Making art for Snakes

Hi! My name is Cheese, and I'm doing art, and some game design (and maybe some other things?) on Snake Snacks.

I came onto the project very late (around 12 hours before the original submission deadline!). I'd wrapped up some work on one of my other projects, so when Splerp mentioned that he wasn't confident he could get something he was happy with, I offered to pitch in. At that time, the game was looking something like this:

We had a quick chat about what was left and where we'd like to take things. The game was manifesting as a sort of platformer-where-you-eat-the-platforms, and it was a lot of fun to play with. There wasn't really an intention for setting or much thematic direction, so we had a quick call to bounce ideas around

A WIP video Splerp had shown me with pink squares that the snake could leap out of the ground to eat made me think about the notion of a snake in an art gallery gobbling up framed pieces - if we used Public Domain art, that would lean into the whole "snake eats culturally significant art" thing, and also let us dedicate more time to other work. We both thought that was a fun/funny idea, so I set about making some art while Splerp polished up some remaining code tasks.

Using the GNU Image Manipulation Program, I made a bunch of picture frames, four wall and doorway variants, a tiling dirt texture (I'd never done that before with pixel art - it was fun!), and some little pillars/mounts for free standing displays. I probably spent a little longer on the bust than I should have :D

Splerp also though it could be fun to have some obstacles in the ground, so I made some pipes to bump off (initially, the pillars were going to fill this role too, though were were talking about maybe letting you climb them), and holes to fall down, though when weighing up what to do/cut as our time ran out, we decided to leave those mechanics out.

As we got closer to the deadline, I switched over to start sourcing art. We'd talked about having the Mona Lisa, and The Scream, so I went to Wikimedia Commons and grabbed a few pieces by notable renaissance artists, and a bunch of works from the expressionism movement. Splerp had expressed interest in Great Wave off Kanagawa, so I picked up a few of the Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji and grabbed some van Gogh while I was at it.

I used ImageMagick to shrink them down to a manageable size, and got to work on making some levels while Splerp sorted out packaging, implemented a couple of extra things (like implementing "9 slice" frame stretching and auto-placing the little plaques, which saved me a bunch of work!)

Because you can only control your movement when you're in the ground or eating a painting, placement has some interesting gameplay implications. In the renaissance level, the Mona Lisa is the most valuable painting, but it's the hardest to get to, and focusing on other paintings first might remove the "stepping stones" you need to get there.

In the end, I only had time to make two levels, and both feel like they could have done with more polish, but all things considered, what's there is functional, and does a good job of giving room for the game's movement mechanics to shine. It's fun, and I'm proud of what we were able to put together!

We've been talking about doing a post-jam patch to add in some of the extra content that didn't make it into the game, and also expand a little with some more quality-of-life improvements, a little polish, and a bit more content.

If you check it out, I hope you find Snake Snacks interesting. I'm looking forward to sharing some post-jam work soon too!