GD Snake

Snake, seen from the side - and this time gravity has an opinion.

Your snake is a rigid body. Step off a ledge and the whole thing drops. Apples make you longer, and length is the only way up: to reach a ledge H cells high you need at least H+1 segments, anchored on the ground, so the snake can rear up and grab the edge.

There is no timer and no twitch. Every press moves you exactly one cell, then the game stops and waits. If you die, it's because you thought wrong - and the retry is instant.

The goal

Get the snake's head onto the exit, either by stepping there or by falling onto it. That's the whole win condition.

The catch is that the exit works the moment you touch it, so being too long can be as fatal as being too short. Sometimes the solution is to skip an apple on purpose, because the next corridor is one cell too narrow for the snake you would have become.

You die by falling off the bottom of the level, or by touching a spike with any part of your body.

What's in the levels

• Apple - step on it and grow by one. Items are only consumed by a deliberate step: the head never falls into them, so you can rest on top of an apple and leave it alone.
• Spike - lethal from every side, to every segment.
• Poison apple - the opposite of an apple: you shrink by one. At length 2 it kills you.
• Teleport pair - up to five separate pairs per level, each with its own icon and colour so you can see what connects to what. Walk into one portal and the snake threads through to its twin. Portals also act as floor: you can land on one and stand there.
• Pushable box - shove it sideways with your head. It has its own gravity, it holds up whatever stands on it, and it travels through portals. Build yourself a staircase.
• One-way floor - you can pass through it from below, but it holds you from above.
• Gravity switch - touch it and gravity flips upside down. Each switch has a limited number of uses, so you have to plan which way up you want to be.
• Key - the exit stays locked until you have collected every key on the level.

Gravity applies to everything: the snake and each box fall as separate rigid bodies until something supports them. Half the puzzles are solved by the physics rather than in spite of it.

Levels

• TUTORIAL - 5 short levels, one new idea at a time.
• MAIN - 20 levels, the main set, in rising difficulty.

Every level is hand-made and verified solvable by a solver. The game remembers your best step count for each level, so once you have beaten one there is a second game: beat it in fewer moves. A level grid (hold fire during play) shows your records and lets you jump around freely - nothing is gated, you can skip a level that has you stuck and come back later.

Controls

• Joystick in port 2, or
• C64: W A S D · Plus/4: cursor keys
• Fire / SPACE / RETURN - confirm in menus
• Hold fire - open the in-game level grid (jump to any level, restart the current one, or leave)

Requirements

A Commodore 64 or a Commodore Plus/4 - real hardware or an emulator (VICE: x64sc / xplus4). Both machines get their own native build, with a custom character set, sound and joystick support.