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A jam submission

Letter SnakesView game page

Multitask as you both move and join letters together!
Submitted by Frances — 2 hours, 57 minutes before the deadline
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Letter Snakes's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Originality#21243.1113.111
Presentation#24302.8152.815
Overall#25372.7902.790
Fun#29412.4442.444

Ranked from 27 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How does your game fit the theme?
I joined together two genres (snake game and letter game) as well as the concept of letters being joined together to form words.

Did your team create the vast majority of the art during the 48 hours?

Yes

We created the vast majority of the art during the game jam

Did your team create the vast majority of the music during the 48 hours?

Yes

We created the vast majority of the music during the game jam

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Comments

Submitted

We explored a few ideas of joining together the snake game and snake game + scrabble was one of the ones we considered. We ended up going for snake + breakout, but it's great to see how other people interpreted similar ideas! Fun game!

Submitted

I like the music and sounds! Using enter and the arrows is a bit inconvenient on the keyboard in my opinion, maybe you could have used the up arrow to sprint since it wasn't used otherwise. Its a fun game but I mainly focused on growing my snake, as it was difficult to also spell words while moving. 

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

Brilliant idea with cute presentation.

A problem is that navigating the snake and clicking letters at the same time is difficult. Perhaps greatly slow the player down while they type out a word, and if they make an incorrect word, they're forced to sit still or something.

Also, reset the player's speed if they're cut back to a smaller size. And prevent new enemies from spawning inside your snake.

Not quite sure how it builds upon slither.io since gameplay and concept is very very similar

Developer

If you've played the game "Bookworm", it's a cross between that and slither.io. The theme is "Joined Together", so I joined together two games that I liked.

The top half of the screen is slither, definitely (I even noted it in the About section in the game itself), but to actually get proper points, you build words with the letters you gained. (Hence the "Bookworm" part.)

So with the two games joined together, the game is pretty much an exercise in how well the player can multitask, which means it's more than a sum of its parts. Do you want to get points by making words and take your attention away from the snakes on the board, or do you focus on avoiding other snakes? Something like that.

It's enough of a twist to build upon the concept, I think.

Submitted

The concept is fun. I like the twist on a classic .io style game where you have to be a bit more active and thoughtful to score.

There were alot of times when I'd stab another snake and I would die instead of them. Idk of that's an intentional mechanic that I just don't understand or a bug. 

I think binding your collection of letters to number keys would have made it alot easier to maneuver the environment and make words at the same time. 

Also fantastic job of making it seem like multiplayer when it isn't.

Developer

Thanks for playing! :)

As for the death-by-stabbing-another-snake thing, the bigger snakes would automatically kill you (not sure why I thought it was a good idea, maybe at the time I thought the game was too easy... but I guess making that change increased the difficulty too much and made it a little more confusing than it had to be...)

Binding to number keys sounds like a great idea! I'll try to implement that in a post-jam version if ever I get around to making one.

(Also the enemy snakes took me a lot of time to tune, so I'm really glad that it felt like it was actually multiplayer! Thanks! :D )

Submitted

Cute little game. I found that trying to make words while also managing to avoid getting pecked by other word worms to be too much for me, but it was a lot of fun.

I did encounter one issue. I use a high refresh rate monitor, so the game was running at 165 fps instead of 60 fps, and the turning controls were too fast to be really playable. Changing my monitor to 60 Hz fixed it for me, but that is not an elegant solution.

Developer(+1)

I see... Sorry about that! I'm still pretty new to Godot so I think I used the wrong functions for movement (or put the controls in the wrong place...) 

Thanks for playing and for pointing out the bug! Shall (attempt to) fix it in a post-jam version!

Submitted

I get that. I started using Godot for game jams a few years ago. I've been happy with Godot, but it does take some getting used to.

I assume the game handles the rotation in the _process(delta) function, so the quick fix is to include the delta argument in the calculation for how much to turn. The delta argument indicates how much time has passed since the last _process call, so scaling by the delta value will account for faster framerates. Godot can be weird, and sometimes it's needed and other times not. Eg. for KinematicBody2D, move_and_collide() requires multiplying by delta, but move_and_slide includes a delta multiplication already (though it's the physics delta, not the frame delta).

In general, though, since you're moving objects with collision checks, you should probably move the movement/rotation code to the _physics_process(delta) function instead. This function still has a delta argument, but it's always a fixed value (defined in the project settings, usually 1/60). This function is equivalent to Unity's FixedUpdate() function.

Developer(+1)

I see, I see! So that's why there's both _process and _fixed_process! I learned something new today, thank you!