What it does
A target word appears with some letters missing — E_E_ for EVEN — alongside a one-line clue. The board is scattered with letters and you steer the snake to collect the missing ones in order. Wrong letter, wrong order, or your own tail, and the run ends.
The board is larger than standard Snake to make room for the letters, and there's a run timer for clearing a whole word list. Time Trial mode inverts it: a fixed countdown, scored on how many words you finish.
Design log
Only one class of letter is collectible
A round gives you the consonants and asks for the vowels, or the reverse — never a free-for-all where any letter might be missing.
There are five vowels and twenty-one consonants. Restricting to one class controls how many distinct letters can be on the board at once, which is what keeps the puzzle readable while the snake is moving. It also changes what the game is testing: with the consonants visible, you're reasoning about the shape of a word rather than recalling it cold.
The two modes are nowhere near equal difficulty. Consonant mode on a long word with a vague clue is genuinely hard — harder than I intended. That's on the fix list rather than fixed.
It became a teaching tool
Added a vocabulary mode where a teacher or parent enters their own words with definitions — five to twenty of them — and the game builds the round from that list.
Practising spelling is generic. Practising this week's chapter words is something a teacher would actually use on a Friday afternoon. The mechanic didn't change at all; the word list becoming an input is what turned a toy into something with a reason to exist.
Cosmetic snake unlocks gated behind score — colours by rarity, plus hats and stripes — because the audience is children and a reason to play again is worth more than another mechanic.
Renaming the log panel
The panel showing previous runs was called "Run log". I renamed it "Score History".
Small, but it's the kind of thing that gives a project away. "Log" is a word developers reach for without noticing. To a nine-year-old, or a teacher setting this up on a classroom laptop, it means nothing. The interface should sound like the people using it, not like the person who built it.
Known gaps
- The reveal-a-letter button can't realistically be used — taking your hand off the keyboard to click it usually kills the snake first. A hint needs to be a key press, not a button. This is a real interaction design mistake and it's my favourite thing on this list, because the feature exists and is technically fine and is still unusable.
- Consonant mode needs either easier word selection or a second clue available.
- No difficulty curve within a word list — words are ordered as entered rather than ramping.