Hey all,

I present to you: the classic arcade game, Snake—in SimplePlanes, at last! What more can I say?

Fully functional and playable, the SimplePlanes edition of Snake comes bundled in a neat arcade machine package, complete with full VR compatibility, which allows you to use the joystick to actually play the game.

Gameplay & Controls

Gameplay is simple as it can be: it’s just Snake (with some twists)!

1. WASD (Pitch & Roll) is used to control the direction you want your snake to move in. Just know that you should only press one type of control at a time (i.e. don’t use Pitch and Roll controls simultaneously!).
2. You may pause/unpause the game at any time by pressing either the pause button or AG1.
3. Every time you eat a food cell, you gain an additional tail segment.
4. If you collide into any of your tail segments, you bite your own tail and lose, ending the game. This also includes trying to go in the opposite direction!
5. You’re allowed to pass through the world border on one side and out the other, and the game is contained in a 21 x 21 field.
6. Over the course of the game, as you accumulate more points, the game will accelerate. By the time you’re in 30 or so points, you’ll be moving quite quickly, so watch out!
7. If you reach 50 points, you “win” the game. The first person to achieve I’ll be awarding 5 upvotes to! Just submit a video of a successful run and tag me on it.

Technical Details

This build features a number of technological innovations that make full use of new features in 1.11 & 1.12. Most prominent is the usage of variable recursion. This simple but powerful feature allows programming logic far more powerful in Funky Trees, and its capabilities are in full display in this build. Building on variable recursion, the following features were implemented:

1. Full linear congruential generator RNG algorithm
   This simple but effective algorithm is an extremely popular method for computers to generate pseudorandom numbers. This has been fully implemented in the game’s food generation algorithm, which will generate a new food cell every time it’s consumed. The seed for the RNG generator is also randomized, making each and every game you play a pretty unique one!
2. Label Attribute Mechanics
   This build utilizes to a great extent the various text modification properties to fully animate the game scene. Most prominently are the position modifiers to control the position of the pixels, but also in full use are the color modification attributes which are used to hide inactive pixels.
3. Full conditional loops
   I’m now fairly confident that Funky Trees is Turing complete. We can not only do various kinds of mathematics, but we can also utilize conditionals in order to group code into logical blocks. For this build, pseudo-code was initially drafted which might have the following kind of structure:

Psuedo-code:

while (i<5) {
  doMethod();
  i++;
}

This can now be directly be converted to variable setter statements.
FT Edition:

doMethod = ... {activator = "i<5"}
i = i+1 {activator = "i<5"}

This is an incredibly powerful tool, and it’s very much possible to do practical programming in Funky Trees with the magic of variables (with the exception of string handling, as variables only take numbers).

With a package under less than 50 parts—maybe 4 for the actual mission critical components—the Snake game delivers an incredibly dense, technologically significant system that paves the way forth for the community to exploit Funky Trees even better.

Comments

So my first semester of engineering school is finally over! It’s been an incredibly busy and tough semester, but I’m now finally back to play the game that led me to becoming an engineer in the first place. This was actually an incredibly useful way to organize my thoughts about programming in general, especially since I’ve been doing C at school. It’s been coded over the span of maybe 3 or 4 weeks, and I’m glad to finally present this to everyone.

Happy holidays and happy snek gaming. I’ll see you in the next one.
- SnoWFLakE0s