Branislav Vajagić

Mind Snake

Using Processing for Java to create simple game of snake.

When you start to learn programming you start by writing console applications. Display some text to user, take some text input from the user, do something and display more text. Even though very powerful, console applications can get boring when it comes to interacting with the user, real person that is using your application. There are a lot of ways to create a GUI application, the most obvious is to create Web application using some HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but what to use when you want to create standalone application what can be run out of browser? Around 6 years ago, this was the question that I had and the answer for me was Processing.

Yes, Processing is not some enterprise application, it is not even meant to be used for creating advanced GUI application. It is meanly used for data visualization, animation and for students to get into interactive programing. Processing has its own IDE that is very easy to setup and start programming. Processing IDE is good for starters but it is very limited, because of that, Processing core libraries can be imported in Java project and in this way you can get best of both worlds. You can Learn more about Processing on my blog post.

With this said, in my free time I wanted to test my programming skills and to push Processing to its limit by creating small game of snake using only Processing core libraries and pure Java. At the end this turned out to be very complex project that took around 50 hours and it is now available in my Github repository. In the core, game is composed of 2 major parts, the game itself and user tracker with score board and profile information. To see the game development process and its composition, please go to Github repository.