Quick Snake

A fast paced terminal snake-like game written in C++17

Installing

This otherwise pure C++ program uses a bit of ncurses for displayig characters. While I was tempted to try using ASCII terminal codes directly for building the TUI, it didn't seem worth the effort so ncurses is required.

I developed the project in Void Linux with clang and tested it on Yakuake and Konsole. For xterm I had to enable unicode support with XTerm.vt100.locale: true

On a fresh macOS Catalina I was able to build and test with the default clang you get after being prompted to install developer tools when you type git in the default terminal. Otherwise, you can install clang with homebrew. While the defautl macOS terminal worked great

Requirments:

a UTF-8 Terminal
UTF friendly font like Noto Mono or Consolas
ncurses
clang or gcc

Note: Your Clang or GCC version needs to support the -std=c++17 flag

Intallation (clang):

git clone https://github.com/gregstula/quick-snake.git
cd quick-snake
make
./qsnake

Intallation (gcc):

git clone https://github.com/gregstula/quick-snake.git
cd quick-snake
make gcc
./qsnake

Note: Gentoo users should have the unicode USE flag set globally and use make gentoo so that ncursesw properly links on their system.

Design

A long time ago, I played a facebook game called Snake '08. It was a realy fast snake game where high scores were difficult to get and you rarely got to the point where your tail length mattered, and once you did you felt like you had reached the "end game". It was fairly addicting and my go to distraction when I used that site. While I haven't played that game in years I wanted to capture the quick and fun distracition it offered

Goals

Challenging gameplay
Emphasize skill over novelty
Emphasize quick play session
Minimal
- can easily exist in your $PATH
- the game should feel as if ls ran a quick snake session
Self Contained
- the game only writes to stdout, no files are used or created

Non-Goals

Arcade style start menu
touching ~/.local or ~/.config for useless writes about a snake game
color
non-UTF capable terminals

Warning! This game is kind of addicting

The fast pace and small initial tail size puts emphasis on control and reaction time. The game quits when you lose, so as to not be a bigger commitment than using cat. However, you may find that there is a strong temptation to press Up and Enter in your terminal and try again!

This is not a typical snake game

Snake games follow a similar pattern but most are slow paced. This game is isnpired by snake but it has it's own rules and vision. The vertical movements are marked by an accordion effect, a natural consququence of terminal dimensions I decided to embrase. The food can appear "under the snakes belly" and that's ok. You can only lose by crashing into yourself and the walls.

Difficulty

This game is challenging off the bat. It has one difficulty mode: Hard. If you lose you're back to your shell prompt. The standard map is 80x40 but if the game detects your screen is too small it will try to shrink accordingly.

Vertical movement vs Hortizontal movemnt

In every text based sake game I've tried vertical movement is faster than horizontal movement. This is because lines in a terminal are more spaced than columns. This problem is especially difficult because line spacing can be changed in most terminal emulators. I decided to use unicode square characters to make the nature of terminal coordinates explicit and to create a nice accordion effect. Then, I simply normalized the vertical travel speed so that it was proportiantate to the map dimensions. The result is smooth controls that feel very natural.

License

Copyright (C) 2020  Gregory D. Stula

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

gregstula / quick-snake