Taken in by nostalgia, this redesigned game takes the classic ‘Snake’ into the dark. The project is a challenge to recreate the classic whilst adding my own touch by adding characters, altering graphics, and other accessories.
A classigc with a twist - Snake... in the DARK!
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My roles as a UX Designer in this project required me to take the role of researching and analysing related projects; experiment on coding features and iterating the graphics for better usability; and conceptualising and developing a rebranding of the game.
Project —
Additions
1_ Food Dot + Spike Dot
Though the classic ‘snake’ eats everything, to make it more interesting, the feature of ‘spikes’ are added. The snake must avoid these ‘spikes’, if not it loses points and shrinks in length. It was quite a challenge to set its characteristic/ability to appear and reappear randomly on the screen. A new class was made to help organise this collision based reaction. The final version still has the flaw of the ‘food’ and ‘spike’ randomly popping up close to each other in proximity. This results in the players having to lose a point in order to continue before the timer ends.
2_ The New Snake Shape
Unlike the classic, pixel-based, snake movement, in this game the snake is given a new, fresh and fluid movement. No longer controlled by keys, the snake now follows and bends according to the movement of the cursor. This characteristic is possible by implementing Keith Peter’s ‘Follow 2’ code that is based on inverse kinematics.
3_ Expanding Ellipses
Since it is ‘snake in the dark’, the game required a light source to spot the right spots to move. The light is visualised as the colourful ellipses that spread from the front of the snake once the spacebar is pressed. A thinner set of rings alike are also added to suggest that the snake has caught food orhave collided with the spike - at first these rings only varied in colour, but to exaggerate the loss/pain of the spike, the red ring is scaled up.
