Spherical Snake

I was pleasantly surprised when a friend texted me after work to say this game was on Hacker News. I hope it brought some small joy to your day. Some comments helped identify some minor tweaks. I do not expect to have time or motivation to make bigger changes soon. Feel free to make GitHub issues.

The game looks really good, although I think it'd be improved if the sphere was a bit smaller. It feels like it takes too long for the game to become difficult

   (() => { let count = 50; const delay = 100; const interval = setInterval(() => { addSnakeNode(); if (--count <= 0) clearInterval(interval); }, delay);})()

Love the game, it just ramps up pretty slowly.

Looking at the comments and people trying to verify what the real maximum score is. I wrote a (Cartesian) snake for fun once, that was Pascal and an obscure 8-bit platform, but most fun was the pure mechanics of it; the rest was just boring, completionist details. As dopamine plateaued, I barely just worked out a formula for a curve to spread the maximum snake length across a set number of levels so that it ends at 100% of gameplay area and remains winnable. But maximum score? No idea, I couldn't be arsed to work it out. But I finished the project! https://github.com/wowczarek/dlp-misc/tree/main/spacew0rm

Really cool game, but please please fix the viewport to prevent accidentaly zooming on the page on a mobile device!

Is there a place I can read about taking unique creative approaches to original topics/games/concepts like this? "Thinking Different with Basics". I like this so much but its because it gets at an essence of creativity applied to the obvious I don't know how to learn or search for:(

Obviously 666, 1337, 9223372036854775807 etc... in the leaderboard are fake, so if I had to try to figure out what the highest legit score is, I'd guess milkman with 227. Unless someone was clever enough to make an inconspicuous fake number :)

Cool. It would also be interesting to see a hyperbolic snake.

Reminds me of this video, where the dev compares spherical and hyperbolical geometries (albeit a dimension higher):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY9GAyJtuJ0

Very neat. Would be cool to see in 3d (cross eye option [1]!? :D)

I think an accelerated initial growth is needed. Maybe start with a growth of 5 and have it decrease so it's a 1 at around 50. It takes a bit too long to get to something non trivial, especially since it seems there is a bias to put dots on the opposite side, causing the first 5 minutes to be mostly going in a straight circumnavigations.

[1] https://www.kula3d.com/how-to-use-the-cross-eyed-method

Very cool but on iOS safari, if I click one of the buttons twice too quickly it zooms in and I can’t see the full screen or the other button. Hard to zoom back out at least on my phone.

Reminds me of Uncle Worm, among the better TI-83+ games. It's 2D, but the snake is curvy:

https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/96/9683.html

When the game ends, the banner obscures the exact spot where the snake ran into itself, which is the thing you most want to see at the end.

Nicely done!

Related projects:

https://wakaba.c3.cx/s/games/swear

https://milksnake.c3.cx

Beyond 100 it becomes a game of avoiding the The Loxodrome of Terror by spiralling into an unescapeable trap.

Easiest pattern to get some more length is to do some sort of spherical sinusoid by following the meridian and then some optional final fill loop for the poles.

Overall it feels a bit slow to get to the part where it becomes tricky

For optimal fill you might end up with something like a tennis ball/baseball pattern instead.

see fig 5 here

https://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4609

I wish there is a mode where the snake go toward where my mouse cursor is (similar to agar.io), as opposed to having the controls turn the snake. So in update function where we have the "direction-=.08" and "direction+=.08" bits, "direction" would be assigned a value either due to the pressed state of the 4 arrow keys, or some arctangent of mouse coordinates:

https://github.com/kevinAlbs/SphericalSnake/blob/b907738476d...

Alternatively, keep the current controls, but rotate the whole world to match the snake's direction of movement. Current mix of non-rotating world with rotating controls makes the game more difficult, most snake variants I have played opted for non-rotating world with non-rotating controls (e.g. press right to go right, independent of current snake heading, as opposed to turning clockwise).

It should start at score 50, which is when the game actually gets interesting.

Opportunity for v1.1:

as things get more difficult it becomes increasingly important to control space-use and the resultant territory occupied by the snek; at a certain point I switched priorities from "get the target as quickly as possible" to "maintain a regular controlled movement"

Something that leapt out at this point was, there is no tension or penalty for doing so.

Opportunity to increase game challenge/skill requirement: introduce an incentive to get the target as quickly as possible.

One interesting way to do this would be to make the ball get bigger over time, with bigger balls adding more segments to the snek.

I like this sort of approach because it leaves supports two distinct play styles/cases:

- some players would see this as incentive to get to the target ASAP, to avoid growing more than necessary, thus prolonging their survival at the same difficulty

- others would see an incentive to let avoid the target, especially if it grows non-linearly, so as to jump to increased difficulty ASAP

People are having fun submitting their fake scores to the leaderboard: https://kevinalbs.com/spherical_snake/leaderboard/

I see a person or two I know in there haha

For a new kind of snake game, check out PluriSnake.

PluriSnake is a snake-based color matching daily puzzle game.

Color matching is used in two ways: (1) matching circles creates snakes, and (2) matching a snake’s color with the squares beneath it destroys them.

Snakes, but not individual circles, can be moved by snaking to squares of matching color, as long as their paths are not blocked by other snakes.

The goal is to score as highly as you can. Destroying all the squares is not required for your score to count.

Of course, there is more to it than that as you will see.

Try it out:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/mJXdJavG

Any feedback would be appreciated. Have fun!

pretty boring start, quite fun once the snake is the size of the sphere circumference

Control by phone sensor (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Orientation...) would be nuts.

tilting the phone as the control...

Here's a demo of the control since mdn didn't have one:

https://9ol.es/pitch.html

Also a more practical thing while we're doing this is a thumb drag control, that'd make this a hit.

Like flappy bird level.

I noticed that the dots on the surface of the sphere are evenly spaced out close to the equator, but because there is a consistent number of dots in each ring, they are very close together when you reach the poles.

One way to get dots evenly spread out over the surface of a sphere is to use a phyllotaxis spiral pattern.

https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/PhyllotaxisSpiralPatternO...

This reminds me of Snake Galaxy. I'm so sad it's not available anymore, it was an adorable spherical snake game on early iPhone circa 2010 era. I really miss the little Paris planet.

https://toucharcade.com/2009/04/24/snakegalaxy-puts-a-new-sp...

Quite a good implementation, got to 62 and was playing a "space filling curve" strategy to bleed off some of the length. Looking at the leader-board I suspect some people are just sending off their own custom submissions [1].

[1] https://kevinalbs.com/spherical_snake/leaderboard/

The original was toroidal!

Good game concept and implementation. Run smoothly even on phone.

Extend the capability to include timer, boost of speed and even levels with enemies.. I would love to also try having a kind of multi level support for moves.. Like 3 layers to explore the 3d navigation with layers of ground for moves.

Awesome experiments that could easily become viral! :)

Fun take! Would love to just drag my finger on the sphere to affect the direction instead of the two big buttons.

For a multiplayer spherical tron-like experience check out Astro Bears, it’s a great little party game!

Reminds me of a old iPhone game "Snake Galaxy" with the same principle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LEIC_BOhgE

94! it really doesn't get fun until around 35-40, would be fun to start there.

This is really fun! Nice job.

Small issue: I accidentally right-clicked one of the arrow buttons and it stuck in the pressed position, causing the snake to curl into itself and end my game before I could left-click out of the context menu.

Really fun! Developing my intuition for a sphere as I played was a nice experience. As other commenters have mentioned, the game ramps up a bit too slowly. Perhaps it would worth adding more than one food item.

What is the strategy after it gets longer than a great circle? Wiggle with constant frequency to "fold" it? Constantly move in one direction to form a spiral? Something completely different?

Cute but this game does not become interesting until score 50 or more.

The snake movement reminds me of the video feedback tail behavior here: https://vimeo.com/487717654

The LB should be clickable to be able to watch the last n-secs of their game.

Would love to be able to start with n-length via url params (should be disqualify from LB if start w/ n-length.

Lovely. Would love if it canvas was bigger on desktop. Zoomed in 3x is much better but pix-elated. The first 50 or so levels were very easy. Started getting difficult around 90+.

I love this, congratulations on the clever design and concept.

Really impressive that it's implemented in < 400 lines of Javascript code and runs so smoothly in my phone's browser (Firefox on Android)

This thing is addictive. The last time I played snake was on Apple-II computer hooked up to some scientific equipment back in USSR