Devlog

Devlog and post-mortem for my game: Neon Snake
Created for Mini Jam 111: Colors

Hey guys, I'm back at it again with yet another game jam this month. This will be a shorter one than usual as I took up a much more laidback approach to this jam. I will just be going into detail about the ideation stage, where I had the most trouble in.

When the limitation was first announced, "You are your own enemy", I was once again stumped. I decided to look around in the discord server for any general suggestions, and eventually I arrived on the idea of snake. 

First Attempt:
I wanted to implement the theme "Colors" in as well, so I came up with a rough idea to use it as a mechanic. I made a timer that switches the current active color and when you collect a pellet, your body part will inherit the current color. The gimmick was that in the active color, you will be able to pass through the body parts with that color as well. After I made a prototype, this idea just did not really work, as you need a long body first before it will matter. That means that players will be spending a large part of the playtime just playing normal snake, which is not good enough.

Second Attempt
My 2nd idea was to have a dynamic camera. Whenever the snake eats a pellet, the camera will shift such that the snake will once again be centralized. With this, players will not be as limited in terms of space as the normal snake, which allows for a smaller play area while still being able to rack up a long snake. I also decided to add a few decoy food as well to spice things up. However, in the end, I could not really get the camera to shift properly, and also it faced the same problem as the first attempt where the camera gimmick does not really come into play until later.

Final Attempt
Finally, I decided to ditch the whole dynamic camera gimmick but kept the decoy foods. To incorporate the theme as well, I decided to color each food differently and added a giant UI text at the background to tell the players which food pellet is the actual one. The game still did not feel engaging enough though due to its simplicity, so I decided to play with colors and text to ramp up the difficulty. Before long, I had the final game idea formalized and completed.
Fun Fact: in the final version, the first 4 pellets are always in the right color and text and will always be the 4 different colors to allow users to learn about the mechanics and colors first before starting the mix-up.

Post-mortem
Even though I took a more relaxed approach to this game jam, I still had a ton of fun participating. To be honest, there were times that I felt like giving up, especially during the constant ideation and realizing that it will not work. However, I persisted and am glad that I did. This was also the first time I worked with post-processing and lighting in Unity, so it was a great learning experience for me as well. All in all, I had great fun in this game jam and wish to thank the organizers ZahranW and kingW for hosting it!