Snake - FOK Edition

Snake FOK Edition uses classic Snake as its starting point, but it is as much a love letter to retro arcade gaming as it is a Snake clone. Power pellets, bonus multiplier chains, border barricades that crumble on impact, extra lives hidden across levels -- it all adds up to something that feels like flipping through an arcade cabinet catalogue from the 1980s.

Play online: https://poeggi.github.io/FOK-snake/

Items

	Item	Description
	Gem	The main collectible. 10 per level. Grab in the fewest steps for a x2 score bonus.
	Lucky Gem	Rare gold gem. Worth 10x or 20x the normal score bonus.
	Epic Gem	Extremely rare rainbow gem. Worth 80x or 160x the normal score bonus.
	Gouranga Bonus	Seven orange gems appear in a line -- horizontal, vertical, or diagonal. Each eaten gem pays an escalating x2, x4, x6 ... score multiplier; sweep all seven in one near-continuous run (a couple of stray steps are allowed) to land the full GOURANGA bonus. Hare Krishna.
	Power Pellet	A Pac-Man nod, from level 2 onward: a two-tone capsule that turns your head into a chomping Pac-Man while it lasts. For 6 seconds all barricades turn fragile AND flee across the board like frightened ghosts -- crash through everything. They blink as the effect fades and freeze wherever they are when it ends.
	Time Crystal	Rare icy pickup from level 6 onward (chance rises with the level). Collect it to slow the whole board to level-3 speed for 30 seconds; a field-wide shimmer marks the warp and blinks as it runs out.
	1UP Heart	Extra life. Appears once during levels 4-6 and occasionally on respawn in later levels. Blinks before disappearing. Can push you above the starting three lives.
	Barricade	Solid orange brick. Colliding costs a life. Grows in number each level.
	Fragile Barricade	Crumbling border block. The snake can smash straight through it for a score reward and a debris effect. Activated by the Power Pellet.

Controls

Input	Action
Arrow keys	Move snake / navigate menus
Arrow key (hold)	Boost, in the direction you are already going
W A S D	Player 2 in a local duel -- steer, and hold to boost
Space	Pause / unpause
Escape	Quit to menu (in-game)
Enter / OK	Select / confirm
Backspace	Delete (name entry)
M	Mute / unmute (music and SFX)

Boost doubles your speed while you hold the direction you are already travelling in. It engages only after a short aligned hold, so the tap that turns you is never read as a boost, and turning drops it again. Settings -> TURBO BOOST switches it off entirely.

Mobile: X-shaped d-pad + OK/pause/ESC side buttons. Hold a d-pad direction to boost. Swipe the canvas to steer, swipe on the way you are already going to boost, and swipe back against it to brake (end the boost). Tap the canvas during name entry to open the keyboard.

Difficulty modes

	Easy	Normal	Hard
Speed	Slow	Standard	Fast
Barricades	Few	Standard	Many
Growth per gem	+1	+2	+2
Snake length at level start	Resets	Resets	Carries over from previous level
Lucky / Epic gem odds	Standard	Standard	Doubled
Achievements	Basic only	Full	Full + Iron Snake

Easy awards only: first gem, level 1, level 5, and FOKoin milestones. Completing all 10 levels requires Normal or higher.

Hard carries your snake's full length into each new level, so the board fills up over time just like the original Nokia Snake.

Features

• 10 levels - speed and barricades increase each level
• Snake grows by 1 segment per gem on Easy, 2 on Normal and Hard
• Screen wraps on all edges
• 3 lives - barricades and self-collision cost one life each
• 10 gems per level; collect in fewest steps for a x2 score bonus
• Lucky gems (x10/x20) and Epic gems (x80/x160) spawn randomly
• Time Crystal (level 6+): slows the board to level-3 speed for 30 seconds
• Pause with Space; quit-to-menu confirm on Escape
• Two music styles: NEW (3-channel chiptune) and CLASSIC (2-channel retro) - switchable in Settings
• Music pauses on death, resumes on restart
• Arcade SFX for eating, dying, level up
• High score table (saved locally, top 10)
• FOKoins: lifetime score accumulator across all sessions, spent in the shop
• Shop with four pages: two of buyable cosmetics -- necktie, sunglasses, cylinder hat, monocle, bow tie (page 1); shoes, moustache, halo, wizard hat, royal crown, and the invisible gown that shimmers only while you outscore the record (page 2), plus a repeatable DONATE -- then MY GEAR, everything you have won, and MYSTERY BOX
• Mystery boxes: four tiers (COMMON, RARE, EPIC, LEGENDARY) that roll FOKoins or a cosmetic by rarity. Box-only gear shares the wear slots with the bought kind, so a won hat and a bought crown compete for the same head
• NEW SNAKE TIMES: in-game news page for release announcements (newspaper icon on the main menu)
• Smileys allowed in high-score names (characters like : - ( ) [ ] ')
• Achievements and expert achievements
• FPS counter
• Scrolling credits screen
• Mobile-friendly responsive layout with portrait and landscape support
• REDUCE MOTION setting (seeded from the OS accessibility preference) that suppresses decorative motion such as the duel near-miss shake
• Installable PWA (works offline)
• 1vs1 duels, local (one keyboard) and ONLINE: classic level progression for two, power pellets that turn the opponent's snake into food, PLAY AGAIN rematches, and a camera shake when the two heads brush past -- heavier, with a sonic boom, when both snakes are boosting through the pass. That pass can also blow a cosmetic clean off the snake wearing it (WINDSWEPT gear: hats, glasses, the moustache and the rest of the loose kind). It lands on the board and belongs to whoever reaches it first, either player. Online it really changes hands -- the winner keeps it and wears it at once; a local duel plays the identical mechanic but nothing outlives the match, because both players share one wardrobe
• SPECTATING: watch a friend's online duel live. The watcher runs the very same sim as the two players, fed a forwarded copy of their inputs and deliberately held a little behind the live edge, so what it shows is the match itself and not a re-telling of it. A feed that has not started yet says which leg it is waiting on -- nobody to ask, an unanswered ask, a link still opening, or the shared clock -- rather than a bare CONNECTING. A friend's match shows up as watchable the moment it begins, and stops offering itself once it is over

Server

Online features speak to FOK-server (https://fok-server.poggensee.it, repo poeggi/FOK-server); the client-facing contract is that repo's docs/API.md -- matchmaking, signaling, PTS time sync, latency reporting and global scores. This client is built against API 5. A server on a newer major closes the online half until the game updates. Single-player is unaffected either way. The engine runs on a deterministic fixed-timestep 60 Hz tick clock, which is what makes prediction netcode and replay-validated scores possible. (docs/multiplayer-server-prompt.md is the historical design brief.)

Setup (GitHub Pages)

In repo Settings -> Pages -> Source: Deploy from branch -> main -> / (root)

Development

sw.js (service-worker cache version + asset list) is auto-managed by a pre-commit hook. Enable it once after cloning:

git config core.hooksPath .githooks

The hook derives MAJOR.MINOR from the latest git tag and bumps the PATCH on every commit. The asset list carries each file's blob id, so an installed client downloads only the files a version changed and copies the rest from its previous cache. Do not edit the version/CACHE/ASSETS lines in sw.js by hand.

A client runs from its cached bundle and never waits for the network. The service worker update check (a 4 KB file) finds a new version, the new bundle is fetched whole before it goes live, and the game reloads once on the splash.

Tests are plain Node, no dependencies. bash test/checks.sh runs the fast tier (the pre-commit hook runs the same), bash test/checks.sh --full adds the duel sweeps CI runs. See test/README.md for the on-demand modes.

License

Snake - FOK Edition is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. It is distributed WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See LICENSE for the full text.

Copyright (C) 2026 Kai Poggensee

The game is delivered to your browser, so AGPL section 13 applies: anyone who runs a modified version and lets others play it must offer those players the source of that version.

The bundled font is not covered by the AGPL. Press Start 2P is Copyright 2012 The Press Start 2P Project Authors, licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 -- see fonts/OFL.txt.