Snake Effects Gameplay

Hello, and welcome! These days, a game has to present two main gameplay things to be a great game: Fun and tryhard! That's how I see things and I will explain how I made Snake Effects enters in that definition.
Snake Effects gameplay is quite the same as classic Snake, but with some modifications that I will explain to you in this DevLog, have fun!

Classic Snake rules

Snake rules are easy. You control a snake that has a unique goal, eating the most fruit as possible. However, be carefull, when you eat one, you grow up, and the bigger you are, the harder it is to not eat your nail ... Or a wall!
Snake is a good game because that's one of the first video game ever, but when we watch closer, there is not really fun in that...
In others words, the only objective is to be the bigger as possible ... You can have a 10min game and can't beat your best score and for no gain... After few games, you become tired of the game and that's what I want my game not to be.
I want my game to have a way for players to tryhard, be inpressed by its visual effects and I want my game to feel like "new" and different from classic snake!

Snake Effects is different than Snake

I made some gameplay's modifications to the original Snake game to change the idea of having a lot of constraints and hard experience to create a challenging-tryhardable game with the possibility of comtemplating the level playing without taking a head with it.

With this idea in mind, the first solution (and also the one implemented) was to create a possible infinite gameplay loop if the player was away from his keyboard during the level playing. To create this loop, 2 solutions poped in my head: A freeze button that when pressed, stop the snake from moving and so, act like a pause button, but without stopping the audio-visual part of the level. Of course, this kind of behaviour was too strange so I decided to abort this idea.
The other possibility was to insert gameplay modification: permit the player to not die when he goes into the terrain limits. He will just have to be teleported to the other side of the terrain. This behaviour is really innnovative and for many reasons explained below, it is the best idea that I had for my game! It brings to Snake a new mechanic that enables tryharding and gives the possibility to AFK. What a thing!

Is tryharding really possible ?

After some user tests, I returned two differents points of view on the question:
"This gameplay feature makes the game easier and it's contrary to a tryhard definition" (A)
"That's a great thing, it's encouraging the player to take some risks to get a better score" (B)

And there I saw a problem in my user testing process: both had not the same gaming time. (A) played for 10mins and (B) for 1hour. So (A) wasn't used to controls and to the game itself so the question about tryhard was totaly out of context for him. He had no time to progress and that's why, for him, the mecanic was an easy tool. After I asked for his best score, he went to 250 000 points. Great score, but let's compare with (B), 1 hour experience and a best score of 420 000 points.

He said an interesting thing: "encouraging the player to take risks". That's exactly the behaviour I wanted the player to have during his experience. The grid is like an infinite one, but looping on itself. Obviously, with some technics easy to find, it can be easy to reach the end of the level without dying. You can, for exemple, go only to the right, ignoring the bonus and then, make a "stair" move to not die and that's it, you can't lose, but you will get a bad score! That's why trying to go faster to a bonus, will force you to take risk, including this mecanic and adding more chance to loop on yourself and die faster too.

So, yes. Tryharding can be a thing, but don't forget that Snake Effects isn't a competitive game, it is first a beautiful game that the goal is to impress the player with a lot of visual effects. With these gameplay changes, Snake Effects become a real evolution of Snake and every player can find their way playing it.

Thank you for your reading, I showed you my point of view on the gameplay modification adding users testing to understand the public mind. If you have a different point of view on that, I will be glad to hear it and learning from your experience too !
Have a good day !