Back to the game

Constrict.io

What’s changed

Newest first. The privacy note is at the bottom — it is short, because there is not much to tell.

2.0.0

In progress · July 2026

A rebuild on top of the 2018 game. Same mascot, same spiky head, same googly eyes following your mouse — and very little else left untouched.

Fixed

  • Holding boost no longer takes the whole match down. Past a certain point it shrank your snake until there was nothing left of it, and then the server’s tick loop crashed for everybody. About fifteen seconds from spawn was enough to do it.
  • Food comes back. Eaten pellets were never replaced, so an arena slowly emptied out until somebody restarted the server. Later in a session the map was visibly barren.
  • The leaderboard is sorted by size. It was really sorted by who had been connected the longest. The numbers beside the names were right; the order never was.
  • You no longer spawn on top of everyone else. Every snake appeared at the exact centre of the map with all hundred of its segments stacked on one point, which made camping the middle free and spawning there a coin flip.
  • Two bandwidth leaks. Every pellet eaten anywhere on the map was announced to every player in the game, and a long snake sliding into your view sent you its entire body once per visible segment.

New

  • Food is worth different amounts and grows back in drifting clusters instead of evenly scattered dots. Bigger and brighter means worth more, so it is worth crossing the map for.
  • Dying pays the killer properly. A corpse now drops a handful of fat gems instead of a long trail of crumbs — roughly double the old payout, in far fewer pieces.
  • A killfeed and a kill count. The snake that ended you finally has a name. The server always knew who it was; it had simply never told anyone.
  • The longest snake wears a crown and carries a bounty on it, paid to whoever takes it off them.
  • Two more power-ups alongside the magnet: ghost, which lets you pass straight through other snakes, and overdrive, which makes boosting free.
  • Boosting drops cheaper pellets. Running away used to hand whoever was chasing you a full-value meal, right where their head already was.

Looks

  • A new menu, palette and type. Near-black indigo, one green, a hex-etched void, and two real typefaces instead of Arial Black at every size. The logo is untouched, because it is the brand — but it glows now.
  • The menu is one composition at any size. It scales with the screen instead of sitting as a fixed block in the corner of a large one, so a 4K monitor gets the same picture a laptop does, only bigger — and on a phone it stacks rather than clips.
  • Dying gets a proper card. Who ended you and what you scored, set in the same column as the rest of the menu instead of one red line floating across the top of the screen — and the menu arrives underneath it as a fade, so you get to watch yourself die first.
  • The tab has a face. The spiky head is the site icon now. There simply was not one before.
  • The renderer is moving to WebGL, which is what makes the snakes ribbons of light rather than a row of overlapping circles.

Gone

  • Ads, analytics and every third-party script. Nothing on this site is fetched from anyone else’s domain any more.
  • Leftovers from a different game of mine that had been pasted in and never removed — including the changelog that used to live on this page. It belonged to ShootEm IO. Its last line was “Added trucks”.
  • The cookie that remembered your name. It is kept in your browser’s local storage instead.
  • Hotlinked images and libraries. Every asset is served from this domain now, because every CDN address the 2018 page used answers with a 404 today.

1.x

2018 · the original

Constrict.io first shipped in 2018, and its version history was not kept — the file that was supposed to hold it turned out to belong to another game entirely. The original build is still standing, frozen exactly as it was, at snake.justatree.dev.

Privacy

No ads, no analytics, no trackers, no third-party scripts. Every file this page loads comes from this domain. Nothing here reports back to anyone.

No accounts. The only thing kept on your device is the name you typed, in your browser’s local storage, so that you do not have to type it again. Clearing this site’s data removes it and there is no copy anywhere else.

What the game server sees is your IP address — it needs somewhere to send the game — and the name you chose. It has no database and writes nothing about you to disk. The web server that hands you this page keeps ordinary access logs, the same as every web server on the internet.

Your name is public for the length of a match: it is drawn over your snake for everyone else to read. Do not put anything in it you would not want a stranger to see.

Anything else, ask on the Discord.