snakeng

snakeng is an implementation of the back-end of the classic "snake" game. It provides an interface to inject directional inputs (up/down/right/left), and produces a data structure representing the game state, for each frame of gameplay. This allows snake to be quickly implemented and played on various platforms.

Features:

• Configurable game area width/height
• Configurable wall behaviour (teleport/wrap or death)
• Serializable game state object (if you want to e.g. save/load game states to .json files)
• Configurable snake speed options (fixed speed, or automatically increase speed as snake grows)

For more information, see the API documentation.

Install

Install via pip:

pip install snakeng

Minimal snake game implementation

This is the simplest possible implementation of snake, using snakeng:

import sys
import time
import keyboard
from snakeng.snake import SnakeGame, SnakeDirection

last_direction = SnakeDirection.DOWN

# Callback function to save the last arrow keypress
def keypress_event(e):
    global last_direction
    if e.name == 'up':
        last_direction = SnakeDirection.UP
    elif e.name == 'down':
        last_direction = SnakeDirection.DOWN
    elif e.name == 'left':
        last_direction = SnakeDirection.LEFT
    elif e.name == 'right':
        last_direction = SnakeDirection.RIGHT

# Register callback function
keyboard.on_press(keypress_event)

game = SnakeGame()

while True:
    new_state = game.process(last_direction)  # Produce new frame
    sys.stdout.write("\033[2J\n")             # Clear terminal screen
    sys.stdout.write(new_state.to_string())   # Print new game state
    sys.stdout.flush()                        # Flush output
    time.sleep(0.05)

Sample command-line (ASCII) implementation

Additionally, a sample terminal-based implementation of a snake game is provided, which can be accessed by running snakeng as a module:

python -m snakeng

The terminal-based implementation accepts several arguments, detailed here:

usage: snakeng [-h] [-x WIDTH] [-y HEIGHT] [-s {slow,medium,fast,faster}]
                           [-o OUTPUT_FILE] [-i INPUT_FILE] [-f FPS]

Simple terminal-based snake game showing how to use snakeng. Use arrow keys to
change snake direction, use 'p' to pause, and use 'Ctrl-C' to quit.

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -x WIDTH, --width WIDTH
                                                Game area width in characters (default: 40)
  -y HEIGHT, --height HEIGHT
                                                Game area height in characters (default: 30)
  -s {slow,medium,fast,faster}, --fixed-speed {slow,medium,fast,faster}
                                                Sets the snake speed for the whole game. If unset, the
                                                snake speed will automatically increase as the snake
                                                size increases. (default: None)
  -o OUTPUT_FILE, --output-file OUTPUT_FILE
                                                If set, the game state will be saved to the specified
                                                filename when you quit with Ctrl-C (default: None)
  -i INPUT_FILE, --input-file INPUT_FILE
                                                If set, the game state will be loaded from the
                                                specified filename (default: None)
  -f FPS, --fps FPS     Framerate in frames per second (default: 24)

NOTE: the sample implementation uses an ANSI escape sequence to clear the terminal screen, so it won't work in terminals that don't support ANSI escape sequences.

Contributions

Contributions are welcome, please open a pull request at https://github.com/eriknyquist/snakeng.

If you have any questions about / need help with contributions, please contact Erik at eknyquist@gmail.com.