Rail Snake by AuthorX

[raw]
made by AuthorX for LD33 (JAM)
Unfinished prototype for Ludum Dare 33. Inspired by the book Railsea, which I was listening to on audiobook for the week before LD33, The Beast from esteemed gaslamp fantasy webcomic Girl Genius, and obviously classic computer game Snake.

Originally the plan was to eat other trains to grow, while switching rails to avoid collisions. You can switch rails by clicking the circles. At the moment, trains will not interact but the snake will grow automatically every 10 seconds, as well as increase speed up to a maximum (there is no maximum to the number of snake segments, so don't leave it running if you don't want it to keep slowly eating memory).

The rails are randomly generated each time, so refresh or close and reopen to see a different configuration. Another plan was to set them along bezier curves, which I was able to do, but normalizing the speed along the curves would have been a whole other mathematical adventure and the cars were too erratic without it, so I went back to straight lines while I tried to get the rest of the features in.

I will probably not finish this, as I've decided that even if I got all features in, it would require a lot more work to balance the rail generation and collision chance to a playable state, and may not be particularly fun even then.

Ratings

Coolness 28% 1981
Overall(Jam) 1.94 1128

Feedback

Jamie Guillemette
25. Aug 2015 · 03:07 UTC
points for what looks like the start of an original idea.
LandoSystems
25. Aug 2015 · 03:09 UTC
Nice attempt, I think I see where it was going. It's a shame it wasn't able to be finished.
aberdeenphoenix
25. Aug 2015 · 14:27 UTC
Interesting idea.
liquidmedia
27. Aug 2015 · 06:02 UTC
The web version runs on the first try, that is more then some got done,

The more you do the easier and faster it becomes to get what you want done.
Grahhhhh
28. Aug 2015 · 03:29 UTC
It gets crazy fast, wish you could've made it further on this, would've liked to have tried the finished product.
Xanjos
02. Sep 2015 · 21:28 UTC
It's a shame you didn't manage to finish this on time and probably never will in the future because that idea seems to have a lot of potential.
peterthehe
12. Sep 2015 · 10:54 UTC
Could make an awesome mobile game! Nice work!