faces from Reddit's "Rage Comics"
"Reddit Snake" is an Adobe Flash-based game designed for social news website Reddit.com (Alexa rank: 112). The game is currently featured in permanent rotation in Reddit's side ad-space with other games and paid ads (see screenshot). Reddit allows enthusiastic game developers to submit homemade games (sized 300*250 pixels) to be seen in place of advertisements, to encourage the site's readers to disable ad-blocking browser plugins, and to attract readers' eyes to a space that normally contains paid advertisements.
The game Snake was chosen for its 'retro' to appeal to Reddit's target audience, and the ability to easily begin and end a session while web browsing. This is needed because of the nature of the game's placement (and really, the nature of Reddit itself)—pages are quickly changed when readers go from one link to the next. The game must load quickly to not slow down the website (and therefore needs few, compressed assets), must appear polished, and should have enough replay value to keep players entertained. References and in-jokes to the site are often included in these games.
The game was created in Adobe Flash CS5 with ActionScript 3. When finished, the SWF came to a total of 156 KB, including image, font and sound assets. A sleek, modern and minimalist style was chosen for the game.
After posting the game to the "WebGames" community on Reddit.com on April 4, 2011 for public playtesting, the game yielded over 2,000 hits, 100 upvotes and 80 comments in under a day (link to thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/WebGames/comments/giujf). Throughout the day on April 5, I personally read and responded to each comment, taking the feedback into consideration and updating the game's code with many new features while ironing out glitches that the community noticed.
Snake is a simple game: the player begins as a one-block "snake" able to move around the screen in four directions using the arrow keys. At any given point, an "upvote" arrow (from Reddit) will be on screen, which increases the snake's size by a block, the point counter by 1 and the game's speed by 0.2 frames per second. At 25 and 50 points, an orange envelope (referred to as an "orangered" on Reddit) appears, which allows the player's snake to pass through itself once per envelope.
The game becomes more difficult to control as the snake grows larger, and more coordination is required as the speed increases. The game ends when a player touches one of the game's four walls, or if the snake collides with itself.
The Game Over screen features six different faces from Reddit's "Rage Comics" depending on the final score: David Silverman's "Seriously?" face appears for a score of 2 or less, a drawing of Yao Ming laughing appears for a score of 3 through 5, a "trollface" appears for a score of 6 through 9 (with his accompanying catchphrase, "Problem?"), and typical happy "rage faces" appear for scores 10-19, 20-29 and 30+.
According to Google's traffic statistics about Reddit.com, 76% of users are male, 34% of users are age 35-44, 28% are 25-34 and 14% are 18-24. According to a February blog post on Reddit.com, the site now pulls in over one billion page views per month (a number shared by only around 100 websites).
Users of the site are typically interested in news, technology, humor, and gaming.
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| Snake Title Screen - Spacebar also begins | Snake gameplay |
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| Pause screen activated by losing focus or Spacebar | Game Over screen - featuring varying faces from Reddit's "Rage Comics" |
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| GUI mockup of main Snake gameplay | GUI mockup #2 - with envelope rare item |
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| GUI mockup of Game Over screen with Y U NO guy | |