Bledge is a game I made in 2011 to participate to Santa Ragione’s game jam Lunarcade: Linee. Like the title implies in Italian, the theme was “Lines” (linee), and so I made this little 2-player snake clone, with a twist (literally).

The two players are fighting to block each other out with their trails, very much like Snake or Tron. But the trails have 3 colour bands, so it matters which side they are approached from. If approached from the bright side, the other player can safely cross their opponent’s line (see the first image below). If they hit the black side, they die.

The game had two special moves: hitting the key in the direction of movement would produce a little jump, allowing a skilled player to skip one tile and save themselves from certain death.

Hitting the key opposite to the direction of travel would make the spaceship twist, so that the the trail would flip colours. A great move to surprise an opponent that thought could travel through, not finding a wall in front of them.

Since the game plays obliquely, you control the two spaceships using oblique sets of keys: instead of a typical t-shaped WASD, player one uses a diamond-shaped SAXZ (see also the second image below), while player two uses JNKM.

Some more screenshots from the tutorial, gameplay, and game over screen:

Unfortunately like many of my older games made in Flash, I don’t have the executable and no videos available 🙁

One final screen I found, which made me smile: as I was working on the game, it was hard to distinguish the front from the back of the spaceships.

To help myself as I was debugging the line colours, I temporarily marked the back of the ship like this:

I am really happy with what I did with this game. It was made quickly, it had a coherent and clean graphic style, and fresh gameplay. Some days I hope my game jamming skills didn’t peak with this game and have been going downhill since then, but I have my doubts 🙂