Sneech Latest

After a rather long break things are moving slowly again. I was hoping to get a new beta release out before blogging anything more but things are really moving slower than expected. The reason is I’m trying to keep everything neat and well designed, so new features fit in cleanly and fewer bugs crop up. It should also make future networking (internet, wifi or bluetooth play) easier to implement.

The latest feature to be added was the Bombs. In one frantic coding session I added the basic bombs feature and it worked well. You now buy some bombs in the shop, but the bombs are inactive when the match starts. You see an icon for each bomb at the bottom of the screen. At any time you can activate a bomb by tapping the icon (desktop version will use a button or keystroke.) You then see a visual representation of the bomb on the front of your snake (currently a chrome looking head.) From that point on, the bomb works similarly to original Sneech; you just ram into an opponent. Bomb damage is restricted to a radius (currently a 12×12 square), and a maximum of 16 segments damage in total. That’s all flexible, so things will change. Damage is not restricted to the victim you hit, so anyone else inside the blast will take a hit also (up to 16 segments each.) The segments destroyed are all inside the blast zone, so if you ram a long opponent  in the middle of his body, you will blast a large hole and you’ll drive right through. The head of the opponent is never affected, unless he was small enough to be completely destroyed.

2 futher ideas….

Maybe you can activate/prime more than 1 bomb at a time. Then you would ram an opponent once, and then chase after him for a second collision. Of course, a double power bomb would be cool but would spoil some of the fun.

I don’t like the idea of players activating the bomb a second before ramming an opponent. So, I thought it might take 5-10 seconds for the bomb to prime and reach full capacity. That way, other players get a visual warning that a bomb is activated and can take action.

So, most of this has been done already. I then realised I needed to teach the CPU players to buy bombs, decide when to activate them, and then use them. This was not as easy as it sounds (teaching cpu player it’s ok to collide with opponents in certain cases etc.), but its mostly done now.

The rest of the work is really just finding the right audio and visual effects, the right bomb icons, and fine tuning the cpu ai. Its not far off though!

One reason for this blog post is (other than to get feedback on the above ideas) I’m only finding the time once a week to work on the game (usually Sunday’s) so the rest of the week I can still gather and refine ideas. I’ll try and do some more midweek also.

Another Update

Once again I’m starting with an apology for the lack of updates, news, and general feedback of late. for various reasons I’m been rather distracted these past months. I had planned to “quickly” port two of my smaller games (PegIt and BombDunk) to iPhone as a way of keeping the output going as I worked on Sneech as more of a slow-burner project. Unfortunately (with various distractions) the project got left aside a little longer than planned!

Now, my puzzle game ‘PegIt’ is reaching the point of Beta/Release, I hope to pick up where I left off with Sneech. One of the first targets will be to put out a rough Windows and Mac beta, so you can all have a play! My iPhone framework has undergone some changes with the development of these other games, so it will take a bit of work to get the iPhone beta up and running again, but that wont be too far away.

It was great fun working on Sneech again, and I practically took 3 months out from all my other work to get the project up and running.  Unfortunately I now have to juggle my various projects (as well as marketing, promotions etc.) to keep business flowing. I will find some big chunks of time to devote to Sneech again, particularly when it reaches Beta and I get close to an initial iPhone release. For the next few weeks I will be picking up the pace again.

I just wanted to let everyone know things are still go!

Original Sneech Source Code

The original Sneech was written in AMOS Pro, a type of BASIC geared towards rapid game development. I has planned to run some conversion processes over the original source code to extract at least some functions that could be reused. I hoped, at least I could recover some basic algorithms, and some long forgotten game rules, or scoring systems, that would make a port easier.

Unfortunately I’ve not really managed to extract much at all. I’ve copied some timings out, score values, some snake characteristics, player starting points, and some sample frequencies. but thats about it!

The problem back then was, even though I was trained to write wonderful structured, and formatted code, the system i was working on just didn’t make that easy or viable. I coded 100% of Sneech on an old portable TV screen. The screen mode was 320×256, so as to save my eyes from too much work, I tried to keep the source code tight, to reduce scrolling about!

I was also working on an Amiga with just 1Mb of ram (and floppy disks only!), but I was targeting minimum-spec as an Amiga A500′s with 512MB of ram. The most annoying thing about the AMOS language was the interpreted nature of it meant the cleaner your code was, the more ram it took up when running! I used to find all sorts of ways to make the source code uglier, and the memory requirement lower! (note: the compiler didn’t change this at all.) The use of short variable names like TL for tail, LTH for length, and so on, also kept the footprint lower. This was probably the last time I ever used GOTO in program, that’s how bad it was!

I thought I would take this chance to present to you the whole source code, unedited, with all the comments still missing (comments also caused runtime memory bloat so were of course not used!)

Here is the original AMOS source in text format: sneechpro.txt

Also, a version partially converted to C with some automated script I created. don’t expect it to look any less ugly:  sneechpro-hybrid.txt

You can see from the source code that the very first lines I wrote were on the 14th of September 1994. So, lets see if the first iPhone version will get released before the 15th anniversary!

(I don’t expect anyone to do anything with the source code, but feel free to modify it if you like. I might be able to find the original set of data banks, if needed. Just let me know if you want it! )

Sneech Plans and FAQs

Yesterday I sent out emails to everyone that had emailed me about Sneech over the past 10 years! I’m sure some of those email addresses have long since gone out of service. Maybe those people will eventually hear about Sneech and get in touch — please do.

However, quite a few did get through ok, so that’s good!

I’ve been asked quite a  few questions, and thought I’d go over some of the faq’s here, to clear things up.

Q. Will there be a Network mode to play over the Internet or LAN?

A. Yes! This is a core part of the current rewrite and everything I do takes into consideration the ability to play over a network. I’m not 100% sure the Internet will be fast (low latency) enough for sneech at high speed play, but LAN play should certainly be great! Also, on iPhone (in a future update) I’m planning Bluetooth head-to-head mode and probably Wifi mode too.

Q. Will there be support for other Phones, like N97, Palm Pre, Sony-Ericsson, Android etc.?

A. Not until the game project is  highly tested, bug-fixed and more complete. Conversions to these types of devices may need a rewrite in Java, and may also require modifications that would cause the code base to be “forked”. Currently the iPhone/Windows/Mac versions share 95% of the code, so only a small piece is rewritten for each platform.

Q. When is a Windows/Mac Version available to try?

A. I currently develop/test Sneech in Windows, although it’s a bit rough (has poor keyboard input), and is currently set to mimic the iPhone screen size (480×320). Maybe in 2 weeks time I’ll rework it a little, for a bigger screen (maybe 800×600), and improve the keyboard control, and make it available on this Blog. A Mac version would take another few days. Once I get a little further with the game I’ll keep you posted!

Q. How about a Linux version?

A. That should be simple to do, but I just have to prioritise my time, so a Linux port would be done once the project matures on Windows/Mac.

That should cover most of the popular questions…..

Just a quick note about pricing. The iPhone version will be released at 99c, and then there will be regular updates adding advanced features, hopefully leading up to (but not promising yet!) Bluetooth and WiFi play, where the price may go up by a dollar or two.

Sneech on other platforms wont cost much more, and it will be free to anyone who played the original

About Sneech

Sneech was a popular ‘shareware’ video game on the Amiga personal computer, way back in 1995, and updated/maintained for almost 2 years. Back then the game was written using AMOS Pro, on a 512k computer running at 14.4Mhz, using a 320×256 pixel display in 32 colours! We did have up to 4 Joysticks though!

The game fuses the classic ‘Snake‘ genre with Multiplayer deathmatch action. Today most people will recognise the game as Nokia Snake, but Sneech pre-dates Nokia snake by some years. The Snake genre goes back as far as the mid 70′s! Sneech was a different beast altogether!

Today Sneech is being rewritten from scratch in highly portable C++ code, using standard technologies like OpenGL for rendering. The game will initially be tested and released for iPhone, but Windows and Mac versions will soon be developed alongside. Mmuch of the Network Multiplayer functionality will be tested on a Windows version, before it gets added to iPhone (in a later revision) and Mac.

The modern Sneech will feature high resolution displays, Multiplayer (via Network) support via Bluetooth/WiFi/LAN/Internet, lots of new effects, all the classic sounds sampled from the original Amiga version, plus new sounds, graphics, and game modes.