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Show HN: Multiplayer Snake in Go

hipstersnake.com

156 pointspaulrosenzweig75 comments

Nice. One complaint: when it's really slow in the beginning, you can apparently do a 180 in place and kill yourself, but it looks like you didn't turn at all. Unless that's how the classic played too...

EDIT: I've had a few TRON-like cut-off or near-cutoff moments. Very cool.

I agree the ability to kill your self with a 180 kinda sucks. It's not fun when you do it to yourself and it is not satisfying when your opponent does it either. I would make sure that it was impossible to do.

Just fixed the bug. I need to take it down for about a minute to deploy, so I'll deploy this when the traffic is lower.

For your next trick, structure it for hot redeploy.

This is amazing. I have fond memories of playing Lightcycle/tron-style games on some older computers against my brother as a kid. We got that program installed and we played forever.

This has a lot of potential, some suggested improvements:

* Chat System

* Rematch (both players agree, then yes, one says no, then no)

* Names for players

I like this and I'm sure you could monetize this with ads if you wanted to. Have you thought about supporting more than 2 players? There are many directions you could go with this, but this is an excellent MVP, if you want it to be an MVP.

Thanks for your feedback! A chat system might get a little ugly, but I like the rematch idea!

I would pay to play snake tournaments! Look into this please.

Also, have the two snakes face each other when they start. This teaches the users from the first second into the match that they can, and must, control the snake.

Great job; totally wasted a morning on this.

Good idea. I'll add that.

Might be hard to chat and play snake at the same time. I guess you could smack talk between matches.

I've played WAAAY to much tron to be bothered to collect the blue dots :P If nicknames are added, mine's gonna be Mongoose.

i'd like to see a score system, and some kind of score ladder scheme where you only play people with on adjacent rungs of the ladder. then the folks that are really good don't end up playing against people like me who just crash into themselves all the time :-)

Love it. Refreshingly addictive.

Only complaint is that I can't automatically tell which color I am to start. Maybe I'm missing something, but it's never immediately known - I need to jiggle left and right.

You're red. Sorry I should have made that more clear.

maybe the game could start paused for the first second or two, and visually indicate which snake is yours e.g. by making it flash, or explicitly labeling it ("this is your snake, there are others like it...")

Pretty cool. Although when you start, you have no idea which snake you are. I end up in the wall half the time because I suspect I'm the other snake.

Ok, so I figured out that you're always the red snake. Might want to point that out on the page.

Too bad for colorblind people like me, I can't distinguish the snakes by color. I end up hitting the wall most of the times.

Sorry. Red/Green was a bad choice.

Had the same thing.

In my first game we were both confused about which snake we were and ended up hitting the wall at the same time.

Can you tell a bit more about Go's performance in this project? Number of connections, RAM footprint, etc. Thx.

Current load: Load average: 0.02 0.01 0.00

Looks like it's using about 50Mb, but I think that's just the reserved memory.

It's preforming well, but even more than the performance, I think Go was a good fit due to the concurrent nature of a multiplayer game.

The controls don't react if you press them too quickly. How about queueing up key presses and then each additional step of the snake would dequeue a key press?

As an expert in this area (I implemented snake, once, in ascii for kicks) the problem with that approach is there's no way to undo your presses. So if you erroneously press left when you meant to press right, you're screwed. The best control strategy I found, and the one that seemed to correlate with classic implementations, is to simply take the most recently pressed key at each tick, and only allow the keys that correspond to left and right relative to your snake's direction.

This. Nokia 3310 style.

Ah, but then you can't do a quick U-turn. I think ideally you'd queue up to two moves, the second always being a 180 if any, but if you change your mind it clears the queue. E.g. you're going right, you can queue up-left or down-left but if you hit up-left-up you just go up, up-left-right you just go right, etc.

Who thinks that north/south/east/west is the right way to control a snake? The proper controls are left and right.

I agree. It's very hard to get used to. I can handle it when the game is slow, but the faster it gets, the more my decades-old instincts take over.

The old QBasic Nibbles game that shipped with DOS 5.0 used up/down/left/right, and that was the one I always played as a kid. All the clones I've seen over the years use up/down/left/right as well. Which versions did you play that only use left/right?

> The old QBasic Nibbles game that shipped with DOS 5.0 used up/down/left/right, and that was the one I always played as a kid.

Sigh I am old.

Every snake game since Nibbles uses north/south/east/west.

It would be nice if it would let me restart via the keyboard (spacebar?) rather than having to move my hand from the arrow keys to the mouse/trackpad.

Does anyone else think the stages ramp up too quickly? How about cranking down the speed multiplier a little bit for each round? By the time I get a long snake I spend more time just not running into an outer wall than actually trying to corner my opponent.

Awesome! For some reason when I want to turn around very quick (Left/Right + Down or Left/Right + Up depending which way I'm going) I just "Die". I wouldn't run into myself in that case, so not sure what's going on. Apart from that, very cool!

I think it turns in on itself inside one pixel, which I don't think is right compared to the way the classic played (one turn always meant at least one pixel in that direction, no matter how fast you pressed)

Is the Go source for this available somewhere?

I have a feeling that it is going to appear at https://github.com/paulrosenzweig/hipstersnake in the near future.

Haha yup, just pushed it.

Awesome :)

The colors scheme of the snakes/points/bg are pretty painful for the eye - even though I like background stashsnake a lot!

Thanks! The background was drawn by draculafetus on Fiverr (http://fiverr.com/draculafetus). I agree that the colors/opacity combo is really ugly.

Clarification: my colors, not the background's

The changes in speed are too discontinuous. It would be nicer if the speed smoothly transitioned (e.g., ease-in-out).

Right now, It's more a 2-player than a "multiplayer snake".

I would love to see how your game will evolve.

It reminds me another cool multiplayer snake https://twitter.com/syl_mat/status/154136259588141056 (it supports more than 2 players, the game is never ending but player accumulate points, it also has bots)

I saw quite a few opponents mistake themselves to be the wrong snake and crash out. A little callout saying "this is you" at the start of a match would help!

Took me back a decade to days of playing Gnibbles with 3 others on the same keyboard in my computer lab in school :D.

Nice, but doing everything server side kills the game unless you have really low latency. You should synchronise clocks between the players, then run the game physics client-side, and resolve conflicts after-the-fact.

Without a point system the one thing I've found is that the multiplayer makes it a disadvantage to play the normal game. The bigger you are the harder it is, you win when the other player crashes. Just a thought.

If you are bigger it is easier to make the other player crash into you.

Ha, I just went Kamikaze on someone. This is so fun. Hope traffic does not die for a while, because I plan to play the shit out of this one. Anyone interested in forming an HN league?

Anyone know if this is open source, github or google code project?

Just posted it on GitHub: https://github.com/paulrosenzweig/hipstersnake

Removing the background makes it much more useable.

$("html").css("background","white")

I really enjoyed playing this while it works but maybe 33% of the time the game just freezes on me and I have to refresh to get it to start working again. I have a strong internet connection so I don't think that's the problem.

I had similar issues - glad I'm not the only one.

Nice, lots of fun.

How about a rating system (Elo) and a leaderboard for ratings?

It seemed really slow to take my control movements. Is it sending each move to the server before moving the snake? Maybe it needs to make the change locally (optimistically), and reconcile it after.

It's quite addicting, but it doesn't seem to be stable. I often just stop moving and have to refresh the browser and some enemies snake right into the wall without moving.

if you try the U turn too fast you die.

for example you're facing south and press est and then north immediately after: insta death.

Try to limit the amount of games played per minute by each IP. That way you don't have anyone sabotaging the game constantly for fun.

Really enjoyed this. The speed up was a bit annoying. The first step up in speed would have been great through out the game.

You could do a Tron from that

It's a fascinating concept, but the implementation is untenably slow.

that's not the implementation, that's the design. It gets faster as you keep playing it.

Big friendly FU to all you bastards who cut me off to win...

Huh? Seems like the primary way to win in that game

Or just hope the other person runs into themself..

Ordinarily, yes. But I think it's just as interesting a goal to try and prevent the other player from winning for as long as possible.

"You both lost at the same time." Nice attention to detail!

This is pretty awesome! Where I can find Go code?

Now we need a HJKL plugin for this.

Cool idea. I'll add that.

...added. Will go out in next deploy.

I thought Go was for server side "systems programming".

What's the entire stack here? Is JavaScript in the browser generated from Go or!?

It would be great if you could give a one-liner overview of what's going on : )

Love it btw

The server is Go, the javascript was generated by coffescript.

Maybe you coul release the code in the open... as an examppe for other go developers

https://github.com/paulrosenzweig/hipstersnake

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