CyberSnek

They don't make 'em like they used to

Please use the print screen key not the snippet tool for screenshotting your highscore


Stay connected, because not even snakes are safe from planned obsolescence.
Use WASD to move around in normal snake fashion. Connect to your charger at the center of the screen to keep your snake going.
Get as much score as you can before getting too greedy or time running out on you.

Voting results

Overall
22nd
64%
5.824
Gameplay
17th
48%
5.941
Originality
21st
61%
6.000
Theme
21st
61%
6.353

This game entered in the Solo competition (33 entries).

Comments (20)

MrAmericanMike
 • 3 years ago • 

Scored 288. Sorry couldn't take a picture, the game removes the score after few seconds. I think you should keep it in screen so people has time to screenshot it.

TomBuston
 • 3 years ago • 

I really like the idea, but I think it could be even better with a better tuning, I found it very difficult to aim for the collectibles with the high snake speed, and if you miss once, you have very little time to go back to your battery to refill, making the game quite difficult even at the very beginning.

Yaro
 • 3 years ago • 

Interesting idea!
To be honest I have trouble playing it on my AZERTY keyboard, directional keys support would've been nice!
Might need some adjusting, but overall it's a good game!

hattoum
  • 3 years ago • 

@MrAmericanMike that makes sense. The score actually stays until you press any key but I can definetly see someone pressing a key accidentally specially right after a game end. Thank you!

@TomBuston I agree. I had a pretty busy schedule but did not want to miss out on the jam. The game definetly needs a lot more tuning and polish. Thanks for the feedback.

@Yaro Oh, it's embarassing but I've never seen an AZERTY keyboard before so I totally forgot about that. I'll definetly be more aware of that next time. And I agree it needs more adjusting, I didn't play the game as much as I should have myself. Thanks.

MrAmericanMike
 • 3 years ago • 

Ohh yes, it was probably my Control+Shift+X to launch the SnippingTool from Windows :P

hattoum
  • 3 years ago • 

It's hilarious that the game actively disallows users from screenshotting the score. Thanks for pointing that out.

matote
 • 3 years ago • 

Omg as a long time fan of old school snake I really appreciated your game ! The gameplay is very dynamic whic gives it a great rhythm and your twist adds personality.
It's simple and very effective ! Congrats :)

ratrogue
 • 3 years ago • 

I like the interpretation of the theme in combination with a well done Snake clone. Good work!

DiningPhilosopher
 • 3 years ago • 

Solid snek game! The only suggestion I can think of is powerups to increase your battery area, but it's nice and simple as it is. Love the slowdown on the snek when the battery runs low.

AaronBacon
 • 3 years ago • 

Fun Concept, I like that at full power you move faster, so its harder to snek the dots

Mr. Chocolate Salmon
(@mr_chocolatesalmon) • 3 years ago • 

Neat little game. I think the snake moves a little too quickly at times, and so judging when to change directions sometimes felt a bit late. But the graphics and concept worked well! Good job :)

BPM
 • 3 years ago • 

Great game. the snake might move a little too fast making it hard to get dots and I think the timer runs out a little too fast. but other than that, the game was great, along with the idea.

hattoum
  • 3 years ago • 

@matote Thank you, I tried to create something really simple to fit my schedule so I'm really happy to see you enjoyed the concept.
@ratrogue It's kind of a convenience thing more than design :D. Thanks for playing!
@DiningPhilosopher Now that you say it, something like that would have probably made the game a lot more enjoyable. I might add that after the jam ends. Thanks
@AaronBacon Yeah, what I was trying to accomplish was to force the player to maintain a balance and a rhythm but I think I made the charging up really fast for the game to imp feedback.
@BPM The snek does move too fast. The original plan was that the snake would move too fast at full power so you'd need to balance out how much you charge but I realize now tThat isn't very well done. I intentionally made the timer because I thought the game was fun but grew boring fast so some time pressure would keep players from slowing down to notice the flaws.

HuvaaKoodia
 • 3 years ago • 

Snake is fresh again! It has been a while.

Simple and effective, I like that. I also had fun going for the high score. Not having a lot of time is understandable, yet the design does indeed need tuning, if you have the time now.

The only valid strategy at the moment is returning back to the center for a full recharge after each short venture into the void. Every rule works against any alternative strategy. The pellets give practically no energy, the snake slows down when low on energy, and the energy itself depletes very quickly. Most of the time there is only a single pellet to fetch anyway, so eating many of them in a chain requires a lot of luck. Planning is not possible and taking risks only leads in death.

I would make these sort of changes to address the big points:

  • Big pellets only give energy and no points.
  • There is more than one pellet on the screen (most of the time at least).
  • The snake does not slow down

And a few small things too:

  • Start with a full energy bar.
  • Show the max size of the energy bar in the GUI
  • Fullscreen mode
  • Support for arrow keys

Solid effort in all. The theme got in the way.

Overall: Above Average (6.0)
Gameplay: Above Average (6.0)
Originality: Good (7.0)
Theme: Below Average (4.0)

hattoum
  • 3 years ago • 

Oh wow, thank you so much for taking the time to write all this.
As you did say, the game does indeed need a lot of tuning. You are right, I was strictly thinking about one strategy of play that I made it impossible to do anything different. And I think your point about making multiple pellets appear at once is a fantastic idea to fix a lot of this issue.

About the snake not slowing down, I do see how the snake slows down at a pace too fast that slowing down basically means you lost the game. However, I do think that slowing down would still be a good idea implemented differently. For example, if the snake slowed down much more gradually giving the player a clue as to how low they are, wouldn't that work well? It would be forcing the player to maintain a balance and punishing greedy play without explicitly disallowing it. Or maybe only slowing down AFTER the energy bar is depleted so it is less punishing but stays thematic.

As for the small things, I considered all of these (except the arrow keys) but I got too lazy :D. They would have def improved the game.

Thank you for your feedback!

Antti Haavikko
(@anttihaavikko) • 3 years ago • 

Nice twist on a classic. Not without any issues though…

First of all, dunno if this (too) was just a mac issue but this was the initial canvas size. Not seeing the GUI or even all the food pellets when they spawned near the edge of the screen.

After enough fiddling around with zoom and whatnot, I noticed the actual iframe url which worked just fine and it even had a fullscreen button @HuvaaKoodia

https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/2392388/index.html

Then the whole screenshotting thing. On mac we do not have the luxury of printscreen button so like half of the scores I didn't even get to capture. My best was something around 550 but I guess this one will have to do. And for now it gets me to the same second position. Would probably go for more tries but a coinflip on whether I get to submit my new score if I manage to get one isn't really appealing.

Since you're on Unity, it would be super easy to just save best score to PlayerPrefs and display it on the main screen or something for conveniently capturing any time the player would want to call it a day. Another Unity thing you should probably do is use the input system instead of hard coded keys. Exact same amount of code but you get the added benefit of both WASD and arrow keys (and controllers too). Sure quite a lot of people seem to be WASD all the way but I can't be the only one who finds it dumb to play with my non-dominant hand only when the right hand is doing jack shit. Or playing in the awkward position of using WASD with my right hand like I did for this one.

Sorry but the sounds were just bad. Would have needed more variety for sure and a little less ear hurting sounds. And of course more sounds overall, now you just had two clips for those two actions so they got old REAL fast. Lack of music didn't really help here either.

Turning felt really inconsistent. I mean like those single square turns for fine tuning your alignment. If you hit the buttons too fast, the second input gets eaten and if you're a tad late you turn wide. There should probably be some kind of buffer or queue for the inputs.

The slowdown on lowish battery was annoying and made it needlessly hard to estimate how much time/distance you still got left.

dorkulon
 • 3 years ago • 

This is a cute concept and a neat spin on a classic. I was getting some input lag on the game which made the controls feel not so tight and the game more difficult than it needed to be. Classic snake also gets you started at a lower speed to get you used to the controls, which could have helped here as well. The beeping sound effect was appropriate but very high volume, which caught me off guard the first time.

hattoum
  • 3 years ago • 

@anttiihaavikko Thank you for playing the game! Some of the issues you had I had not encountered before so its gotta be something with mac + browser combination that I did not account for. I'll keep that in mind next time.
The highscore thing, I realize now that using any button to skip score was not all that smart. However, the score only showing up after you finish without any scores saving was mostly a (questionable) decision I made to emphasize the bite-sized nature of the game. I just wanted people to play it once or twice and go like "heh, that's neat." I wanted it to be that kind of game. I knew that the more people played it the more the flaws showed.
As for the audio, I opted-out for a reason :D. I would definetly like my next jam game to have more dedicated time so I can polish it better. The game needs a lot of tuning and work to be enjoyable. Maybe with all you guys' kind feedback I could revisit it after the jam. Thanks a lot.

@dorkulon Did you experience the input lag at all times? Or was it just when the snek got slow? I seem to only get that "lag" (in reality it is just a suboptimal way of handling input) when the snek starts slowing down considerably. As for the beeping, I guess it doubles as a horror game now. Thank you for feedback!

dorkulon
 • 3 years ago • 

@hattoum the input lag was my best estimate at what was happening. It just felt like there was a considerable delay in between pressing a button to turn and the snek actually turning. I basically always missed the mark.

CoherentNonsense
 • 3 years ago • 

I use a mac too and had pretty much the same problems as Antti and the score disappears when I try to screenshot it /:
I like the idea. Snake is always fun and this kept the same concept and added to it.
One thing I wasn't a fan of was the time limit. It doesn't feel right ending the game out of nowhere but I guess it works better for highscores.

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hattoum

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High scores Submit score

#UserScore
1@DiningPhilosopher747 
2@HuvaaKoodia729 
3@Antti Haavikko477 
4@Birdwards459 
5@AlexDavies423 
6@minoryo387 
7@elZach351 
8@ratrogue279 
9@AaronBacon234 
10@matote189 
Total submitted scores: 10
View all 10 scores