In earlier versions there was a problem with frequent ties. The safest move for both players was to go straight for a head on collision. Worst case scenario, a tie. Best case scenario, your opponent makes a horrible mistake and you win. As you can imagine, this incentivized some boring play styles.

In this update, I have reworked the way matches are set up in such a way as to eliminate ties, and set up incentives for interesting play styles. The two players will now alternate starting the round shorter than their opponent. If a player wins a round in which they started as the shorter centipede then they score a point. If the player who started the round as the longer centipede wins the match, or if the timer runs out, then no one scores that round. The first player to score 2 more points than their opponent wins.

In theory, this provides incentive for both players to engage each other in interesting battles for position.

The player who starts shorter will want to play aggressively since the best outcome of aggressive play is scoring and the worst outcome of aggressive play is the same as the best outcome of passive play, namely, the round ends and no one scores. However, since the shorter pede will die in a head on collision with the longer pede, the shorter player will be forced to cleverly plan their offense in such a way as to avoid head on collisions.

It would seem that the player who starts longer would have incentive to play passively and try to let the timer run out since that outcome would be the same as the outcome of killing his opponent. However, in practice, the longer centipede is too slow to easily run from the shorter centipede. Instead they must devise a more clever defense which leverages their superiority in head on collisions.

Other changes include a wider range of pede speeds, a new title screen, some new buttons, a scoreboard that indicates who is currently longer, performance optimizations, and some improvements to the AI that makes it better at playing as the shorter pede.

I plan to begin working on random map generation, but I may release some additional handmade maps before then.

Thanks for reading,
Zach