I have lost my mind - Snake Game Design

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

Recently I have been working on a bunch of random projects, havent completed anything and they have ranged from top down shooters, asteroids style games, match 3 games etc. So I decided to screw all the complicated designs and just make a complete snake game real quick, however I then realized I HAVE NO IDEA how to properly design a snake game.

I know there is no “right” way to design it but I cant even figure out any way to do it. The way I have been trying to do it is without a grid just using bounding boxes for collisions and having the snake move at a fixed distance every couple of frames or so. Why would I need a grid?

My current design is working, but it seems like its stupid. It is basically a Snake which is made up of a list of Body parts, each update I save the head’s old position, update the head, and then loop through each of the Body parts from the end of the list to the front and set each body part to the location of the one next to it, and if its the first element in the array I set it to the “old head” position. It works but seems sloppy or hacked together.

But anyways, how would you guys design this seemingly simple game?

#2

My first ever snake game, I used an ArrayList of Points. Every time the snake moves, I add a new Point for the new head and remove the last Point. However I don’t remove the last point when capturing the apple :slight_smile:
Also the easiest way is to not think about pixels when doing this, just think about your data. You only convert to screen coordinates when rendering. So if you have a grid of 20x20, each point would have an x and y between 0 and 19.

Good luck :slight_smile:

#3

@ra4king I was thinking about how to do this last night and really couldn’t conceptualize this. Until reading your comment. That really does seem like the way to do it.

#4

@ra4king ahh, thats actually pretty smart. I was helping some kid out in my programming class, and I did it the way dah01 did it with saving prev locations. but at the time I was more worried about making the stupid thing work in checkboxes (I was using VBA >.<)

#5

Yeah I remember thinking about it and then suddenly getting that moment of inspiration.
Here is the snake game if you’re interested :slight_smile:

#6

Haha much cleaner than the chain reaction idea, I knew there was a simpler way, thanks! Its always nice to see what other people think to clear your brain a bit haha