Mr And Mrs Snake

SNAKE in 3D

About

A variant of the computer game classic SNAKE: three-dimensional and in third-person perspective for Android smartphones. The aim is to collect apples that appear at random while avoiding the own snake body as well as the boundaries of the playing field. With each snack eaten, the snake’s body grows by another body part, making maneuvering more difficult over time. The player can choose from four different snake characters (female green/blue, male green/blue). The movement of the snake can be controlled with a joystick on the left, the camera rotation can be controlled by swiping the screen.

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Project Details

Period
Team Size
Platform
Languages
IDE
Game Engine
Unity Service

03/2021 – 03/2021
1
Android
C#, R
Visual Studio, RStudio
Unity 3D (2020.3.7f1)
Unity Analytics

3D Modeling Tool
Image Editor
Video Editor

Blender (2.92.0)
Gimp (2.10.22)
DaVinci Resolve (17.0)

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/RauschkugelxD/Mr-And-Mrs-Snake
YouTube: https://youtu.be/IrqCcog390M
Sketchfab: https://skfb.ly/onN7T

Project Description

The game was developed by me in the university course ‚Human-computer interaction part 2‘. Creating a game was one of several possible submissions to pass the course alongside an online exam held during the pandemic.

The game was originally supposed to be a group project, but the other three of my group members dropped out, so I decided to develop a small game on my own. It was a relatively spontaneous action, so I only had two weeks, but since I already had experience with Unity and Blender, I wanted to give it a try.

Gameplay

At the beginning the player can choose which snake character he wants to play the game with (male vs. female).
The player then maneuvers the snake across the playfield while collecting randomly appearing apples, each worth one point.
The goal is to get as high a score as possible, however, if the player touches the edge of the field or his own snake body, the game is over.
Since the body of the snake continues to grow with every eaten snack, freedom of movement is increasingly restricted and tactical action is required.
After dying, the round can be started again with the same snake character, another snake can be chosen, or the game can be left.

Controls

Third-person perspective: the camera is fixed behind the snake character while the player controls the snake in different directions.
The camera can be rotated to get a better viewing angle: by steering the snake in a certain direction with the left hand, the right hand is free to rotate the camera. This makes it possible to develop the right strategy for further action while looking around for the apple and maneuvering the snake.

Left joystick
Touch field on screen (transparent)

Move the snake
Rotate the camera

Game Play Video

Not for my studies, but because I’m a fan of making short video clips, I recorded my playing on my smartphone and made a video out of it using DaVinci Resolve.

3D models on Sketchfab

I uploaded the 3D models to Sketchfab to make them available to others. Check them out:

Mr And Mrs Snake

Hair Bow, Hair Ribbon

Simple Baseball Cap

Development

As the game progressed in programming, I came up with ideas that could make SNAKE even more interesting, so I designed different snake characters: with accessories and colors, the player has the possibility to personalize the snake character. I chose a hat for the male snake and a hair bow for the female snake. The snake’s body color can be either light green or light blue.

With Blender, I modeled all game objects and imported them to Unity.

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Screenshots out of Unity and Visual Studio.

Apple — Adjusting the sphere collider on apple

Unity — Spawn area of apples on the playing field

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According to the specifications of my university course, the implemented game should also be analyzed using R and R-Studio. I decided among other things to log the player’s survival time, the number of apples collected and the object that was collided with (the reason the game ended) to do some simple statistical calculations.

For this purpose, I took my first steps with the integrated Unity Analytics service and played the game several times on my mobile phone to simulate different players.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, the time I had for the project was very short, otherwise I would have liked to add other features that would have made the game even more interesting:

Increasing difficulty over time: obstacles or an increased movement speed of the snake
Different types of snacks providing different numbers of points
Different levels with different environments
Achievements that the player can earn
Ranking system with other players