This game is a single 13 KiB file that runs on Windows, Linux and in the Browser

Summary

Not that long ago I became aware of Justine Tunney’s cosmopolitan libc project. It’s a toolkit that allows you to compile C source code into a single binary that runs natively on multiple operating systems, including Windows, Linux, various flavours of BSD, even including booters. Unfortunately, back then the project didn’t seem to support GUI interfaces and produces quite swollen binaries. Hence I decided to take a stab at a similar (simpler? harder? up to you to decide) challenge: create a video game (<16 KiB) that runs natively on Windows, Linux and in the Browser, all from a single source file. The Game⌗ It’s a pretty standard Snake game with the same rules and interface on all platforms. You control a snake that grows longer as it eats food, and the goal is to avoid running into walls. The snake is controlled using either the arrow keys or WASD keys. It can be terminated via ESC (if permissible by the platform), reset via R, and paused via P. Spacebar starts the game. The game keeps track of your score. Each piece of food eaten increases your score by 10 points, except yellow fruit (which spawns with a 15% chance) that gives you 20 points. Fruit spawns at a fixed rate and despawns after a certain time if not eaten. The despawn timer is proportional to the speed of the snake at the time of spawning, which itself is proportional to the snake’s length. Once ten fruit are eaten, the game proceeds to the next level, randomizing the walls’ layout. The maze is created as to ensure that there is always a path from the snake’s head to any piece of food. The initial placement of the snake is also randomized, but always in a position that has at least five empty tiles in the direction the snake is facing. Download the game here (13,772 bytes). The Polyglot⌗ I implemented the game three times in total: once in C for the i686 Visual C platform using WinAPI, once in C for the x86_64 Linux platform using clang and X11, and once in JavaScript for the browser using HTML5 Canvas...