Snake in rust using ncurses crate

The game is playable

run with

cargo run

Keybinds

hjkl or arrow keys for movement

esc or p to pause

Screenshot

Click the image for asciinema

Need unicode support in terminal to print the snake

The unicode characters used are:

• 0x0298 ʘ
• 0x2550 ═
• 0x2551 ║
• 0x2554 ╔
• 0x2557 ╗
• 0x255a ╚
• 0x255d ╝

Todo 🚧

• Add a way to change the snake speed
  • Make a ui to switch the snake speed
  • Interal implementation of the snake speed
• Implement Highscore System
  • Make the ui
  • Internal Implementation
• Use unicode charachters to draw the snake

Bugs 🐛

• Snake going through the walls
• Food spawning in the walls
• Boxdraw characters not rendering properly
• Remove all the logging in the ui
• Pausing delayed if esc is pressed but not if p is pressed.
• The game flickers a lot after sometime (probably due to the constant redrawing of the whole board every tick)

Maybe in the future

• Autoplay the game using a simple pathfinding algorithm (to show on r/unixporn of course 🤡)

Notes

A few notes about the game and how I should improve the game

A few notes about time complexity and redrawing with ncurses

The complexity of the program is O(n) every tick (time which changes relative to the speed)

However the place, I can improve is the redrawing of the game

At the time of writing the in commit f9be68e the game still redraws the total board and the total snake every tick.

I think this can be improved by only drawing the parts of the snake and the board when needed

Rust specific stuff I learned

char and std::char are not the same. char is the primitive type std::char is the char module.

As of Sat, 23 Jan 2021 21:49:13 +0000 the char::from_u32 (used in this program) is not valid in primitive char but is valid in std::char

ncursesw is not needed to print unicode characters. I have no clue where I got that idea from.