Okay, so today I messed around with something I’m calling “snake pisces.” It’s basically a little experiment combining a snake game with, well, you’ll see.
First, I fired up my trusty code editor. I’ve been using Python for this kind of stuff lately, it’s just so easy to get something running quickly. I grabbed the Pygame library – that’s my go-to for simple games. You know, pip install pygame, the usual.
Getting the Snake Moving
Next, I needed to get the basic snake mechanics down. I created a simple grid, represented by a 2D list. The snake starts as a single “segment” (just a coordinate on the grid). I set up a main loop that handles:
- Getting input: Up, down, left, right arrow keys. Pretty standard stuff.
- Updating the snake’s position: I added a new head segment in the direction the player pressed, and removed the tail segment (unless the snake ate some food, more on that later).
- Drawing everything: I used Pygame’s drawing functions to draw little squares for the snake segments and the grid.
This part was a bit of a pain. I kept running into issues where the snake would go off-screen, or it would tie itself in knots. Lots of debugging, lots of print() statements to see what the heck was going on. Eventually, I got it working smoothly.
Adding the “Pisces” Part
Now for the fun part. The “pisces” element. What I did what, instead of having boring old “food” for the snake to eat, I decided to make it fish. Yeah, little pixelated fish swimming around.
I created another class for the fish. Each fish has a random position and a random direction. Every few frames, the fish move a little bit in their chosen direction. It’s super basic “AI”, if you can even call it that. I wanted to add to my game.
I also added some collision detection. If the snake’s head hits a fish, the snake grows longer (I just don’t remove the tail segment), and a new fish spawns somewhere else on the grid. Simple, but effective!
This part was actually easier than the basic snake movement. The fish AI is so simple that it’s hard to mess up. I spent it for a few minutes.
Putting It All Together
Finally, I tweaked a few things. I added a score counter, so you can see how many fish you’ve eaten. I played around with the colors and sizes of the snake and fish. I even added a simple game over screen when the snake runs into itself or the edge of the screen.
It’s not exactly the next AAA game, but it was a fun little project. It helped me brush up on my Pygame skills, and it was satisfying to see the little snake slithering around and gobbling up fish.
It took my whole evening.
I might add more features later, like different types of fish, or maybe even power-ups. But for now, I’m pretty happy with my “snake pisces” experiment.
I hope you guys find it interesting and give you a good laugh!
