Waypoint Zero

Andeli is the working title of a game that initially sought out to combine old-school Snake mechanics with Boggle- or Scrabble-like wordmaking. I had a ton of ideas initially ranging from "the letters are bombs" to "words are recipes". After a bunch of time spent working through different physical prototypes or mental models of gameplay, I decided to implement a digital prototype that I thought would be the most fun. After a few weeks of working out the core gameplay loop, what I have settled on is:

1) Mobile-friendly

2) No tails behind player

3) Each letter grants a unique ability

#1. This was conceived from the outset to be a mobile-friendly game, with inspiration from Snake and a Snake-like rogue-like called Nimble Quest (published around 2014). I tested a variety of input methods, including swipes that were 'cardinalized' into four direction (up, down, left, right), multi-swipe where the player could easily queue up multiple movements in one swipe, and a simple "touch the desired destination" method. While Snake emphasized split-second control over your snake, especially when the tail had grown quite long, I found that "swipe to move" made it difficult to reliably get the letter tiles you want, particularly when they were too close to other letters. "Touch the desired destination" was intuitive and allowed the player a reliable way to get the letter they were looking for. I use Astar pathfinding to find the best route. The current implementation has some errors with the way that I've mated it to the movement system. I wanted movement to be "locked in" once moving between integer position. In other words, I didn't want the player or enemies moving halfway towards the next tile and then suddenly reversing course. 

#2. I really liked the idea of tails behind players. It was a logical way to provide the player feedback of the current word they were spelling, and it was the main connection to the original inspiration of Snake. No tail, no Snake.  Unfortunately, there were a number of issues when bringing the Snake mechanics to a word game. First, spelling words is hard - you have to get the order of letters correct, or else you end up with gibberish. Original Snake just required the player to eat an apple while avoiding the ever-growing tail. However, avoiding the tail while also manuevering around a board full of random letters while searching for the right one proved to be just way too difficult in real-time. Second, English words were legible when moving up or right. However, moving down or left reversed the visual order of the words, making it even more challenging for the player.

#3 I was ambivalent about giving letters different powers, or even having powers at all. However, I really wanted to give players some interesting decisions to make. Rather than simply spelling "IS" or "CAT" over and over again, I felt that having each letter give special abilities would allow for the player to prioritize certain letters over others, and thereby add some tension. "Do I go for the E with a weak ability, or the higher-risk Q with a powerful ability?"

Anyway, Andeli is clearly a work in progress, but one that I hope to release sometime in 2021. I'm interested in feedback!