About the project
Snakes & Snails is a hobby game I'm making in my spare time. It's a cozy 3D adventure where you play a snail protecting five gardens from snakes who get scared off, never killed.
It isn't a business. There's no Kickstarter, no publisher, no roadmap I owe anyone. I just like the idea of a game where the worst thing that happens is a snake gets embarrassed.
Where the idea came from
I made the first version of this years ago to teach my kids how to code, when they were five. We were living in California then, and our yard had actual snakes and actual snails out in it. That early version was simpler than this one: a photograph of a real snail as the player character, and a photograph of a rubber snake for the bad guys. That was the whole game.
This Unity rebuild is the same idea, in 3D. Same small creatures, same small yard, same rule about nobody getting hurt.
What it is
Five small yards, dawn to moonlit. The Tulip Lawn at morning. The Vegetable Patch at midday. The Wildflower Meadow in the afternoon. The Greenhouse at dusk. The Moonlit Garden at night.
In each yard there's a family who lives there — baby snails, ladybugs, butterflies, bees, fireflies. A snake shows up. You scare it off with slime. The fireflies cheer. That's the whole loop.
The boss of each yard is a grumpy garden snake, not a menacing one. Old Hognose is lost from his patch, not on a rampage.
How it's made
Unity 6, one person, evenings and weekends. Everything in the game is generated procedurally in C# at runtime — no scene-editor authoring. The two scenes in the project each contain a single bootstrap GameObject; everything else is built from code.
That's a weird choice for a small game and probably a slow one, but it's the part I find fun.
Where it's at
Early. The first yard plays through. The other four are sketched. Most of what you'd want to see in screenshots doesn't exist yet.
If any of this sounds like your kind of thing, follow along on X at @sns2game. I post when something interesting happens, which isn't every week.