Designing the eight Snakoff modes
At first Snakoff had one way to play: 45 seconds, eat as much as you can. It's a good game, but the same goal every day starts to feel like a chore. So we designed eight modes that share one arena format and one tournament, and the day's mode is picked from the date so everyone plays the same one. This is how they came about, and what we got wrong along the way.
One rule for all of them
The hardest constraint was that every mode had to fit the same knockout. A round is cut at the median, and a median needs one ranking. So every mode maps onto the same order underneath: a main score first, then time alive as the tie-break. Classic's main score is food; Gold Rush's is points; Survival's is seconds alive. The leaderboard shows each in its own words, "23 food", "41 pts", "63 s alive", but the cut works the same way.
Each mode also plays on the day's usual map, and the round modifiers still apply on top: Round 2 is faster, Round 3 has one food fewer, and the final has both. A mode changes what a run is worth, not how the day is structured.
Changing the clock: Classic, Sprint, Marathon
Classic is the baseline: 45 seconds, starting at a comfortable speed and ramping up to the end.
Sprint and Marathon came from asking what happens if we only change the clock. Sprint is 20 seconds and fast from the very first move, so the opening route decides almost everything. Marathon is 90 seconds with a slow start and a long ramp. We expected Marathon to produce much higher scores, and at the top it did: in our simulation the best runs roughly doubled. But the median was no higher than on a Classic day. Longer runs mean longer snakes, and longer snakes crash more. That turned out to be exactly the kind of difference we wanted.
Changing the goal: Gold Rush and Harvest
Gold Rush makes some food worth more than others, so the nearest piece isn't always the best one. The first version used values of 1, 3 and 5. From 31 October it uses four gems, Bronze, Silver, Gold and Diamond, worth 1, 2, 3 and 5, with Diamonds rare. The spread of values is the same for everyone because it comes from the date's seed.
Harvest flips the goal: eat a fixed number of food as fast as you can, and your time is your score. We first set the target at 25. On paper that was fine; in testing, at the game's speeds, 25 took most players past the time cap, so most runs ended unfinished. We cut it to 12. Now a typical run finishes, and the race is about the route rather than endurance. A run that doesn't reach 12 still ranks, by how many it ate.
Changing what you see: Blackout and Rotate
Blackout and Rotate keep Classic's rules exactly and change only the screen. In Blackout the lights go out for a moment every few seconds, so you steer from memory. In Rotate the whole arena turns a quarter turn every 15 seconds. The board underneath never moves, which keeps them fair and easy to verify: a run replays on the server just like a Classic run.
Survival, twice
Survival was the mode we had to redesign. The first version had food, no timer, a five-minute cap and a speed ramp that got very fast. The idea was that the speed would end every run eventually. It didn't. A snake that settles into a small, safe loop can keep going, and in our simulation the best bots lasted the full five minutes. A mode where the winning move is to circle quietly isn't much of a contest.
So we rebuilt it. Survival now has no food at all. From 10 seconds in, walls start appearing on the arena, one new wall every five seconds, and from 45 seconds they come as two-cell pieces. Each one blinks for a second as a warning before it lands, and they're placed from the day's seed, so everyone faces the same walls at the same moments. Meanwhile your snake grows by itself, faster as the run goes on, and the speed steps up every 20 seconds. A safe loop doesn't stay safe for long. The goal is the same as before: stay alive, and the longest time wins.
The same lesson applies to the other modes. Wherever a run could be stretched out by circling, we're adding speed ramps and timed hazards so that playing well always beats playing safe.
Introducing them slowly
We didn't switch all eight on at once. Each mode joined the daily pool from its own date, and older days keep the rules they had, so their replays still check out. Before your warm-up, a mode card shows the name, the goal and whatever is specific to that mode, so nobody meets Harvest's target or Survival's walls for the first time in a run that counts. Practice plays yesterday's arena with today's mode, which is the easiest way to try one out first.