OHSnake

The conquest has just begun...
Don't conquer the wrong state, or you'll freeze!
A relatively short conquest, only 3 states... Be sure to check out the diagnostic screen after each play!
Try your hand at conquering all 50 states without losing the game!

Inspiration

We have always enjoyed playing the snake game, but wondered why there were never any popular variations of the vanilla game. Back in middle school, we programmed this game on our calculators for endless fun in the classroom. Now, we thought we could theme the snake game in such a way for it to be entertaining all over again. We found an existing Github Repository, linked two sections below, that already contained the base snake game within HTML5, which we then forked and edited, under this rule of the competition in the MLH Code of Conduct: "Adding new features to existing projects is allowed. Judges will only consider new functionality introduced or new features added during the hackathon in determining the winners."

What it does

Building on the base snake gameplay, you are prompted to "eat" one of three states displayed on the screen, designated by the outline of the state. In order to progress in the game, you must eat the correct state, while avoiding the two incorrect states. The goal is to conquer all 50 states, and thus the USA. Ohio will prevail!

How we built it

We forked the base snake game from a GitHub repository by Rembound, protected by the MIT Software License, linked here. From there, we created our own custom sprite sheets and additional game logic, along with diagnostic information below the game board using vanilla Javascript, HTML, and CSS.

Challenges we ran into

We had a difficult time digesting the syntax eccentricities from Javascript, especially because the original snake game we forked off of GitHub was 7 years old. Javascript has evolved a lot since then. Our lack of experience in web programming caused us to get stuck on many minor issues during the course of programming.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

However, we're very proud that we managed to create a functional web-based game that is actually entertaining to play! There's a certain magic to pulling an all-nighter, and in the morning, finally being able to test and have fun with the game with friends. None of us had ANY experience with Javascript, and almost no experience with HTML/CSS.

What we learned

We learned how to apply the principles of game design to an entirely new beast of a programming language. We can safely say that we prefer programming games in Arduino-C or Pygame, rather than HTML/CSS/Javascript.

What's next for OHSnake

Once it gets approved, we plan on using our free domain name from "Domain.com" to push this game to the world wide web, so everyone can play! It would be nice to implement some server-side features to allow something like a global leaderboard for our game. Before implementing any extra features, we would first like to reorganize our code.