Would a version of Snake be good for a first timer?

Topic.

This thing we're doing at my Digital Arts course is our first foray into game making, and I'm thinking of doing a kind of Snake game (even though I'm actually terrified of Snakes in general! Tonight's episode of Neighbours was pretty darn scary!).

Would this be simple enough?

In that book I got from eBay last week there's a version of Asteroids called Captain Blaster which looks OK, but I'd like to try something a bit more advanced even though I'm a total coding novice, apart from a bit of experience in VB.

 

Snake is actually a little hard for someone new to programming. You need to keep an array of body segment positions, create/destroy segments on the fly, etc.

It's not awful, but there are a lot of much simpler concepts out there — Angry Birds, Flappy Bird, Asteroids (as you said), etc. Don't scoff at something because it's simple — simple is what you should do for your first game. You can work up to more advanced stuff later.

 

Which on that note here is a tutorial series for the classic snakes game in Unity.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWeGoBm1YHVhc51TYY7fTLNbA02qkyLrA

 

This. Snake is deceptively difficult. I wouldn't recommend it for a first project.

Build flappy birds or space invaders first. Build snake second.

 

Yeah, I made a snake variant in Unity. I spent about a week nutting out how to do the movement so it looked smooth & turned a sharp 90°.

Space invaders is easy, you can then expand & start using sin, cos & tan to get interesting enemy movement. You can even make the bases out of lots of little blocks & destroy them as they get shot so it looks like they are disintegrating.

This is it if you wanted to check it out. It was a group project for a short course, I did the game stuff, someone else did the storing of the answers etc & showing the results & the other person did the entry screens. It was meant to be usable to teach kids their times tables.

http://gamejolt.com/games/math-snake/182648

 

We started working on a Boulderdash clone this morning, should be ready to show y'all in a few weeks.

 

Good luck. If you're allowed, share it in the design forum on the Feedback Friday thread (it will be stickied at the top).