Sometimes, a game concept sounds too ridiculous to work.
After I thought of this idea, it took me a long to time try it out, mostly because I assumed it would be a “joke game” that’s only fun due to the comedy of how frustrating it is. I imagined players getting endlessly confused by the need to press right to go left and vice-versa. But after some refinement, I was pleased to discover how well it worked as an arcade game that you can take seriously and get good at.
The most important change, by far, was rotating the entire screen to keep the snake oriented from the player’s perspective. At first, this was another joke; I just thought it would be funny to have the screen constantly tumbling left and right as you play. But this turned out to be the fix that made the game work! It became such an important pillar of the game that I used the rotating play area as the basis for the menu UI.
A trap that arcade-style games often fall into is making their difficulty curve too gradual. In a game where you start from the beginning every time you lose, it’s important that players aren’t stuck slogging through “the boring part” in order to climb back to a level of challenge that matches their skill.
Snark! is designed to get to the interesting part as fast as possible. Your snake starts 8 segments long, already two-thirds the width of the play area, and grows by two for each fruit eaten. For beginner players, for whom walls are the more immediate obstacle, this doubled growth rate won’t make much of a difference. But experienced players will appreciate how quickly the game gets to a point where routes need to be carefully planned.
To add another layer of skill to the game, I wanted to reward the player for planning well enough to play out their entire hand. But what should that reward be? It couldn’t be anything cumulative or permanent—otherwise, optimal play would require playing perfect hands over and over.
Temporarily cutting the snake’s length in half turned out to be the perfect solution. In the early game, it’s not a huge boon, so players are free to play fast and loose. But as the snake grows, the reward for pulling it off escalates in tandem with the difficulty, and the decision of whether or not to go for a perfect hand at a given moment becomes an exciting strategic decision.