Friday Freeday: HTML5 Snake Game
James Simpson
 · 
August 26, 2011

I've been wanting to start doing Friday Freeday for sometime now, but I kept pushing it back due to my recent workload. While that workload hasn't slowed down (and don't' get me wrong, I'm enjoying every second), I finally scheduled this afternoon to have the first of what will hopefully become a tradition within GoldFire Studios.

The idea is that everyone in the company (yes, just me for now), will take Friday afternoon to work on pretty much whatever project they want. This doesn't mean any project within the company, but rather any personal idea/project they are interested in. If you are familiar with how Google works, you no doubt know about their 20% time philosophy. Friday Freedays (if anyone has a less cheesy name, please let me know) stems from the same idea, but it is structured a little differently.

To kick it off I have decided to take my first real plunge into HTML5 game development. I've been praising HTML5 games as the future of gaming for sometime now, and I plan on committing GoldFire Studios to HTML5 game development over the next few months and into the future, but I've never had a chance to play around with the technology itself.

HTML5 Snake

I decided to start off with something easy -- Snake. Yes, the old Nokia classic that we all enjoyed until we realized we could put fully functioning computers in our pockets. Not only was I learning the canvas tag for the first time, but all I had was this afternoon to complete this project, so I went for something doable.

The game has some pretty basic functionality: pause, play, scoring, and 3 difficulty levels. I tried to make the interface as pretty as an interface for such a basic game can be. There really isn't anything else to it. Click below to check the game out for yourself and post in the comments if you think you have the high score. If people are really interested I might think about doing a tutorial post on how I made this game.

Play HTML5 Snake