[Beta Release] Snakes - Local play 1-8 players

Current Version: 0.2.5

Gameplay from 0.2.2, thanks to pickPickles:


Introducing a local play game supporting 1-8 players!
This is a great party game!



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0.2.4:
  • 1-3 Bot opponents to play against while waiting for friends to join!
  • Autopilot feature!
  • Will go back to Start Screen if you leave game.
0.2.3:
  • Fixed many netcode anomalies
  • Fixed message flooding after host leaves game options menu
0.2.2:
  • Added "Occasional holes" game option by request of Kingdra. This makes holes about 1/80 dots of your snake on average, allowing you or anyone else to pass through them.
0.2.1:
  • Added Screen Score system. This reflects a score based on the combined lengths of all snakes on the screen at the end of the round.
  • Added High Score system. The High Score is based upon the Screen Score at the end of the round. The winner takes the full Screen Score. Messages will be displayed to all players if you obtain a new high score!
  • You can now reset your High Score by holding R and pressing Y at the start screen.
0.2.0:
  • Fixed bug when many long snakes die in "Disappear on death", the game slows down.
  • Official beta release!
0.1.7:
  • Added new game option: Disappear on death. Now you can have a true tron cycle bike game mode by enabling: Tron mode, No apple, Disappear on death.
  • Fixed a slew of bugs, including: ghost readies, being unable to press A for the first second at the end of a round, dropping death packets that force some players to stay in game when round is actually over, players getting stuck in "game starting...", and many more.

CURRENT KNOWN BUGS:
  • Bots do not know what to do during a game with "No apple" mode enabled.
  • If two snakes cross at the same time, they will both live. This is not technically a bug, as when I asked players how they'd like to handle it, they decided it's more fun if they both live when this happens.
  • Sometimes when using Autopilot in local play, the bot appears longer to other players.
  • If you close the lid while hosting, you may be unable to start a game without re-opening Snakes.
  • All of these bugs will be fixed soon! Sorry about that.
To Start A Game:
You do NOT need a wifi connection to play with others that already have this game installed, but you do need WiFi enabled on your 3ds so local play can work.

Read the instructions on the bottom screen.


At the Start Screen, press START to quit.

Press X to display the QRCode to the latest .cia release of Snakes! Use this so friends can easily install the latest version and play with you. For installing this way, you need a wifi connection and a QRCode .cia installer: https://gbatemp.net/threads/release-qr-web-installer-cia-installer.416243/

Press A to host and start a one player game. HOLD A to wait for a 2nd player to connect.

Hold B to scan for a room. If more than one room is found, you will be able to choose them from a list. The selected room will be highlighted in yellow. If you see a list, press A to select that room to join it.


When joining a room that is in-progress, you will join as dead. This is to be fair to other players. When this happens you will have to wait for the end-of-round screen before you can interact. Press START to quit.

Press Y at the start screen to change your username. This will only be displayed IN the game, not when selecting a host to join.

Press SELECT for game options. Press B to go back a screen. Using directional input will allow you to highlight a selection in yellow. Press A to select. In some sub-menus, pressing A will highlight a special selection in red. When this happens, pressing directional input will change the red value. Press B or A to stop selecting the value. You can always press B to go back a screen.

Here are the game modes you can toggle any combination of:



    • Boundaries kill: Classic snake! You can't touch the boundaries, or they will kill you.
    • Tron mode: For a game of tron, enable this and "No apple" to experience a true tron cycle bike game! Snakes will always grow, and never have a true tail.
    • Disable diagonals: For those of you that think the CPad's automatic diagonals is too OP, this is for you.
    • Disable A: Don't like being able to go fast? Disable it here.
    • Disable B: Don't like being able to go slow? Disable it here.
    • Disable Y: Hate it when people teleport the apple? This is for you.
    • Enable R: Be able to go in reverse by pushing the R button.
    • No apple: Forget the apple, just kill everyone!
    • Apples double length: for easier advantage over other players. you get twice as long for every apple you get
    • Disappear on death: What it sounds like. Use this, no apple, and Tron mode for a tron cycle bike game mode.
    • Occasional holes: This makes all snakes occasionally have holes in them at random. On average, it happens 1/80 "dots". To put this in perspective, non-Tron games start with a length of 40 dots. Requested by Kingdra.
You can also select how many bots you want to play against in one-player. Select the top line that displays "Number of bots: 1" and press Right or Left to increase or decrease the bots.

You can also press up/down to select a specific bot to change its difficulty.
The difficulty range is as follows from most difficult to least: Insane > Hard > Medium > Easy.


How to Play:
This version of snake is a little different from the average!

Your snake is always moving, whether you want it to or not!


To change direction, Use the CPad (left thumbstick) for easy curves, or the D-Pad for precise directional changes.

Your snake is a unique color line that grows the more you eat apples. Don't run into yourself or other snakes! If you die, on the bottom screen it will say in parenthesis who you ran into.

Apples are white dots. Run over one and you will gain a point and get much longer than in the average snake game.

Hold A to go twice as fast!
Hold B to go twice as slow!

Press Y to move the apple once! You can only do this once until someone scores a point. You can still do this when you are dead! Annoy the last one standing by moving it around right before they get it!

Once everyone is dead, or the last one alive gets the highest score, the round will end. To continue, press A! You may not be able to press A right after the round ends, it will be ignored for one second. Once everyone presses A, the next round will begin! You can tell if someone is ready by noting a green R under their score.

You can also press L to toggle Autopilot. Whenever this is enabled, you forfeit that round even if you disable it before the round ends. This is to be fair to others.

Some META:
If the apple is stuck in the center of a square/circle of your long tail, you can teleport it by pressing Y, or you can move in layers (back and forth) to use up the least amount of space possible. Eventually the end of your tail will stop wrapping around the apple as it catches up to you.

Having trouble getting the apple? Hold B when getting close to it for fine maneuvers!

In multiplayer, you basically have one of two goals:
  • Get apples until you are big enough to kill everyone else
  • Kill everyone first by moving quickly, then grab the remaining apples needed to get the highest score.
  • The Cage Strategy: If you are longer than the last person alive, you can wrap around them and bite your own tail to prevent their escape. You obviously have gotten more apples than them, so they will be forced to suicide and lose. Suggested by elementalcode
Screen Score:
The Screen Score is the balancing between all game modes to give an accurate "score" for the end of the round. This score is calculated by all devices adding up all client-side snake lengths, and sharing this number. All devices agree to use the largest number shared, and this becomes the "Screen Score". If this screen score is higher than the winner's current High Score, it will display a message on all devices saying they have obtained a new High Score, and it will automatically save to the winner's save file on the root of the their SD card.

Credits:
  • Wolfvak - for graphics help like finding color from frame buffer. thanks a lot!
  • smealum - for ctrulib and other contributions to homebrew dev
  • fincs - graphical rendering! Helped me fix a major bug that slowed the game down.
  • Stary - both Stary and fincs both helped me discover and fix a bug that slowed the game down due to inefficient graphical rendering. Thank you so much!
  • zaksabeast - for helping me with this release
  • pickPickles - testing and recording gameplay with 8 players
 
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0.2.5 has been released!
This means there are 1 - 3 bot opponents with customizable difficulty settings to play against!
You can also use Autopilot if you want to watch the game play itself, or want everyone to play while you go afk.

If you spot any bugs, please let me know!
 
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Any chance a "B to go back to menu" option could be added to the game over screen?
I was debating doing that. I was just afraid people have a higher chance of accidentally pressing B instead of START.
But yes, I can definitely do that!

edit: Testing that out right now.

edit continued: Alright, B button can now take you back to the Start Screen from End-of-Round Screen.
 
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I plan to fix some minor bugs in the next patch. On my plate are:
  • Properly displaying what killed you in game when you run into the boundary.
  • Making a "dirty pixel" buffer that allows the game to know when you hit a boundary even when it hasn't been drawn yet. This will hopefully solve a lot of problems where it lets you go through other snakes.
Once I've done those fixes, expect much less frequent releases. Unfortunately this project has become too much of a distraction from my studies.

Although I will be starting work on another, non-fun 3ds project for an independent study about cellular automota, I might disappear from the 3ds homebrew community for a while.
 
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I have fixed a bug that caused the 3ds to crash every once in a while. This bug was evil and very hard to find. The only method I found to fix it before consequently halved the framerate of the game. So now that it's fixed, the framerate is much better, especially on the old 3ds.

Now that I've solved that, I plan to fix a slew of minor bugs involving players joining and leaving the room. I would say expect a patch soon, but I really need to focus on school.
 
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Patch 0.2.5.2 is out.
This squashes a ton of bugs. I highly recommend you update to this version.
Bugs fixed:
  • Game no longer crashes randomly
  • Joining the game no longer causes strange anomalies.
  • Boundary death now displays proper message during game "you are dead (Boundary)"
  • Snakes no longer warp out of shape at the beginning of the round
  • When you die with "Disappear on death", it will no longer erase part of the snake or boundary you ran into.
  • Frame rate has been greatly improved
  • Enabling autopilot no longer screws up the speed of other players
  • Autopilot no longer screws up the lengths of certain players
 

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Once I find plenty of free time, I plan to rewrite Snakes from scratch for a better implementation.
This should make the game much more stable and reduce the number of bugs. If I had known I was going to turn an experiment with local play into a full game I'd have planned it better.

I don't foresee that much free time until at least after mid terms.
 
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I'm no longer supporting this game.
The last I've added was computer opponents, which took me months to get right...

By the time I added them, nobody noticed I think.

I am currently working on an actual Nintendo switch indie title that is a work in progress...

Hopefully a playable demo will be released summer next year.

Thank you all for supporting my efforts with honest feedback :)
 

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Hell yeah, a Snake port! I don't see enough of these around, so you're a great person OP. :bow:
Though, may I ask what this means?:
To Start A Game:
You do NOT need a wifi connection to play with others that already have this game installed, but you do need WiFi enabled on your 3ds so local play can work.
 
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Quantumcat

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I'm no longer supporting this game.
The last I've added was computer opponents, which took me months to get right...

By the time I added them, nobody noticed I think.

I am currently working on an actual Nintendo switch indie title that is a work in progress...

Hopefully a playable demo will be released summer next year.

Thank you all for supporting my efforts with honest feedback :)
I had great fun playing this with a friend of mine, just wanted to say thanks. I'll try out the new computer players :-)
 
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Hell yeah, a Snake port! I don't see enough of these around, so you're a great person OP. :bow:
Though, may I ask what this means?:
At the top left of the bottom screen in the home menu, there's a button. Tap that to access some settings. One of them controls Wireless Communication. This needs to be enabled for this game to work with local play. It doesn't actually connect to the internet, but it still needs to be enabled.
On the Old 3DS and Old 3DS XL, there's also a physical switch to toggle wireless communications.
 

Crimson Cuttlefish

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At the top left of the bottom screen in the home menu, there's a button. Tap that to access some settings. One of them controls Wireless Communication. This needs to be enabled for this game to work with local play. It doesn't actually connect to the internet, but it still needs to be enabled.
On the Old 3DS and Old 3DS XL, there's also a physical switch to toggle wireless communications.
Ah, I see. Thanks!
 
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nuu nintendo switch is bad D:
I love the switch, but the price tag for developing indie games on it is a bit much for a college student like me.

I was working on the indie title for a couple months, but it ended up dying as I suffocated trying to do all the roles of an indie game studio by myself. The combat system was similar to smash Bros. You can find a video of one of the earlier alphas of it on YouTube here:

I had an album of music I wrote for it, a story, and much more. Unfortunately I caved when I realized it doesn't even inspire brotherly love (seriously).

I am glad some of you liked something I made, despite how messy the code was!
 

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I love the switch, but the price tag for developing indie games on it is a bit much for a college student like me.

I was working on the indie title for a couple months, but it ended up dying as I suffocated trying to do all the roles of an indie game studio by myself. The combat system was similar to smash Bros. You can find a video of one of the earlier alphas of it on YouTube here:

I had an album of music I wrote for it, a story, and much more. Unfortunately I caved when I realized it doesn't even inspire brotherly love (seriously).

I am glad some of you liked something I made, despite how messy the code was!

well that's true, work by yourself in something big like that is hard, i tried for 5 months to make something alone, just because i wanted to draw sprites for it XD
 

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