A word game with a twist: the letters in your typed word steer the snake — U goes up, D goes down, L goes left, R goes right. Eat fruit to score, avoid walls and your own tail. A daily shared board lets everyone compare scores on a leaderboard. In duel mode you race an AI opponent that plays optimal words.
A React app with game logic in a useReducer. The snake grid is rendered to an HTML5 canvas for performance. The daily seed is derived from the date — same for all players, no server required. Word validation runs client-side against bundled dictionary files (split by language). The leaderboard is stored in Supabase.
The core mechanic — mapping word letters to directional movement — was the fun part, and it was designed by hand. The AI had no useful intuition for game feel; every suggestion made the rules more complex rather than more fun.
Word validation was an interesting challenge. The AI generated a working trie-based lookup in minutes, but the dictionary bundling (splitting by language, handling special Norwegian characters) required careful human attention.
The AI was most useful for the leaderboard UI — table sorting, date formatting, mobile layout — and for the i18n wiring. Entirely unremarkable work that would have been tedious to write from scratch.