Diving into Spatial Gaming with Snak on Snap Spectacles

Hey everyone! We're thrilled to share our exciting journey developing "Snak", our first shipped game for the Snap Spectacles and also our first shipped AR glasses game! This fast-paced project took us from concept to launch in just one month, and we learned so much along the way.

Smooth Sailing with Spectacles

We were impressed by the Snap Spectacles' form factor. They're sleek, lightweight, and easy to share, which made collaboration within our team smooth. Passing them around and getting quick feedback felt just like the old days of handing out a pad to a friend. We want to insist how refreshing that felt for us XR veterans, snappy, reliable hand-overs…bliss.

Intuitive Hand Tracking & Controls

Implementing hand tracking for "Snak's 3D movement was surprisingly simple. We invented an innovative pinch-drag control scheme that feels natural and precise, and new players grasped it almost instantly. We call it the Pinch-Pull Joystick. You heard it here first!

Streamlined Development in Lens Studio

Migrating to Lens Studio was much smoother than we anticipated as we feared new language, new engine, new everything. And yet the platform's Unity-like interface and clear documentation along with its assistant AI made it easy to get up to speed quickly. We were impressed by the rapid iterations – pushing builds to the device and testing in real-time was efficient. Integrating assets like models, textures, and audio was also smooth, and the built-in physics system worked fine for our interactions.

Snak

Here’s the gameplay video.

The Spectacles' field of view is a challenge so we opted for a game with scrolling where the player’s attention is always centered. That’s key for the players’ hand to stay in view without them having to be conscious about it.

Quickly our spatial snake felt hypnotic and our musician wouldn’t sleep on the occasion for ambient music.

As Hollow Knight fans (come on Silk Song, come out already) we thought of brambles as a good solution for a super low poly natural decor that we could morph into any shape quickly and which would evoke its gameplay role: get stung and you lose but feel slithery and you gob food by coiling around a gnarly nest mesh of them!

Positive Learnings & Future Excitement

Overall, our experience with Lens Studio and the Snap Spectacles was very positive. The familiar design of Lens Studio helped us onboard quickly, and its tools enabled us to build "Snak" in record time, a game we're honestly quite proud of already.

Code and project

You can check the beauty or horror of our code yourself at this Github repo.
If you're a lucky user of Spectacles, you can find Snak here.

Conclusion

A month into our collaboration with Snap, we're hyped and we're eager to stop cleaning our code for that github and writing this blog post and dive into our second Pinch-Pull Joystick game for the Spectacles.