The MultiSnake Challenge

July 6th, 2009 | Nick Miyake

“Freaking lag!” It had started to become a common refrain around the developer pit. Listed as a project on a candidate’s resume, MultiSnake was a game that we had started to play during our coding breaks. The game was really quite fun — it was easy to play, games were short, and its multi-player nature fostered great competition. The only real drawback was that we seemed to experience network lag. There was nothing more infuriating than having your long snake die by running straight into a completely avoidable wall because the game lagged and didn’t respond to your keyboard commands in time. During one of our particularly lag-heavy games, someone yelled out a gripe that would change our MultiSnaking days for good: “Man, we could totally write this game ourselves, in our app.”

The gripe stuck around, and one day someone finally called out the person making the claim. “Do you seriously think we could write this ourselves?”

“Sure, why not? We have all of the architecture that we need to make this work. We could do it in four hours.”

“I bet you we couldn’t.”

The rest of the story and a video of MultiSnake in action follows.

The Challenge

A challenge was born. The task sounded fun, and it also provided us with a great chance to test the extensibility of our platform. Our most recent milestone had focused on solidifying the public APIs of our platform, and this challenge seemed like a way to test its pluggability. We also thought that it would be a great showcase to demonstrate how easily one could add capabilities to our platform — if we could write a multi-player network game using only the same public APIs available to our clients, it would be a strong signal that our framework was solid.

The Rules

Once we decided that we were going to take on the challenge, we decided that we would do it on Sunday from 8:00PM to midnight (our normal peak productivity hours) and laid out the following rules:

• There would be a strict four-hour time limit for all planning, design and coding.
• The game had to be implemented using only our public APIs — no touching core code.
• The game had to support all of the features provided by the online game and had to be lag-free (after all, that was the whole point of writing our own!).

The Race

Sunday night came along, and it was off to the races! We projected a countdown timer onto a whiteboard in the middle of the developer space, blasted some techno music and got to work! Five developers decided to participate, and it was a pretty collaborative effort in which most of the participants ended up contributing in their standard roles — the frontend people did the game graphics and UI, the backenders worked on the server and game logic, and our data folks dealt with creating a game board provider.

The pluggability of our platform and the fact that it already had support for multiple users and sending out realtime messages from the server to clients made most of the work go pretty smoothly. Besides Eclipse crashing on one of our machines, development was pretty seamless and fast-paced, with team members yelling out at each other across the room to communicate. Within 45 minutes, most of us had finished our first iteration of code, and at the one hour mark we verified that we could successfully get the server and client communicating with each other and draw some game state. By the time we were two hours in, we had most of the core game features implemented, and once we hit the three hour mark we had a fully functional snake game that allowed us to play against each other. We spent the last hour doing some UI polish and ironing out a few bugs, and by the time midnight rolled around we had a fully functional MultiSnake implementation in our platform that was written using only our public APIs. We were even able to get in a few extra features such as a visible timer to count down to the end of the game, a circle to show where a snake respawned and a name that followed the snakes vertically to identify them. We celebrated by eating a rum cake that a coworker had brought in earlier and playing multiple rounds of lag-free MultiSnake against each other. Success!

The Results

MultiSnake lives on as an add-on to our platform. Even after the challenge was completed, devs have been playing around with the code on slow weekends, adding extra maps, new features such as wormholes, and overhauling the graphics. The final product is a pretty impressive and fun-to-play game that we now often demo as an example of the versatility and power of the APIs for our platform.