Fight through the leagues and unlock modes and heroes as you face off against the deadly gang bosses!

Design & Prototype

The original idea was based on Nimble Quest but with multiplayer.

I’ve coded the prototype with the art by Pablo Spreafico.

It was a simple idea. You pick your heroes and start the game. You would play with one random hero at first. As you collect boxes another hero would spawn. They each have different abilities, adding to replayability. As you collide with another player’s snake, you would essentially cut off the tail, killing all heroes after the one you hit. With the goal of the game being to destroy the enemy tower.

Screenshots

Level Design

The levels were created from a texture where colors defined the type of tile. It’s simple as you don’t need to make a level editor.

However, it’s also incredibly limiting as color is the only parameter you have. For example, if you want to link teleporter A to teleporter B you would need to match them with some value. I’ve used the alpha channel values, and it works fine. But if you need another parameter down the line, you’re out of luck!

Chaos

There were moments where snakes could get really long, creating these epic looking battles.

Networking

For networking I’ve started with Photon, syncing each and every object individually. Soon it became obvious that this wasn’t going to work. The game had a lot of objects and it was fast-paced. This almost killed the game.

We ended up creating a custom deterministic lockstep networking system. It solved a lot of the issues and enabled us to debug the game from replays. Since the game is deterministic when you run into a weird bug, you could save the replay, tweak some code and run the replay again.

Final

After a while, I left the project and watched it turn into something unrecognizable. It was going after what was hot at the time, which was Brawl Stars. People saw it as a direct clone, and the game did poorly in the end.

The game would have done a lot better have the Core Pillars been clearly defined. It would allow the game to embrace its own unique identity and be over with chasing market trends.

Video

Redesign

I still really like the original concept, and at one point I’ve tried to build a simpler version of it. Have a look at Snakeys.

Takeaways

• Define your core pillars.