Sneaky Snek!

A thrilling blend of Snake and maze puzzles—You, the Sneaky Snek must navigate tricky paths, dodge Eagles, and slither safely to the finish! And make sure you eat as many Mice as you can!

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Inspiration

This project is inspired by the classic snake game, and the typical printed maze games. We've always enjoyed these games (as kids, and as adults too!). This game combines the thrill and fun of both: Solving a maze, clubbed with sneakily crawling around to eat food, and avoid getting eaten by the predators (The Eagles!)

What it does

The game creates a maze programmatically, and places food (Mice), and predators (Eagles) randomly within the maze. The goal of the player is to crawl through the maze from start point to the finish point carefully. Players must sneakily dodge from the predators(Eagles) in the maze, and eat as much food food(Mice) as they can to earn points. The time taken to reach the finish point is measured, along with the total food eaten by the player - these are used for scoring and ranking in the Leaderboard. Once the player completes a new maze, they can challenge others players to solve the the maze they just completed and find out how other players do at their challenge. Since the maze gets generated dynamically on each new game, each challenge would be unique, and presents a different level of difficulty. With users playing new mazes regularly and challenging others with the ones they had fun completing, the subreddit would keep the subscribers hooked to the new challenges curated by the regular players - resulting in good user retention mechnanics.

How we built it

The game is built for Devvit platform, using Node JS/Typescript. It uses the Phaser gaming framework. A number of iterations were made to come up with the present state of the game, to keep it simple and yet fun to play. The dymaically generated maze gets stored in the redis (when challenge posts are made), and rest of the information is stored in the postData of the custom posts.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many challenges with getting the maze generation working, and fit it well with the view port sizes of devvit platform. There were also challenges related to movement of snake, and rendering of snake as I am new to Phaser framework.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of having created a game for the hackathon which is fun to play.

What we learned

I learnt a lot of things related to Phaser as I am new to this. It simplifies the process of developing game to a great extent. From the learning so far, I am sure I will be spending a lot more time building more fun games with Phaser for Devvit in the near future.

What's next for Sneaky Snek!

Due to the limited time I had, the present animations for predators and food are very poor (just the emoji moving around randomly in the maze). Next, I will be working on:

  1. Improve the splash UI with a maze preview shown, and include the challenge creator's Snoovatar.
  2. Add animation to the animals in game using sprites to make the playing experience much more realistic.
  3. Allow the users to customize the places where the Eagles must be placed, where the mice must be placed etc., while creating a challenge for others.
  4. Make daily automatic challenge posts, with a unique maze to solve each day.
  5. Add option to build a custom maze and allow users to alter an automatically generated maze.

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