A few weeks ago, I needed a break from my routine, to step away from the daily grind and make a game. Just like I did last year when I started my adventure in video game development. Simple games, imitations of classics. This time, it was Snake’s turn.

I titled the game Snake 2D 2024. Not very original, I know. But I had a blast making it. It’s quite a bit more complex than it appears, especially the system for managing the growth of the snake’s body and movement.

Snake is not a game per se, but rather a genre that emerged around 1976. Yes, a long time ago. But the one I based mine on is the one that I think most people know or associate with the name Snake, and that is the legendary game for Nokia mobile phones (they couldn’t be called smartphones yet) from 1998 developed by Taneli Armanto.

There are hundreds of thousands of copies of that game and modern evolutions that have been very successful. In my case, I wanted to focus on making that little tribute to the original, trying to capture the same gameplay with some modifications.

In this case, the game is all in one scene. You can manage some options like turning sound and effects on/off and choosing whether you want the snake to go through walls. Not much else, the rest is simple movement with WASD/Arrow keys and go for the apples.

Your progress can be seen in the points of the minimalist UI (each apple is 10 points) and in the growth of the snake itself. The added difficulty is that each time you eat an apple, the snake moves faster, so when you have 10 apples, the difficulty is very high.

As a finishing touch, I integrated the possibility of adding your name to a global leaderboard at the end of each game. Only the top 10 are visible, so being there is quite a challenge.

I’m getting more and more comfortable and confident making these kinds of mini-projects in Unity to the point where this only took me a few hours. I want my next classic to implement 3D, even if it’s simple logic, with my own modeled assets and some multiplayer and even AI. We’ll see what happens.

For now, I’ll get back to my routine and continue developing Flantastic Café Run.

You can play Snake 2D 2024 and try to enter the ranking here: https://dekrud.itch.io/snake-2d-2024