Snakes on a (2D) Plane

Gameplay
Under the hood
Gameover
Sprites

Inspiration

We do love a good spreatsheet. This is just a silly little project to use Excel in a bit of an unconventional way. Our main objective was to simply have a working game and have fun while making it!

What it does

Does whatever a snake can! It's basically snake, the beloved Nokia game, but better in every way.

How we built it

We built it using entirely Excel and VBA. The bulk of the game is handle by macros, while its graphics are simply colored cells, which we used as makeshift pixels.

Challenges we ran into

Definitely movement! We used timers to set up intervals in our "game-loop", giving us a way to control the frames referesh rate. Collision were also tricky to implement, but we relied on cell ranges overlap in some cases, and hidden (non printable) values in others!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We can confidently say we're some of the best Excel game developers on the market! Jokes aside, we're proud of the overall look and the fact of having a functional game. It does run a lot smoother than we'd imagined, and while simple, we're very proud of the project as a whole!

What we learned

Working with VBA and macros, and how to manually implement a basic game-loop, pixel-by-pixel!

What's next for Snakes on a (2D) Plane

We would've liked to implement a difficulty feature, a scoreboard, and a little character selection. With what we know now, none of these seem particularly challenging, so who knows, maybe in the future!