Creating Snake with Amazon Q

The nostalgia of classic arcade games inspired me to reimagine the beloved Snake game with modern visuals, responsive controls and adaptive difficulty. I aimed to create a basic yet challenging game for players of all ages.

Since I did not have a lot of experience creating games and deploying them, I approached Amazon Q with my idea and used it to help me.

Amazon Q was able to give me some starter code for the app. All I had to do was give it my idea of the same as well as some requirements. At the start, I simply told it that I wanted to code out snake. It then gave me some code in Python using tkinter as the UI.

However, this would not work since I wanted to deploy the game online! I thus told it to give me code for the game that could be deployed. It then proceeded to give me code written in HTML, CSS and JS.

Now that I had the base functionality complete, I proceeded to use Amazon Q to implement new features. I did not have to copy paste the code again, I simply told Amazon Q my new features and it gave me the code for them. Some features included

Since Amazon Q is a service provided by AWS, I thought that it would be able to teach me how to deploy my app on AWS! In my prompt, I added the additional criteria of being able to deploy the app cheaply!

Unsurprisingly, it gave me the full walk-through in doing so.

Along the way, I faced some issues that were a little strange to me. For example, my mobile-friendly arrow buttons were rendering wrongly on the S3 deployment.

After some prompting, Amazon Q informed me that I had to change the encoding accordingly. Without Amazon Q, I would have spent at least 20 minutes debugging this but I managed to solve it in 3 minutes.

All in all, Amazon Q was incredibly effective in helping me code as a beginner game developer. I hope to be able to use it for even more impressive features when I have the time!