MechaSnek by bluescrn
A 3rd-person-Snake-shooter!
(Say hello to Mechasnek!!! An arcade remix of classic snake with more added guns! Native PC build recommended for performance. And you'll need a fairly decent GPU Most of our team normally work on mobile games, so we had lots of fun doing lots of things in Unity that you just can't get away with on mobile!)
PLAY NOW (Web)
http://www.inverseblue.com/LD41/index.html

Instructions
Steer the snake with A/D or Z/X keys. Use the mouse to aim, left button to shoot. (Note that shooting will lock your current camera orientation)
Collect the power cells to restore health... but beware, they also increase the length of your snake...
Escape = Quit
Our LD41 jam team was:
Code: Dave Reed (@bluescrn) and Ben Scroggins (@ben-scroggins)
Art: Holli Packwood (@holz) and Alex Price (@lagman9000)
Audio: Dan Parkes
https://youtu.be/p75P0R5xU0k




| Windows | http://www.inverseblue.com/LD41/Mechasnek.zip |
| HTML5 (web) | http://www.inverseblue.com/LD41/index.html |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/mechasnek |
Ratings
| Overall | 26th | 4.245⭐ | 104🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 73th | 4.015⭐ | 105🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 323th | 3.655⭐ | 105🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 219th | 4.049⭐ | 104🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 13th | 4.652⭐ | 104🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 60th | 4.065⭐ | 102🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 107th | 3.95⭐ | 103🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 32🗳️ | 35🗨️ |
We also make our original. Mind to check it out: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/daxua
The gameplay was great too. It didn't give me too much to manage at once but was still challenging. Controls and the camera were great too.
Nice audio too. Maybe it lacks of something bigger ? Like more guns ;).
I find the speed of the snake is a litle bit fast, and it made me miss power cells often, but maybe that's because i never was good at snake :D.
Congratulations !
In the end I got shot down because I could neither pay much attention to the health bar at the bottom (focus was at the top towards targets/movement direction), nor did I dare to enter the nooks and crannies of the level to risk crashing for pickups (like, can my fat snek even *fit* through there?).
Still 32 is a respectable first mechasnek length.
Also locking the camera while shooting was a good choice :thumbsup_tone1: it would have been much worse without that.
Very well done, besides the amazing visuals, the music also really adds to it. Just all around great job!
Controls felt smooth, and both the graphics and sound were great, consistent and super polished.
The only bit to improve...I have to agree with the comment about the follow cam. While I was playing I didn't really notice, but now I'm feeling a bit dizzy because of the twists. Slightly related to the cam, too, it would have been cool to be able to see the enemies at all times.
Despite these two things, this is one of the best games I've seen so far, and I bet it'll remain that way.Hope you can continue working on this towards a full game.
Congrats! :clap_tone1: :clap_tone1: :clap_tone1:
All in all, great game!
Graphic and music makes a nice immersion. Maybe a camera more smooth, but i like your work
We're mostly from a mobile dev background so working on a pc title was a nice change of pace (just don't look too closely at those polygon counts) We'll probably post up something later with a breakdown of how we approached the art with a crazy lack of time and sleep.
And few cons from me: very small hitbox for health containers. Pretty boring after few minutes to shoot same enemies.
I have a lot HOPE that you will finish up this game to big one and some day I'll buy it in Steam store =)
I have to say that I'm not too sure about the other parts of the body being shootable and blocking your own shots, in a game like snake where it is the goal to become the longest you can become having something that punishes you for doing just that feels off. Though I guess that depends on how you want to approach the mix.
When first playing it was a bit difficult to grab powercells for some reason, I missed them, I'm not too sure why, maybe because there's no really clear grid displayed. But once you take the shift in perspective in mind while moving it becomes easier.
I'm not sure if this is intended, but the game remembers the buttons pressed. By pressing A and D repeatedly 10 times for instance, it'll do that action 10 times even after no longer pressing any buttons. It seems that the last action gets added to the end of the list of input actions, which probably isn't something you really want, you'll want tight and responsive controls when playing this, when making a mistake you'll want to be able to correct it immediately. It could be that this is a result of the game moving in real time and not necessarily in a manner of move-wait-move-wait like how snake usually works. It is rather nice for turning 180 degrees though, so maybe having a maximum of inputs to the list would be nice to have, or to have it based on the amount of time in between inputs.
When I played the first time I thought that some of the elements in the ground were some sort of powerup for my mechasnek, might be a cool idea? Like a boost or slow down, or different weapons even.
I would love to see this explored further with some more guns, different level layouts (Bigger levels!? Space!? Awesome!) and different enemies.
You've got a real gem here! Very cool, well done all, very impressive!
As you say the difficult of encouraging progression to the longer snek is something we need to put more thought into. We could nerf damage taken across the body and introduce perks as you progress such as mad new weapons, body turrets etc. Like the concept of having a slowdown on the enemies!
Good catch on the inputs! Probably the result of not having enough time to test in the end. Would love to build some new levels, we actually prototyped a double sized level but our frame rate just collapsed! Watch this space though! :)
Cheers again!
I've particularly appreciated the level design: I liked the fact there are some corners where we can be easily blocked (hence losing), that the style of the environment with their pipes and light pathes remind of the shape of a snake.
A few ideas to make it even better:
- pushing the idea of dead-end and obstacles in the levels: making levels more maze-like
- adding power up to momentarily shrink the length of the snake
- and most of all: using the 3rd dimension! With multi-layered levels, with bridges, some conduits and even portals. With the ability for the snake to move on top of itself to reach inaccessible areas and so on.
Very good job, thank you!
Would appreciate if you gave mine a go! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/left-for-bait
(one of your team had seen my game, for the rest of you and commentators: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/ssss)
Also, you could add a quality setting option, the game almost killed the computer I'm currently on :P
But overall it's a very good game, quite polished. Congratulation on that one.
Just a quick post for those who are interested with some of the art we worked on for our Jam Mechasnek :)

A lot of the speed modelling was completed in the first day and was intended to be as modular as possible and made without the need of high poly projections. All of the polys!

On the second day we worked up the lighting which really helped to support the visuals, we only really required a few basic textures.
Didn't have a full day in on the third day but we managed to polish with a few fx and odds n ends.
All in all quite an intense 3 days but great fun!
Hope you guys enjoy the game, I'm still not very good the maximum score that I've managed to date is 38 Mechasnek length :)
(web version) http://www.inverseblue.com/LD41/index.html
The pipes and objects on the ground were a bit confusing because I wasn't sure if I was allowed to run into them so maybe the obstacles could be outlined in some way.
When destroying the enemies I kind of wish that the coins landed on the same tile so it would be easy to predict where it lands.
Apart from those minor things this game was one of the best ones I have played so far in this Ludum Dare. Really well done! :smiley:
One thing bothers me a bit is this camera, it made me a bit dizzy.
Jokes aside, From the intro screen it was apparent to me that this would be a very polished game. Aesthetically it's pleasing and consistent, the particles complement the high contrast design. The shaders did it justice, especially the lighting. The only thing that tanked in quality was the UI which is to be expected, with submissions of this quality it's easy to forget this is a Jam game.
Gameplay-wise the game is simple but kept me involved nonetheless. Everyone knows "Snake" so few things like collecting power-ups and the grid movement are very clear from the start. What pushed it was definitely the shooting part. There's not much in terms of it and I encountered a few bugs but it's actually polished to the point where it's more than enough to keep it interesting. The camera however should see improvement. I appreciated the camera locking when the mouse button was pressed, but I still found it working against me half of the time.
There's an issue where the first enemy that explodes causes a half a second freeze, likely from loading the texture data for the particles. You can remedy this by doing it off the main render texture in a loading screen so it's preloaded once it's needed. Another issue I had was the shooting would sometimes persist even though I'm not pressing the mouse button. I made sure this wasn't due to me spazztically moving the mouse out of the game's border. Max I got was 32 before getting completely outnumbered and demolished.
Thematically it's alright. Honestly I'm clueless how to rate games properly following the theme this time around. A lot of submissions seem to be of games that don't really change in genre but on the other hand are a mashup of different games. So in that regard I'd say it's pretty well thought out.
Audio is sparse, if a bit lacking, but it's never crossing the line of being annoying. For a jam game that's a huge success in on itself.
tl;dr this is a very fleshed out submission, very polished and cohesive in what it's trying to be from start to finish.
Thanks for releasing the source code, I could learn a bunch from you guys!
I left my rating of your game, if you can leave your feedback in our game, Witch's Escape.
I hope you continue with the project.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/witchs-escape
Very cool graphics, nice music, great sound effects. The idea is really something different, full on hitting the target I must say. A snake shooter is really two in compatible mechanics and it is also really fun to play!
I think it is awesome what you did in this short amount of time. Everything looks and feels just great. You get the polish trophy in this LD!
Great job, keep up the good work :-)
Please, take a look at my game too: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/confessional
The music fits the game very well.
Very good pacing and game feel.
The camera and the controls feels a bit weird to me.
I think that is a little hard to tell which objects we can interact with(enemies, obstacles etc) and which we can't.
Great game! =)