Sumo Digital

A prototype accident became the Snake Pass tech demo. Designer Seb Liese was learning Unreal Engine by building a physics rope and forgot to attach it to the ceiling. It fell and coiled in an interesting way, so he made it controllable and added a head, creating the snake.

Liese won his job at Sumo Digital with user-made LittleBigPlanet levels, and learning Unreal Engine was his first task. Sumo also made Sonic Racing and LittleBigPlanet 3.

The core idea came from real snakes, not other games. Liese had kept pet snakes and had been a biology teacher, so he knew how snakes move. Sumo borrowed details from Spyro and Banjo-Kazooie, but the central mechanic came from the real world.

Mark Brown compares this to Miyamoto turning music, pets and gardening into games, and Lucas Pope basing Papers, Please on passport checks he met while travelling.

Asking what the snake can't do turned a demo into a game. Early ideas like sneaking and killing, coiling and springing, and growing and shrinking by eating fruit all failed. The team then removed jumping, which every 3D platformer hero does constantly, and the game became one about climbing vertical structures the snake winds around.

Dropping the jump forced changes to almost everything about 3D platformer design, starting with the controls. Brown suggests the same question elsewhere: a shooter where you can't shoot, or a driving game where you can't brake. Quote: "the team had stop thinking about what the snake could do - and instead think about what the snake can't do."

Making the player's own body the danger replaced enemies and combat. The player steers only the head while 35 collision spheres trail behind. Wrapping the body around a pillar creates grip, but a body dangling over an edge makes Noodle slip and fall.

The stick aims the head relative to the camera, holding A lifts it, and the right trigger drives it forward, so real speed needs a serpentine zig-zag. Each sphere tracks what it and its neighbours touch and whether it is part of a bend. Brown notes that adding enemies leads to a combat system and then a game like every other.

Moves are learned through practice, with optional aids to set difficulty. The tutorial ends quickly and moves are never taught, so players master the tug-of-war between momentum, friction and gravity by experimenting. The left trigger grips tighter and Y has the hummingbird Doodle lift the tail.

Liese says getting better at anything triggers a part of the brain that makes it pleasant. Players can collect only the three key stones per level or also chase blue bubbles and gold coins.

Difficulty rises through level layout, and some mechanics give relief. Later levels make slipping easier and falls costlier: bamboo rods lose end caps, gaps and angles vary, and frames move from safe ground to over spikes, fire and thin air. Water lets Noodle move freely as a brief respite from the risk of falling.

Moving platforms require a body position that stays safe when the platform flips upside down.

A bold design divides players, and Sumo accepted that cost. Some players call Snake Pass a frustrating mess and others a fantastic challenge. Brown argues that outside inspiration, subtraction and unusual dangers produce original games at the price of divided opinion.