A cozy game where nobody dies.

This is a 3D adventure built solo, in code. The premise is simple: you play a snail. You travel across five yards — each one a different time of day — and protect the families who live in each garden from snakes who are scared off, never killed. The snail, when overwhelmed, hides in its shell. The bosses are grumpy, not evil. The fireflies cheer when you save them.

I wanted to make a small action game that didn't have any death in it. Not as a constraint, but as the whole point.

Where the idea came from

I'd been thinking about why I drift away from action games as I get older. It isn't the violence in the abstract — it's the cumulative weight of every action being framed as kill-or-be-killed. Even the cozy genre often defaults to it: you're not killing the slimes, but you're "defeating" them, and the slime sound effect is still a death rattle. The mental load of "everything that's not me wants to be erased" gets tiring.

So I started a thought experiment. Could I build a game where every system that looked like combat actually resolved without anyone dying? The answer turned out to be yes. When the snake reaches 0 HP, it doesn't die — it runs away to the nearest rock and burrows under it, embarrassed. When the snail reaches 0 HP, it doesn't die — it hides in its shell, and the game-over screen reassures you the family will rebuild.

What I didn't expect was how much that one rule changed the rest of the design. The garden families exist because the snail needed someone to protect, and that someone needed to be a person, not a number. The five yards exist because each one has a different family with a different reaction to the same events. The boss is named Old Hognose because once you commit to "no one dies," the antagonist has to have a personality you can root for.

How it's built

The whole game is procedurally generated. There's no scene-editor authoring at all. The two scenes are each a single bootstrap GameObject with a script attached, and that script wipes the rest of the scene at startup and rebuilds everything in C# at runtime. Every mesh, every material, every prefab, every UI element is built in code.

This isn't because I have anything against artists. It's because I'm one person, I don't have an artist, and the procedural approach lets me iterate at a pace where the game can actually get made. A new yard isn't a level-design pass; it's a few new entries in a YardData table. A new snake variant isn't a new model; it's a new case in a switch statement.

The five yards

• The Tulip Lawn — morning. Baby snails as the family. The tutorial yard.
• The Vegetable Patch — late morning. Ladybugs.
• The Wildflower Meadow — afternoon. Butterflies. An open meadow with no fence.
• The Greenhouse — dusk. Bees and baby snails.
• The Moonlit Garden — night. Fireflies. Boss yard, where Old Hognose lives.

How to keep up

The Steam page is coming. Until then, follow on X for devlog clips, screenshots, and the slow grind toward shipping.

If you want to email, I read every one: hello@snakesandsnailsgame.com