Confetti for the winner
A win effect and per-viewer reveal rule let every player see one clear ending, even when a duel ends with both a winner and a crash.
The game already gave a crash its own visual beat, but winning still went straight to the recap. The missing part was not merely confetti. Daily has one snake and a word-limit win, while AI Duel and PvP usually produce a winner at the same moment another snake crashes. The design had to decide what each player should see, where the effect should begin, and how long the result should remain on the board.
One outcome per viewer#
The visual question went through a throwaway prototype first. It settled on confetti fired from the winning snake’s head, arcing towards the horizontal centre of the board and falling under gravity. The restrained gold, head, and body colours keep it inside the game’s palette, and the particles fade before reaching the board edges. This follows the same canvas-overlay architecture as the collision burst, but the motion reads as celebration rather than impact.
The harder decision was simultaneity. A duel can end with one snake winning while the other collides, but showing both effects to both players would make each ending compete with itself. The planning discussion chose a viewer-relative rule instead: a winner sees their own confetti, a player who crashed sees their own collision burst, and the non-crashing side of a draw sees no effect. A player gets one verdict, not a replay of everything the engine knows.
Keep the rule shared#
The existing recap selector was extended rather than copied into three mode-specific versions. It now chooses the visible effect and delay from the viewer’s outcome, including the awkward case where a crashing AI Duel player can still win on score. Win takes priority there. PvP forfeits remain immediate because no final engine turn exists to anchor an animation, while reduced-motion handling keeps the short breathing space without playing the particles.
The result is a clearer ending across Daily, AI Duel, and PvP, built from one small decision that every mode shares: show the player the outcome that belongs to them. The confetti supplies the celebration, but the useful part is the boundary around it. Each screen now has one effect, one pause, and one recap saying what happened.