AntSnake!

Scientists have recently discovered a strange new species of ant. On their own, they seem to wander aimlessly, but together they form a new macro-organism: the ANTSNAKE!

You are a researcher observing this fascinating new behavior in a lab environment. Try to see how long the AntSnake can get without crashing into any walls or into itself. Whenever the AntSnake comes into contact with another ant, that ant will join and the AntSnake will get longer.

Controls

BUTTON	KEYBOARD	ACTION
⬅ ➡ ⬆ ⬇	⬅ ➡ ⬆ ⬇	Change AntSnake's direction
START	Enter	Play/Pause Game
SELECT	Backslash (\)	Return to Start screen while paused

About the Procedural Generation

The game uses procedually generated 2D terrain for the player to navigate around and avoid crashing into. This terrain is generated using a cellular automata algorithm designed to generate cave-like spaces.

The algorithm begins by generating a random value of 1 or 0 (filled or empty) for each cell, with each cell having a 45% chance of being filled.

Once the inital cell values are generated, a cellular automata algorithm with the following rules is run:

• A cell in the next generation is filled if and only if a 3x3 grid centered around the cell contains 5 or more filled cells in the current generation.
• Any cell position outside the grid is treated as filled.

This algorithm is run on the generated cells for 6 generations, resulting in cave-system-like terrain.

A hole at the center is also cleared before the game starts to ensure that the player's spawnpoint is clear. 

Tweaking this algorithm by changing the inital probability of a cell being filled can result in narrower or wider passageways, but anything outside [40%,60%] tends to result in either completely filled or completely empty space.

This algorithm is an implementation of a similar algorithm I wrote to generate terrain for another game a few years ago, but that version then performed a Marching Squares algorithm on the generated cell grid.