Paper Loop

Record body

Abstract

You are a snek. 🐍 Slip out of your home turf, trace a path across the grid, and close it back into your own territory to claim everything you enclosed — the more ground you take, the bigger you get. But the trail you leave behind is your weak spot: run over a rival snek's trail to knock them out, and never let anyone touch yours. Movement is clean and grid-based — you step square by square in four directions, and every turn folds the trail like a ribbon of paper. Seal a rival's trail inside one of your captures and they are eliminated on the spot. Corner a bot, close the loop, and watch the whole region flip to your colour. Your opponents are neural bots: a small reinforcement-learning network trained by self-play, running entirely on your device — no network needed. There is also a hand-written scripted bot for a lighter, cleaner challenge. Switch between a light "paper" theme and a dark one from the start screen, and your own colour is drawn fresh every game. Features: * Classic grid-based territory capture — step, draw, and close the loop to claim ground. * On-device neural self-play bots (no network) plus a scripted fallback. * A folded-ribbon trail, smooth "virus" death dissolves, and a live minimap. * Light and dark themes, and a random player colour each game. * A local high score. No accounts, no ads, no tracking, no network access. * Tiny download and fully playable offline. Paper Loop is built with libGDX and is free and open-source software, licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0.