I sat down to write a Snake clone.
Not for any good reason. Snake’s on every “top 10 games to build” listicle, every YouTube tutorial, every dev’s CV. So’s Pong. So’s the endless runner. I know this. I built one anyway. (Probably.)
Ok, not a straight up Snake clone, its a Snake platformer.
Got to the stage every solo dev hits – the bit where you’ve got the mechanics working, the screen looks right, and now it needs sound. Crunch when the slinky thing eats. Bloop when it grows. Fail tone when you smack a wall.
Now, I ended up calling it a Worm not a Snake. Mechanically identical, but Worm is less done to death – and the Snake brand is taken by every bored CS student since 1976.
(Quick gut-check while writing this: 1,062 Snake games on Steam. 654 Worms. 283 Slugs. 95 Caterpillars. So Worm wasn’t the boldest call, but it wasn’t the worst either. Caterpillar would have been the play out if these Vermiforms… Hindsight, ay.)
Internal name: Crave. The name I’ll probably stick because internal names always do, but the mechanic doesn’t actually care what species the slinky thing is. It’s gotta eat and get bigger regardless.
More on the game itself in Crave: what that Snake game actually turned into – turns out I built more of it than I thought.
Anyway. Sound.
The free sound pack rabbit hole
Started where everyone starts – Googling free sound effect packs. Freesound, OpenGameArt, that kind of thing. Plenty of stuff but most of it doesn’t quite fit. You either compromise and use the closest thing to what you wanted, or you go custom.
I went custom. Or tried to.
That’s when I remembered a site I’d dabbled with a year or two ago. Couldn’t remember the name. Spent twenty minutes searching for “AI music generator free credits something Sun-something” before it clicked.
Suno.
Looking back at the receipts
Logged in. Found my old account. First track: “Digital Ravager” 1 May 2024, 20:00. A genuinely terrible heavy thrash thing I’d made on free credits and then ignored.
Scrolling through that period there were a few survivors worth keeping. The one I actually still like:
🔗 Oioi Pirates Call (original) – a shanty/grime hybrid. Grime isn’t my scene but this stuck because of the very British sound. Pirate-themed bars over a shanty backbone is a genuinely fun collision. Functional first-album energy.
A bit later there was:
Then I stopped using it. Didn’t think much more of it. That was meant to be the end of it.
Mild Disclaimer
The music on this post is presented under the fragile assumption that my own jaded sense of taste, questionable judgement, and possible self-delusion have not completely betrayed me.
You may not agree with my opinions, my self-appointed grandeur, or any claims — implied or otherwise — of musical prowess.
In fact, there is a perfectly reasonable chance that all of this is absolute trash.
Coming back for the game
Two years later, here I am, looking for sound effects for a worm.
Logged back in. Free credits!
But the tool had clearly moved on. Tried to generate a song for the game – something with retro arcade-leaning vibes
That came out really good. Genuinely good. Problem was I had no idea how to actually wire that into the game. So I shelved it and made a non-lyrical instrumental instead, which was easier to drop in:
Job done. Back to coding the game.
Except.
The Remix button
There’s a Remix button on Suno. Hmm.
What if I took the original Oioi Pirates Call – the 2024 one – and ran it through the new version of the model. Same lyrics, same’ish vibe, two years of model improvements between them.
Massive improvement. Same song, properly (AI) produced. That’s the moment a tool stops being a curiosity and starts being a thing.
I should have gone back to the game. I did not go back to the game.
The track that hooked me
After several tangents – three branches into the fourth rabbit hole – and a long chat with the AI of the day, this came out:
A villain’s monologue set in a literal D&D session. Tim Curry purring through the verses, Mark Hamill’s Joker by the bridge. The mimic gag – chest is a mimic, door is a mimic, floor is a mimic, tavern wench is a mimic – escalating until the whole world is teeth.
This is the one that solidified Suno in my mind as something with real potential. Not a toy. Not a curiosity. A tool I could actually use to make something I’d want to play to other humans.
The game still didn’t have its sound effects.
What happened next
The aftermath turned into roughly twenty more songs and an album. That’s the next post.
🤷
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If you fancy a poke at Suno yourself, here’s an invite link – we both get free credits, which is how this whole thing got started in the first place.