And yeah, zex, I agree - diagonal-only movement *is* a strong weakness due to the parity issue - it's child's play to stand on a square the snake can't reach and just cut it down to size. Without changes, you'd need to have the designer limit its use to rooms where it's difficult to use such squares against it, or where its unique diagonal movement works well where other snakes wouldn't. With changes... well, you could give it the Seep-like ability to attack squares it's next to if there's something it wants on there, but that'll complicate the snake graphics issue even more. Or maybe its weakness is more localized rather than any middle segment of its body. It bears thinking about.
I'll admit I hadn't thought the whole thing through very well, but I still feel the idea is workable. Given the parity issue, I think it would have to have seep movement if you're right next to it, but that would end up adding 16 new tiles required, and could be kind of a pain. I also think the only thing that would end up interesting the snake enough to change spaces is Beethro (maybe a human), otherwise it would end up being a mostly diagonal monster, except where it doesn't want to, and confuses the rules.
I thought about the localized weaknesses, but I'm not really sure how that would work. Would you have a snake with a bunch of special tiles throughout his body, and when you hit one, it would divide into 2 snakes, each with localized weaknesses in the same place that the other ones did? now, if one of the new snakes doesn't have a localized weakness, it just dies? That seems similar to the snake heart idea at
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=10310&page=0#107169 except that it's more general.
First, here's the concerns. On a consistency standpoint, I disagree that when cutting the snake, the two heads should be facing you - you *already* have a head and a tail presumably far away from the cutting point. What happens to those? The most consistent result would be that the piece that has the head gets a new tail, and the piece that has the tail gets a new head. If the snake is cut multiple times in the same turn, then it's easiest to just say that pieces that were nearer along the snake towards the head become heads, and pieces that were nearer along the snake towards the tail become tails.
I feel that moving the heads towards the center where the snake was cut adds more puzzle potential, and helps to remove possibilities that make the room unsolvable, as it prevents (I really don't like rooms that try to put you in a place where you make the room unsolvable, like trapping a rattler into a hole when it's tail is inaccessible). I never really thought of the possibility of multiple cuts in 1 turn. I can see how it would be easier to just have heads spawn closer to the heads. I think, if the divider was cut multiple times in the same turn, the ends would end up with heads moving towards the center, as I said, except the areas between the first and last cuts on the snake would just die all at once. That makes sense to me, sort of like in the head is another tail, and in the tail is another head, but if you cut a whole section of center away, the spare heads/tails can't get there, and it dies. It also makes sense to me with that logic that if you had a spare head, you wouldn't send it leaving your tail exposed, you would send the head to fight off the attacker.
On top of that, how should such a snake block movement?
It's apparent that it would need to, otherwise it wouldn't make very much sense as a horde blocker. Coding wise, you could do a movement check when any monster is adjacent to a divider, and if it would step over it, simply prevent that move.
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In other news,
is a considerably more stylish way to express sarcasm than
, because everybody uses
and I am /indie/. INDIE, I TELL YOU.
/dy
