Snake Game

What is the problem?

We will be building a Haskell implementation of the classic game Snake.

What is the something extra?

We will create a graphical user interface using gloss for the user to play the game and select difficulty in the main menu page.

What did we learn from doing this?

Developing a game within a language that is not object oriented presents some challenges, but the unique simplicity of functional programming makes the higher level design of games such as snake easier to grasp. However, we did have some trouble because of the fact that Haskell is a strongly-typed language. Specifically, we started by making the base game before creating a GUI, and had set most of our data types to work with Ints. However, certain builtin functions that we used required floats, while others required ints, thus we had to do a lot of "casting" in order to make things work. We also struggled with making the random number generator to create new food locations for the food as a result of this. Our first version of the generator only created Coords that had a positive x,y, so we had to change it to use randomRIO to generate negative coordinates. This resulted in a lot of refactoring of our program to support this.