From Game Jam to the Snake King's Tomb

Back in 2021, my kid Fintan–fifteen at the time–and I sat down for a weekend to enter our very first game jam. ZenoJam 3, theme: “It Never Ends.” We built Tomb of the Snake King in Unity, a roguelike-meets-snake game where you collect cursed treasure that follows you around, growing your tail while you dodge mummies and scarabs. Fintan and little sister Ellie did all the pixel art and music. We came 5th out of 79 entries, which for a first jam felt pretty great! It certainly inspired us to try more, although I don’t think we’ve ever done as well since :-D

The original was rough around the edges–we ran out of time for half the features we wanted, the walls were instant death (because we had so few enemies that it was simpler if the only safe thing to touch was gold), and the whole thing was held together with the kind of code you write at 2am on a Sunday. But there was something there. The core loop of collecting gold while your tail grows and the space shrinks: that had legs. Or, well, no legs. It’s a snake.

Fast forward a few years. Fintan’s 20 now, studying game design in college, and we’ve rebuilt ToSK from scratch as a proper retro arcade game. The roguelike angle is gone. It’s closer to games like Pac-Man, Dig Dug or Boulder Dash now — turn-based grid movement, authored levels, pattern recognition, and that Indiana Jones hat-under-the-door tension of threading yourself through a gap that’s about to close. The game jam prototype was the proof of concept: this is the real thing.

What We’ve Built

The game runs on Godot with a native C++ core handling all the simulation. Everything is deterministic and tick-based: same inputs, same result, every time. The Godot layer handles rendering and input, the native layer handles the rules. Clean separation, and it means we can test the entire game logic without ever spinning up a window. This makes my TDD-oriented soul very happy. We have so many tests. (“Too many!”–Fintan). We’ve also picked up a friend along the way, Alex, who really understands frontend development, leaving Fintan free to focus on “the best bit”: game design.

Five Biomes

The original had one tileset and a handful of enemy types. Now we’ve got five distinct biomes, each with its own enemies, hazards, and mechanics:

Tomb is where it started, but we’ve leaned a bit more into the pseudo-ancient Egypt theme: mummies patrol horizontally, scarabs patrol vertically, snakes chase you, and mimics sit dormant until you get close enough to wake them up.

Jungle introduces the trap system. Arrow traps fire across rows when you step on a trigger tile. Boulder traps drop down columns — but only once per level, so you can bait them out. Spike traps extend from walls when you walk past. The whole biome is about reading the floor and knowing which tiles are safe. This one makes me feel most like Indie–I just wish we could’ve included a way to swap out an idol for a bag of sand!

Ice adds sliding physics. Step onto ice and you keep moving until you hit something solid, which means you really need to plan ahead with your moves. Add in the Ice Imps, who are stationary but throw snowballs at you, and the Polar Bear who takes up four tiles, and this biome becomes gnarly to navigate.

Gothic is, as you might expect, dark. Literally–you can only see the few tiles around you that are lit by your lantern, and walls block line of sight. Statues chase you but freeze when you can see them (yes, Weeping Angels, we know). Ghosts travel in straight lines between grave markers, passing through everything in between. I think this is actually the trickiest biome because of how much your view shrinks.

Lava brings the most complex enemies. The Firewurm burrows up from the ground and back down, mini-volcanos shoot molten lava, and the Lava Demon keeps his beady eye on you, appearing from the lava in front of where you’re going to be. To paraphrase the Dread Pirate Roberts, the Lava Biome certainly keeps you on your toes (hmmm, maybe we should put in Rodents of Unusual Size…).

Power-ups and Inventory

You pick up items as you go, and some persist across levels. Shields absorb one hit. Poles let you jump a pit. The Whip gives you unlimited pit-jumping for the current map (yes, Indiana Jones fantasy definitely playing out here, no apologies). The Hourglass freezes all enemies. Bullets let you fire a projectile to take out an enemy at range. There’s a rhythm to learning what each biome demands and managing your resources accordingly.

What’s Next

We’re working toward getting ToSK on Steam. Right now we’re focused on getting the art sorted (mostly that’s me at the moment, so don’t expect a huge jump in quality–we’re leaning into the 80s era vibe of the game) and polishing the levels. There’s more to do on the UI side, and we’ll need audio that isn’t placeholder. But the game plays well, the tools are solid, and the content pipeline is ready.

It’s been a good journey from a weekend jam entry to something we’re genuinely proud of. Fintan went from a fourteen-year-old drawing pixel art and writing sketchy C# to a game design student building levels in a tool we made together. That’s the best part, honestly.

More updates as we get closer to release. If you’ve got questions about the game or the tech, let us know.