get snekkl’d, kid

Play on LD here

or play on Itch.IO here

The idea was to make a physicsy snake clone, focusing on juicy, realistic motion. I think I half succeeded with this. I’m happy with the jaw snapping (uses muscles properly), but the travelling itself is just forces applied to the neck, when really, the tail should be helping it move (more detail below).

Planned features that didn’t make it: (I will add in the future)

• Growth. When you eat a piece, it should heal your jaws and neck, and add an extra segment onto your butt.
• Locomotion. Movement should be a product of the muscles in your tail pulling and relaxing, with the tail segments changing their damping to simulate gripping the ground. This would also have the benefit of not being negatively affected by more segments (at the moment, the less segments you have, the lighter you are, and the faster you are)
• AI. or at least some simple enemies that came at you. At the moment, the AI is totally dumb. At random intervals, it changes its left/right inputs (also randomly) to simulate a human pressing these keys. It wouldn’t have been too hard to simply make it steer towards you but I had zero time left.
• GORE. Blood should spurt out of pieces when they are ripped off. Chomping on pieces should squirt blood forwards out of your mouth, etc
• Audio. I just want some lovely bone-crack and squelch noises.

Scope creep ‘maybe’ future features:

• Segment variation. instead of just the tube segment, there should also be triangular and square segments that can connect to 2 and 3 additional segments (no longer a snake, but some kinda crazy dress). When you eat a piece, you can choose what extremity to grow a new segment on by directing a visual indicator of the ‘food’ down your body (tapping left/right/both chooses the next segment to go down)
• Special segments. Extra jaws? Stabby things? Hardened exoskeleton bits?  Acid spewers?
• Ranged attack. There is no reason to tap L+R together rapidly, so this could gradually build up an acid gob inside your jaw, and then shoot it out next time you yawn wide enough and bite.
• Other creatures. Simply adjusting the positions of the muscles, and shapes of the segments creates a pretty different feeling creature each time. It’d be awesome to put a bunch of different types into one game, and turn this into something like flOw

Some awesome games that I was thinking about when I made this: flOw, Rainworld, Swim bots, Captain forever

thanks for reading/playing/voting.

@keepeetron

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