Rust Journey – Snake Clone – Day 2 and 3

Day 2

My second day with this project was focused on partially refactoring the code.

I created different modules for the game, snake, and food entities. Also created a module for the direction enum… despite not being needed.

It took quite a while to move code from here to there and solve every complaint from the compiler. Then, I implemented a few getters and setters and removed the pub keyword from the struct members.

The worst part was passing the RendererWindow declared in main to a function implemented for the game type. Oh boy… it was solved using the &mut keyword but I felt like throwing spaghetti at the wall.

I finished with housekeeping. Adding license, updating gitignore, and deleting a few IDE files.

Day 3

My first task was fixing a bug related to the snake’s movement. When a quarter-circle was performed with the arrow keeps it was possible to get the snake heading to its own body.

Later I implemented a few new features: wall render, wall collision, snake body collision, and game over/reset.

I had no hard time implementing anything on day 3.

Final Notes

The 3rd day was a breeze. Probably because it was just programming and I didn’t deal with anything related to Rust syntax and semantics. The 2nd day, however… was a learning experience.

What’s next? graphics? main menu? maybe learn how to read and write a file for high-score records? Soon…

Rust Journey – Snake Clone – Day 1

Introduction

I have a strong passion for coding, but I often struggle when it comes to starting personal projects using the same languages and tech stack I use in my daily job. However, I believe in the importance of exploring new technologies and exploring different scenarios, so I’m using that as a driving force to learn and expand my skills.

Although it has been a while since I worked on anything involving visual interaction, I remember the immense joy I felt when seeing the results of my code with technologies like Processing or Flash/ActionScript over a decade ago.

With that in mind, I’ve brainstormed a few ideas and settled on a tech stack for my next project.

Why Rust?

The features of Rust have truly captivated my interest. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of the language, or at least everything I’ve read about it so far. It seemed like a logical choice for this project, and if I end up not liking it, I can always switch to something else, right?

Why SFML?

I had some prior experience with SDL2, and SFML appeared to share many similarities with it. However, SFML offers the advantage of wrapping everything in classes, while SDL2 requires the use of long and cumbersome functions. Don’t get me wrong, SDL2 is impressive, but its extensive portability wasn’t necessary for this project.

Why not a game engine?

My primary goal is to learn new programming languages and libraries, rather than focusing solely on game development. The game portion of this project serves as a familiar concept that I can work with and learn from. In fact, I don’t want to limit my future projects to game development alone; they could also involve creating my own GUI toolkit or exploring data visualization.

First day progress:

My approach is to tackle this project without relying on tutorials or lessons, although I will make use of documentation and StackOverflow as needed.

To begin, I cloned the rust-sfml repository and followed the instructions. Once I had it up and running, I created a separate repository for my project and added a boilerplate code to create a window and an event listener.

From there, I started implementing the basic features of the game. The process went smoothly, and by the end of the first day, I had a satisfactory prototype that included:

  • A snake rendered on the screen and controlled by arrow keys
  • Food items randomly placed on the screen, which, when consumed, increased the snake’s size and speed

Although there is still a lot more to do, you can track the ongoing progress on the GitHub Repository.

Moving forward, my plan is to focus on the following tasks:

  • Organize the files into modules
  • Implementing hit detection to walls
  • Implementing hit detection to snake’s body
  • Adding game-over functionality, score tracking, and a restart option
  • Implementing an FPS cap and detection mechanism.
  • Improving the snake’s speed code.
  • Enhancing the snake’s movement code.
  • Adding sound effects.
  • Adding actual graphics
  • Learn how to use the debugger
  • Implement automated tests

Final Notes

This project has been an exciting and unique experience for me, and I’m eagerly looking forward to starting other projects as well. Even at this early stage, I can already appreciate the power and potential of Rust as a programming language. I’m still learning and grasping its concepts and syntax, so please bear with any unconventional code you may come across.

My journey experimenting with 6502 assembly and CC65

Greetings!

A while ago I slowly started experimenting with 6502 assembly while I read a bit about the subject. After some tinkering around, I really got excited with the idea of creating a NES game.

I sketched some ideas and ended up with a fantasy roguelike(so original!) and choose to use CC65(a C compiler for machines with a 6502-compatible CPU).

However, I ended up dealing with some pitfalls during development, like: 2 axis map scrolling, random map generation… heck! I wasn’t even able to export the music from FamiTracker into the code.

It was a new experience and provided me a lot of epiphanies, but nearly all tools are designed for Windows(even the emulator with debugger) and such difficulties really slowed my other ideas.

I am going to move the project to C#/SDL2, trying to keep as much as possible the NES limitations (pallete, resolution, sound) and on a future resume the NES version.