The Serpent of Scorhill

Premise

An ambitious twist on a classic game, Snake.

I wrote all this flowery flavour text about how you control a spiritual being who is attracting the rune stones from within the Earth towards themselves and they can form spiritual bonds by looping the stones around, but honestly it's all just a little overblown. I was going to have some additional animations to convey this more clearly, but couldn't get them working in time.

Controls:

- Arrow keys or WASD to move
- Q to restart
- Esc to quit
- F1 to save a screenshot (It will be saved to appdata/local/the serpent of scorhill)
- Alt+Enter to toggle fullscreen mode

Some self reflection:

I'm pleased with the work I did on this, particularly the visuals, but I managed my time poorly and there are one or two things I never got to finish.

The main thing to note is that the concept was originally going to be a puzzle game about creating specific shapes with the loops, but because I chose to invest so much time in art and animation (much of which I had to scrap anyway because it didn't work), I no longer had time to make a level editor or any of the other infrastructure that the puzzle game concept required. I think this problem is particularly apparent in how unsatisfying the percentage meter can be - I thought it might be broken for a long time, but I think psychologically it's difficult to properly estimate how much of the game space has actually been filled in and the effort required is so great compared to the actual progress that you're making, that you're realistically not going to reach much more than 50%, especially on the larger levels at higher speeds.

If I ever rebuild the game, the puzzle game concept will definitely be the priotiry. I feel that this would better emphasize the core mechanic of the game, which I believe to be a strong one despite the poor presentation here.

Notable miscellaneous problems:

- No highscore (a problem shared by my LD46 game, Protect the Sandworm)
- Dodgy sprite layering
- The game possisbly crashes if you somehow win (but if you manage it then frankly well done)
- The concept is poorly communicated
- The writing is rushed and wonky
- General UI ugliness

Still though, I've learned a lot from this one and I'm excited for what the future holds.