With an interest in gaming, animation, architecting, and design, I always wanted a large personal project that I could really sink my teeth into. I felt making a snake game in React would be a good start and would give rise to this opportunity.

As learning was my main objective, I actively avoided tutorials and the use of libraries. This is so I could be in a position to solve new problems and have a deep understanding of what I’m building.

Note: This is not a how-to guide and is a paper on how I built this project.

Breaking Down the Problem 🔨

Like many problems in Computer Science, or in general, the approach was to break down the problem into smaller subproblems. I started to think about the old school Nokia snake game and what components were involved to make it. This is what I considered:

• Snake - rendered with squares which represented the head and body
• Game Board - the area the snake can move
• UI - Components that represent the score and menu items

#javascript