up being somewhat interesting in itself and built a playground around it for people to mess about in, which is the explanation behind why the funky spikey things exist :)
The theme connection was originally going to be you playing a monster in a sort of urban encroachment situation, however after my 180 the only call out to monstrousness is the main character being somewhat out of the ordinary and a little monstrous itself :)
Thanks for playing!
Anyway, snakey just wanted looooove i guess. haha
Second, I opened up my volume mixer to make sure; it's not that the sound is quiet, there is no audio coming out of the game.
For the great majority of the game, I assumed my goal was to destroy all the things. This led me in the direction of RSI, and was generally frustrating. Once I realized I could ignore the round things the game got a little better, though it only lasted a few seconds past that. It would have been MUCH more satisfying to be able to smash through the round things just by running into them, without mashing the action button. Working sound would have also made the experience several times more satisfying.
- CH