25th March 2018

With each release comes an influx of feedback from the many people who've played the games.

This week, @RSKGames takes a look at an underwater Snake clone.

You can Download Slithering Waters here.

@RSKGames

The title font design with the wavy pattern is nicely done.

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A simple case of plain text, then oodles of distortion filters until it looked a bit wavey! Reduce the alpha and layer it over the original text, to produce a nice watery looking effect.

I just found that apart from the current game there are some 7 games that are snake related in AGAW collection of games. Slithering waters is a very good addition to that collection.

There's probably more than that. Snake's a very easy game to remake

GamePlay:
A lighting fast and short game that tests the players reflex and focus. If you take eyes of the snake to look at the powerups or the enemies, surely it will end in the game over screen.

Remembering that this was originally created to be a "After Roland eats the biscuit" crazy psychedelia sort of thing, I originally planned to have it be EVEN FASTER!!
But that plan didn't fit with the slower pace of the biscuit game, so instead it got recreated here.
Even so, the speed was still reduced quite a bit to make it slightly more playable!

The controls are very smooth.

Yeah...
They're as smooth as I could make them, but the speed of the game causes them to be slightly less controllable than I'd like.
Additionally, if you're getting a low framerate, they're significantly worse!!

The difficulty settings are well balanced. I was trying to avoid the creation of the walls and wait for the powerups to appear but it was difficult to execute this plan when the snake goes out of the screen and comes back in the opposite direction.

Note how the pinball-bumper things won't spawn a block. Only the regular yellow pickups will do that. I decided that Hard mode should avoid all bumpers to keep things more difficult.
As such, it can indeed get a little crazy.
.. But that's what Hard mode's for, right

Liked the skeleton style look of the snake.
The snake movement and animation is very well done.

Really simply done, just a trail, like the one from the Space shooter the other week, except drawing the sprite at points instead of drawing lines.
It really ended up looking rather nice, but it can get glitchy with lower framerates, as the parts of the snake don't quite meet up correctly.

The water waves effects in the menu and in the game background looks cool, a neat trick without using complex shaders?.

Insanely simplistic. Just the included rippleb.png being drawn at different offsets and rotations. No shaders required.
.. Which reminds me.. I should really look into shaders, some time.

Liked the enemies and bomb sprites.

The bomb sprite is unusual for me. I typically draw either a round black circular bomb, or a red tube TNT bomb. This is a weird blue thing that has no real logic in the world, whatsoever!!
I just felt that it stood out, and was easier to notice amongst the chaos that was going on.
Round black cartoon bombs looked a bit too much like the moving enemies, and red TNT looked too much like the Bumpers.
I had to improvise!!

Music: Each game play got over so fast that I couldn't listen to the music fully. But whatever I heard was fast paced matching the pace of the game.

D'oh, I forgot to link to the music from the game's page, again. *fixed*
Analysing Wombats was only just created a couple of weeks ago, but the Choon's fast pace made it ideal for this.

Overall a very good fast paced game with an interesting twist to the snake game.

Yeah, I'm happy that I've now finally made a "good" Snake clone. Previous Snake clones have been lackluster and coded with hours to spare. This time I took a little more time, and I'm happy with the result.

You can Download Slithering Waters here.

Views 335, Upvotes 30

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