The best gaming monitors are engineering marvels, packed with millions of pixels that can change color faster than you can imagine. You’ll need a decent graphics card to handle them, though, but one inspired developer has a solution in the form of a game that only uses the sub-pixels of your monitor.
As I write this, I’m currently staring at a 27-inch 4K monitor. The display includes just under 8.3 million pixels and, obviously, they are too miniature to be recognized with the naked eye. But if you take a microscope or a camera with a decent macro lens, you will immediately notice them and the fact that each pixel is a collection of three (sometimes four) even smaller pixels, one each for the red, blue and green color channels. Their name is subpixels.
Fascinated by his own discovery, programmer Patrick Gillespie (By Sweclockers) was inspired to create a version of Snake, a classic phone game that ran solely through the monitor’s subpixels. In other words, instead of moving a snake of one or two full pixels across the screen, Gillespie developed a way to deal only with sub-pixels.
If you want to know what it would look like, you can try “Subpixel Snake”. Gillespie’s website or you can download the JavaScript code from GitHuband compile it for your own hardware. There’s just one minor problem – unless you have eyes like Legolas, you’ll barely notice anything, which means you’ll almost certainly need a microscope (or a good macro lens).
And don’t think you can just enlarge your browser window all the way, because the more you do it, the more the sub-pixels in your game code will not align properly with the sub-pixels of your monitor. You actually have to go the other way and scroll the browser window all the way down to make sure everything lines up. Well, you Power try zooming in as much as possible, or even apply a software tool to enlarge that part of the screen even more, but it just won’t work properly.
If this all seems too hard, you can just watch the YouTube video above instead, but it’s still worth your five minutes as Gillespie explains how everything was done. Subpixel Snake doesn’t serve any practical purpose or push the boundaries of game development any further, but to me it’s just a really frosty endeavor.
I believe that anyone who wants to become a game developer should try a similar project. In the same way that ’80s bedroom programmers worked with constrained color palettes and miniature amounts of RAM, forcing yourself to work on current, extremely powerful hardware that had huge limitations in what it could do will lend a hand you understand why and how everything works. And like old-school developers, it can lead to better games.
Sure, there’s probably no career path in the world of sub-pixel gaming, but think about the reaction you’d get in a game developer job interview when you whip out your microscope to show off the next massive indie hit.
