A small real-time multiplayer Snake that runs in the browser with a Python/Streamlit backend. It’s primarily a demo of the streamlit-hotkeys (PyPI, GitHub) component for low-latency keyboard input on Streamlit.
Check it out on Streamlit Community Cloud.
- Multiplayer: everyone shares one arena.
- Controls: Arrow keys or WASD (via
streamlit-hotkeys). - Crisp pixels: server sends clients WebRTC video stream with a game using streamlit-webrtc.
- Fixed tick rate for consistent gameplay.
git clone https://github.com/viktor-shcherb/multiplayer-snake
cd multiplayer-snake
pip install -r requirements.txt
streamlit run app.pyOpen the local URL in your browser (open several tabs for multiple players).
Controls: Arrow keys / WASD. Make sure the page has focus.
- Shared state lives in the Python process. Each Streamlit session (tab) is a thread that reads/writes that state.
- Input arrives via
streamlit-hotkeysand updates per-player direction. - Game loop advances at a fixed tick, moves snakes, resolves collisions, and draws the board into a NumPy array.
- Rendering encodes the array to PNG (Pillow), embeds it as a base64
<img>withimage-rendering: pixelatedfor nearest-neighbor scaling.
Contributions are very welcome—issues, discussions, and PRs.
Potential improvements:
- Input/UI: on-screen buttons or mobile touch controls; configurable key bindings.
- Gameplay: scoring, UI overlays, bots, teams, power-ups, and special abilities.
- Net/rendering: smarter diff-based updates; client-side
<canvas>renderer; WebRTC streaming. - Robustness: better state sync/locking; tests; linting; CI.
- Observability: FPS/tick metrics, profiling hooks.
- Docs: clearer examples of using
streamlit-hotkeysin other apps.
Note: Performance on Streamlit Community Cloud is currently poor and needs investigation (possible culprits: PNG encoding overhead, rerun frequency, cache invalidation, bandwidth/CPU limits). Help profiling and optimizing this is especially appreciated.