Snakia

Tags: gamedev , nesdev , ludum-dare

Last weekend Ludum Dare 60 happened.

As usual (since ~2020) I try making NES games for it (and other game jams as well); this time it was Snakia, a recreation of the game Snake II for those old Nokia phones.

Snakia — Nokia's snake game, now on the NES

The hardest part was figuring out the specs for the game; I’ve found some different info depending on specific Nokia models, and saw some fan reimplementations that did things very different from each other and from the original game. Differences like: what’s the grid size? What are the available mazes? How many points are each stuff worth? In the end I had to take some liberties.

The second hardest part was drawing the thumb, since I’m no artist at all 😅. I guess it… kinda worked fine? Even the pressing animation seems better than I had expected.

Fun fact that I keep bring up every time: at least on the model I used to play, Nokia 2280, the diagonal buttons (1,3,7,9) make it way easier to play, and I did replicate that feature on my game (e.g. pressing 1 makes you move up if you were moving horizontally, and make you move left otherwise; this way you can cover all directions with just two buttons).