I don't have experience in games programming (baring some assignments during my bachelor's degree) so I need to start actually doing something to start getting some experience (you have to start your 10 000 hours somewhere).
I figured to give myself an achievable start I'd though I'd tackle something with not too many moving parts. As such, I thought I'd implement Snake. For the uninitiated, in basic snake you play a snake, made up of squares and you eat dots which make you longer and you try not to crash into things (either the wall or yourself.)
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| Emulation of the Snake I remember best on the TI-83. |
I like snake for a number of reasons. The first as I mentioned is that it's relatively easy to program and a simple implementation can be put together in a day or an afternoon (even if you don't really know what you're doing). It is also easily extendible (it's not too much extra work to get to tron bikes or to caterpillar) and still has enough game play aspects to introduce interesting ideas.
This is not a terribly novel thing to do. There is a site at snakegame.net which has an archive of some of the more interesting implementations which come in a variety of flavors. There's also a cool version Snakes on a Cartesian Plane which plays with a lot of different game play concepts and ideas.
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| It's punny and an exciting experiment. |
A friend of mine, who happens to be experienced in the way of game design, mentioned a developer who always implements snake as a way to get familiar with a new platform. I feel like this is a good idea and I'm planning to follow that as well as I start teaching myself how to make games.
The first stage I'd like to finish is to implement a vary basic, limited graphics version of snake using Processing.org. I actually did most of this a while ago but somehow lost the project on my computer so need to start again. This should be fairly quick (as I said maybe an afternoon of work) but I'm going to give myself a deadline of September 1, 2012 to finish.
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