Jordan Eldredge

The game Snake in 90 lines of JavaScript

After watching Coding an HTML5 Game in 5 min 30 sec in which Chris DeLeon programs a Pong clone in Notepad, I was inspired to write a game myself. I opted to clone Snake and took a minimal approach. My goal was to do it with as little code as possible while still keeping the code very readable.

Obviously this is highly subjective, but I think I found a balance where there is hardly any extraneous code, but anyone with a small amount of JavaScript experience could read thought the code and understand everything.

Play the game here

(function() {
var SIZE = 500; // Size of the play-field in pixels
var GRID_SIZE = SIZE / 50;
var c = document.getElementById('c');
c.height = c.width = SIZE * 2; // 2x our resolution so retina screens look good
c.style.width = c.style.height = SIZE + 'px';
var context = c.getContext('2d');
context.scale(2, 2); // Scale our canvas for retina screens

var direction = newDirection = 1; // -2: up, 2: down, -1: left, 1: right
var snakeLength = 5;
var snake = [{x: SIZE / 2, y: SIZE / 2}]; // Snake starts in the center
var candy = null;
var end = false;

function randomOffset() {
return Math.floor(Math.random() * SIZE / GRID_SIZE) * GRID_SIZE;
}

function stringifyCoord(obj) {
return [obj.x, obj.y].join(',');
}

function tick() {
var newHead = {x: snake[0].x, y: snake[0].y};

// Only change directon if the new direction is a different axis
if (Math.abs(direction) !== Math.abs(newDirection)) {
direction = newDirection;
}
var axis = Math.abs(direction) === 1 ? 'x' : 'y'; // 1, -1 are X; 2, -2 are Y
if (direction < 0) {
newHead[axis] -= GRID_SIZE; // Move left or down
} else {
newHead[axis] += GRID_SIZE; // Move right or up
}

// Did we eat a candy? Detect if our head is in the same cell as the candy
if (candy && candy.x === newHead.x && candy.y === newHead.y) {
candy = null;
snakeLength += 20;
}

context.fillStyle = '#002b36';
context.fillRect(0, 0, SIZE, SIZE); // Reset the play area
if (end) {
context.fillStyle = '#eee8d5';
context.font = '40px serif';
context.textAlign = 'center';
context.fillText('Refresh to play again', SIZE / 2, SIZE / 2);
} else {
snake.unshift(newHead); // Add the new head to the front
snake = snake.slice(0, snakeLength); // Enforce the snake's max length
}

// Detect wall collisions
if (newHead.x < 0 || newHead.x >= SIZE || newHead.y < 0 || newHead.y >= SIZE) {
end = true;
}

context.fillStyle = '#268bd2';
var snakeObj = {};
for (var i = 0; i < snake.length; i++) {
var a = snake[i];
context.fillRect(a.x, a.y, GRID_SIZE, GRID_SIZE); // Paint the snake
// Build a collision lookup object
if (i > 0) snakeObj[stringifyCoord(a)] = true;
}

if (snakeObj[stringifyCoord(newHead)]) end = true; // Collided with our tail

// Place a candy (not on the snake) if needed
while (!candy || snakeObj[stringifyCoord(candy)]) {
candy = {x: randomOffset(), y: randomOffset()};
}

context.fillStyle = '#b58900';
context.fillRect(candy.x, candy.y, GRID_SIZE, GRID_SIZE); // Paint the candy
}

window.onload = function() {
setInterval(tick, 100); // Kick off the game loop!
window.onkeydown = function(e) {
newDirection = {37: -1, 38: -2, 39: 1, 40: 2}[e.keyCode] || newDirection;
};
};
})();

You can contribute to the code on GitHub