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Snakes in a Feedback Post Blog
30th March 2019

@RSKGames

I was very lucky that in my first game I did not get into any snake tiles and got the help of one ladder tile to reach near the end zone much before the AI.


Yup, this is a game 100% down to luck.
I'd like to perhaps remove the sheer-luck, by making the moves maybe Card based, or something? Not quite sure how well that would work, and it honestly wouldn't be "Snakes and Ladders" anymore.
So.. Perhaps another type of board game in the future?

-=-=-

I was surprised to find that piece was turning to go in opposite direction if the number was greater than 100. When I had played long long ago if the current tile + dice roll > 100 the piece is not moved.


Aaah, we're down to house-rules again! These things are going to come up time and time again, as I add games to the Shoebox.
In our house, we played the "backwards" rule.
I'm not sure how common that rule is, but it's what separates Snakes'n'Ladders from most other games, for me, so I wanted to keep it in.

I guess the current approach has much better chance of winning provided there is no snake tile in the last six tiles.


Yeah, the topmost snake had to be shifted a teensy bit across so you didn't end up frustratingly landing on it during a backward run. That would be incredibly unlucky!

Will there be dynamically placed snakes and ladders tiles in the future.


Not like this, no!
The tilemap isn't shuffleable, and is very much a static image.
If I aim for some kind of "v2" game, with the cards for more strategic movement like I mentioned above, then I'll definitely try to come up with a board that uses single tiles, instead of a pre-rendered board.

It doesn't even have to be Snakes and Ladders.
SpikeDislike is a prime candidate. Try to reach the goal without hitting a spike. Or, really, any number of Platform games. Maybe a randomly generated JNKPlat level to make your way through?
The possibilities are endless!!

I feel that the framework is getting more and more power full to create so many games in less time that you may need to reserve morethanagameaweek.com


It definitely is, and I've been building it up piece by piece, in reusable ways.
Usually doing AGameAWeek, I tend to redo a lot of stuff, each time. Some games might need one style of tilemap, whilst another needs a wildly different one, so rather than bloating the framework all the time I tend to scrap and redo each time.
Here, though, all the games are sharing the same sets of scripts, so it makes much more sense to write reusable code.

As it builds, each little tweak is being done specifically with certain other games in mind, like the way that the Leapfrog game was created with future boardgames in mind. It doesn't look too much like a board game, but the scrollable and zoomable tilemap is there, as is the ability to lift and place objects within the grid.
That's all been super helpful in Snakes and Ladders, and I've also now added in the feature to use different tilemap spritesheets depending on the specific game.
This will, of course, come in handy later as I expand the types of tilemaps that are needed.

It's all little bits and pieces that come together to make the next thing, and that's been a fun adventure.. As you can probably tell from the fact that I've all but ignored "normal" AGameAWeek for almost two whole months, now!

Like you have a version and changes page in foldapuzz do you have something similar for Shoebox of Games.


Sorry to say, but that doesn't exist any more!!
A couple of months ago, I decided that it was a better idea to make it into a blog, and as such, make it much easier to manage. And then I decided I might as well put those blog posts here, rather than have them as a whole other blog script that I need to manage.

The foldapuz updates are now here, in the same way that JNKsg are here and Shoebox are here.

What I might do, however, is create some kind of minifyer, producing a page that looks more like how the old foldapuz page used to work. That might work better..

Watch this space!
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