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sssnake: A Classic Snake Game to Play in Your Free Time

Linux is intriguing for a while, but after a certain period, you will have mental burnout while continuously staring at the terminal screen. To claim yourself, you usually take a break or have a sip of dark coffee and get back to work.

What if I say that you have an additional option to chill out your brain from the terminal burnout with a classical snake game that you used to play on your Nokia devices?

sssnake game for Linux terminal

The sssnake game is one of the other terminal-based games on Linux. However, the game gives you the feel of an old snake game that you used to play on a Nokia device.

The installation is simple and straightforward, just make sure to have a Git package and a ncurses-devel package for compilation from Git on your Linux system. Otherwise, fire up the following command to install them depending upon your Linux distribution.

$ sudo apt install git libncurses-dev       #On Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint
$ sudo yum install git ncurses-devel        #On RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux
$ sudo pacman -Sy git ncurses               #On Arch, Manjaro, Endeavor Linux

After both the packages are installed, run the following commands in series to grab the source from the Git repository and compile and install it as shown.

$ git clone https://github.com/AngelJumbo/sssnake.git 
$ cd sssnake
$ make 
$ sudo make install

After the installation is completed, you can verify the game is successfully installed on your system by following the below command.

$ sssnake -h

Below is the output of the above command.

sssnake help manual in Linux terminal
sssnake help manual in Linux terminal

Tada! The Snake game is installed, and now it’s time to explore it.

Playing the sssnake game on Linux

To launch the game, you can execute the following command in your Linux terminal.

$ sssnake

When the game starts, you can control the snake head using the WASD, HJKL, or arrow keys. However, you can use a flag with the sssnake command to make it more enjoyable.

  • The -a flag (autoplay mode) allows the snake to catch the square/block by itself without any interaction.
  • The -S flag is used to set it as a screensaver.
  • The -s flag is used to control the speed of the snake.
  • The -j flag is used to add random blocks to increase the difficulty of this game.

Below are some examples of how you can try to make your game more enjoyable.

  • Increase the speed by 10x by using the following command.
$ sssnake -s 10
  • The following command will give you some blocks to avoid hitting the snake’s head.
$ sssnake -s 10 -j 5
  • If you want to let the snake feed the square by itself, then follow the below command to play the game in automatic mode.
$ sssnake -s 10 -j 5 -a
  • Fire up the following command to use this game as a screensaver.
$ sssnake -s 10 -j 5 -S

You can modify the flags independently of each other as per your requirements. Until then, I will see you in the next article.

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