Terminal-Based Snake Game Link to heading

One bored weekend, I thought: “Why not write a snake game in C?”. It’s a relatively easy project, letting me focus on C syntax and improve my proficiency.

You can try it by following instructions on zee GitHub

Features Link to heading

• Godly and only supported vim motions aka hjkl
• Quitting the game with shift + q (aka Left Thumb + q)
• Cannot eat itself (it dies)
• Cannot escape the frame (it dies)
• Loves red square food (it grows)
• Score (memorization required)

Objectives Link to heading

• Dynamically build a frame using unicode characters eg “┌”, “┐”, “└”, “┘”, “─”, “│”.

Example:

┌────────┐
│        │
│        │
└────────┘

• Learn what a Linked-list is.
• Have a working Snake Game

Complications along the way Link to heading

There were some obstacles along the way, some simple but some took some time to debug. Might have been slightly influenced by the late-night hour on the clock.

Building the frame Link to heading

After going into raw terminal mode. I could move the cursor where I wanted. But centering the frame was harder than I thought.

Characters in a terminal are longer than they are wide. Which meant that I had to multiply the width by 2 to get a square looking frame. So while that looked like a square each snake body was still 1 char wide. Making it go twice as fast vertically (obviously).

Solution: Make the snake body take up two characters. Still a problem: Food is only one character plus a whitespace. That’s why its offset…

Linked-list Link to heading

Implementing a linked list in C was an amazing experience. It let me work directly with memory addresses and practice manual memory allocation—a fundamental skill in C.

Each segment of the snake’s body has a pointer to the next, with the tail’s next pointer set to NULL. This structure makes it super convenient for the snake to follow along the path that the head is moving. Watching it all come together was both satisfying and educational!

To be able to easily add a new body after the tail. I simply made a reference which kept track of pointers to head and tail. I didn’t even need know how many body elements there are. As updates would just propogate down to the tail!

Code flow Link to heading

I spent a lot of time making the code as readable as possible, prioritizing clarity and functionality. Using pointers wherever I could helped minimize data copying and made me more comfortable with their quirks (and occasional chaos). My goal was for each function to do just one thing, which not only made the code easier to read but also simplified debugging.

That said, not everything went smoothly. For instance, I wanted to add a menu with a “Press Enter to Start” screen. After hours of tinkering and messing with the main loop, I hit a roadblock: trying to balance functionality with cleanliness in the code. Eventually, I decided to scrap the menu idea and focus purely on gameplay. Maybe I’ll revisit it in the future, but for now, simplicity feels like the right choice—and it works.