Let’s Make a Game: Wrap Up

In this tutorial series I explained how to build a version of the game Snake.

• Part 1: Covers installation of Shoes and explains how the snake moves and how to control it with the keyboard
• Part 2: Basic collision detection, eating food to make the snake longer
• Part 3: Collision detection for bricks and the snake, stopping the main animation when the snake crashes
• Part 4: Handling scores, game over screen and restarting the game.  This part also shows how to draw a border around the level, and explains how to use Git to get my code
• Part 5: Sounds and ideas for better sound support

Making games with Shoes and Ruby is fun and relatively easy.  You could use the same approach to make any classic game, from Space Invaders to Pacman — the algorithms are similar for any programming language, so using Ruby is a gentle introduction and a great way to experiment.  Shoes even has examples of games like Minesweeper and Pong here: Shoes samples.