Snake
Classic Snake in Python and Pygame, with a neon arcade look - and the same code runs in your browser, compiled to WebAssembly.
Play it in your browser - arrows, WASD, or swipe on a phone.
Features
- Smooth grid movement that speeds up as you eat, with a no-instant-reverse guard
- Two modes: Classic (walls kill) and Wrap (walls wrap around to the other side). Press M, or swipe sideways on a phone, between games
- A best score that survives restarts, kept per mode: in a small JSON file on desktop, in
localStorage in the browser. A corrupt save just starts from zero
- Buffered turns: two keys pressed faster than the snake moves (a quick up-then-left U-turn) are both kept, and each is checked against the one before it, so you can never reverse into yourself
- Start, pause, game over, new best and win screens
- Keyboard (arrows or WASD) and touch (swipe to steer, tap to start)
- Neon arcade palette, pixel-square segments and a CRT scanline overlay
- One codebase for desktop and web: the main loop is
async and yields to the browser every frame, which is what lets pygbag run it as WebAssembly
Run on the desktop
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
python src/main.py
(With MSYS2 Python, install Pygame with pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-python-pygame instead.)
Build for the web
python scripts/build_web.py # pygbag compiles src/ and copies it into site/game/
python -m http.server 8000 --directory site # then open http://localhost:8000
site/index.html is the arcade-cabinet page that frames the game.
Tests and the demo GIF
python -m pytest -q # 17 tests on the game logic, run headless
python scripts/record_demo.py # re-records assets/demo.gif
The GIF is recorded by an autopilot that plays the real game headlessly: a breadth-first search finds the shortest safe path to the food each move.
Controls
| Action | Keyboard | Touch |
|---|
| Move | Arrows or WASD | Swipe |
| Start / restart | Space or Enter | Tap |
| Switch mode (between games) | M | Swipe sideways |
| Pause / resume | P | - |
| Quit (desktop only) | Esc | - |
Design notes
- Logic and drawing are separate.
update() moves the snake and decides the outcome; draw() only reads state. That is what lets the tests drive whole games without a window, and the GIF recorder play headlessly.
- One loop, two platforms. The only web-specific code is the
async main loop and the save location; pygbag's platform.window gives Python direct access to the browser's localStorage.
Licence
MIT
