Snake

One of my forgotten dreams was to build a clone of Snake that could run on a browser, the one that was included in the Nokia 3210 cellphone. Yes, the Nokia 3210, the dad of all cool phones. In 1999 it had interchangeable covers, background logos and custom ringtones you sent yourself via SMS, and games. The game I liked the most was Snake, at the time we passed hours in buses asking to borrow our friend's phones just to try and fill the screen with that Snake, mostly because we didn't have cellphones.

The process

So I started by stating facts: I found some pictures of Snake being played on the 3210, and I wrote them down. Measuring the picture I found out that the board is 24x17. Then I remembered that the snake got longer only when the eaten fruit reached its tail. I cannot recall how it started so I put the snake on the most probable location.

Through some iterations I then simplified the calculations. For this iteration I devised a way in which we have to draw only the snake and apple squares. By sorting the snake tracts before printing them we can minimize the renderings.

Also tried to improve performance by advancing immediately the snake upon direction change with different techniques but didn't notice any improvement without a drawback.

Instructions

To play on desktop press the arrows, WSAD, spacebar or enter. To pause the game press spacebar or enter, to resume it press the arrows, WSAD, spacebar or enter. When game is over you can reset it by pressing the Reset button or spacebar or enter.

To play on mobile just press the buttons (swipe would be too slow to capture).