rust-snake

A classic Snake game for the terminal, written in Rust.

Features

• Smooth terminal rendering with Unicode box-drawing and block characters
• Progressive difficulty — the snake speeds up as your score grows
• Bonus food that spawns periodically for extra points
• High score persistence across sessions
• Death flash animation
• Win condition when the board is completely filled
• Responsive board sizing based on terminal dimensions
• Color themes: classic, neon, and monochrome
• CLI flags for board size and theme customization
• Terminal bell feedback on food pickup and death

Requirements

• Rust 1.85+ (edition 2024)
• A terminal that supports ANSI escape codes and Unicode

Installation

From crates.io

cargo install rust-snake

From source

cargo run

Pre-built binaries

Download the latest release for your platform from the Releases page. Available for Linux (x86_64), macOS (x86_64, aarch64), and Windows (x86_64).

Usage

rust-snake                          # auto-detect board size, classic theme
rust-snake --width 40 --height 25   # custom board dimensions
rust-snake --theme neon             # neon color theme
rust-snake --theme monochrome       # greyscale theme
rust-snake --no-bell                # disable terminal bell sounds

Controls

Key	Action
Arrow keys / WASD	Move
Enter	Start game
P	Pause/resume
R	Restart (after game over)
Q / Esc	Quit

Running Tests

cargo test

Project Structure

src/
├── main.rs        # Entry point, terminal setup, game loop, input dispatch
├── game.rs        # Core game logic, state machine, collision, scoring
├── snake.rs       # Snake data types and movement logic
├── rendering.rs   # Terminal rendering for every game state
├── theme.rs       # Color theme definitions (classic, neon, monochrome)
└── constants.rs   # Tunable game parameters