🐍 Retro Snake — Pixel Art Edition

A single-file, fully offline, vanilla-JavaScript arcade Snake game. Free to play, free to study, and free to build on — no permission or credit required.

Coded with AI assistance and human guidance working in harmony — one person's vision and care, one model's hands on the keyboard, iterating together until it shined.

✨ The story

This game has lived three lives.

It was first written a year ago as a small personal project — a way to learn. Then, this year, it was rebuilt and personalized as a gift for my mom (the same mom who gifted me the AI subscription that started this whole journey). Finally, it became this: the personal touches lifted out, the architecture polished, and the whole thing opened up so anyone can take it, learn from it, and make it their own.

That's the loop I wanted to close — created, given, and then given again. If it helps you fall in love with making things, especially making things alongside AI, then it has done exactly what it was meant to do.

🎮 Features

• 15 hand-tuned visual themes — every palette checked so the snake is always easy to see, plus a Keep Current Theme lock so it never changes on you mid-game.
• Snake skins & phone-body color skins — cosmetic variety, some earned through play.
• Power-ups — ghost mode, star power, food magnet, and more.
• Coins, combos & a multiplier — quick consecutive pickups build a combo for bigger scores.
• Unlock progression — earn extra themes and skins as your lifetime food count grows.
• Obstacles mode (classic & extreme) and multiple difficulty levels.
• No-Walls (wrap-around) mode — a gentler option that lets the snake pass through edges.
• Two control schemes — swipe anywhere on the board or tap the on-screen D-pad.
• Real pause/resume with a clear on-screen overlay.
• Lifetime stats and per-difficulty high scores.
• Accessibility — a Large Fonts toggle for easier reading.
• Synthesized sound — every effect is generated in code via the Web Audio API. No audio files to ship, nothing to license.
• Truly self-contained — one HTML file, no dependencies, no build step, no network calls. Works offline forever.
• Mobile-ready & crisp — high-DPI-correct rendering and a Capacitor-friendly layout.

▶️ Play it

Pick whichever is easiest:

• Locally: double-click the HTML file (rename it to index.html if you like) — it opens in any modern browser.
• On the web: drop the single file onto any static host — GitHub Pages, itch.io, Netlify, anything.
• As a mobile app: wrap the file with Capacitor or Cordova to build an Android/iOS package.

No server, no install, no internet required.

🕹️ How to play

• Steer: swipe across the screen, or tap the arrow buttons.
• Grow: eat the food. Collect coins and chain pickups to build combos.
• Survive: avoid your own tail and any obstacles. Hitting a wall ends the run — unless you enable No-Walls, which wraps you to the opposite side.
• ⚙️ Gear icon: open Settings (basic options up top, everything else under Advanced).
• ▶ / ❚❚ button: start, pause, and resume.

🔧 Built to be hacked on

Everything is in one file and clearly sectioned. Open it and search for SECTION: (JavaScript) or STYLES: (CSS) to jump anywhere instantly. The header comment at the top is a full map.

Quick wins:

Want to…	Do this
Add a color theme	Push an object onto the gameThemes array
Add a snake skin	Push an object onto the snakeSkins array
Resize the board	Change gridSize, tileCountX, tileCountY
Retune the sounds	Edit the play*Sound() helpers in the Audio Engine section
Tweak difficulty	Edit the difficultySettings object

Two spots carry plain-English warnings in the code because they're easy to break: the high-DPI snake blit (keep the logical size argument) and the fixed-timestep game loop (keeps speed frame-rate-independent). Read those notes before touching them.

🛠️ Under the hood

• Vanilla HTML / CSS / JavaScript — no frameworks, no bundler, no tooling.
• Canvas rendering with correct device-pixel-ratio handling so it stays sharp on any screen.
• Web Audio API for all sound (procedurally synthesized — public-domain by nature).
• localStorage for settings, high scores, and lifetime stats.

📜 License

Released under the MIT License — use it for anything (personal or commercial), modify it, ship it, sell it. Credit is appreciated but never required. See the LICENSE file for the full text.

🤝 Credits & acknowledgments

Created by the Digital Spellcaster — human design, direction, and guidance.

The core architecture, relentless debugging, and thirteen months of deep-trench pair-programming were forged hand-in-hand with Gemini. That massive collaboration built the engine block. Claude (Anthropic) stepped in at the final hour to help put a sparkle on the paint for a special gift version. Every decision was shaped by a human; every line was written with AI. Neither half built this alone, and that collaboration is the point of the project.

And to the person who started it all by handing me the tools: thank you, Mom. ❤️

Made to be enjoyed, and to be taken apart. If you build something from this, I hope you have as much fun as we did.

— the Digital Spellcaster & Gemini (with a tip of the hat to Claude)