Unfinished prototype for Ludum Dare 33. Inspired by the book Railsea, which I was listening to on audiobook for the week before LD33, The Beast from esteemed gaslamp fantasy webcomic Girl Genius, and obviously classic computer game Snake.
Originally the plan was to eat other trains to grow, while switching rails to avoid collisions. You can switch rails by clicking the circles. At the moment, trains will not interact but the snake will grow automatically every 10 seconds, as well as increase speed up to a maximum (there is no maximum to the number of snake segments, so don't leave it running if you don't want it to keep slowly eating memory).
The rails are randomly generated each time, so refresh or close and reopen to see a different configuration. Another plan was to set them along bezier curves, which I was able to do, but normalizing the speed along the curves would have been a whole other mathematical adventure and the cars were too erratic without it, so I went back to straight lines while I tried to get the rest of the features in.
I will probably not finish this, as I've decided that even if I got all features in, it would require a lot more work to balance the rail generation and collision chance to a playable state, and may not be particularly fun even then.
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The more you do the easier and faster it becomes to get what you want done.