Changelog — Sidewinder

v1.0 2026-04-30 latest

Big. The game is now called Sidewinder. Same game, sharper name. The mechanic was always about speed — Sidewinder leans into it: fast desert snake, Microsoft Sidewinder keyboard heritage, lateral-darting urgency. Tagline survives unchanged: if your day has a keyboard in it, this is for you.
New. New domain: sidewinder.retrogames1337.com. Old snake.retrogames1337.com redirects for ~30 days.
New. New logo + brand treatment.
Fix. If you were tracking high scores or daily streaks, your data is preserved (localStorage keys are unchanged for back-compat).

Fix. Hard-mode multiplayer was eating keystrokes — server was rewriting letters non-deterministically when both players reached for the same cell. Letters now stable mid-typing. #62
Fix. TypeQuest mid-run restart left the boss timer bus-stopped. Crusher difficulty re-tuned (was a wall, now a fight). #60
New. X-Large 10×10 board option in single-player. For when an 8×8 stops feeling roomy. #61

Big. Switcheroo mechanic shipped — predictive heat countdown on cells the snake is about to occupy, with scoring bonuses for grabbing food the instant before the swap. The mechanic the rest of v0.9 hangs off. #45
New. Snake-butt restoration: cells the tail vacates restore their original letter instead of re-rolling. Big legibility win. #45
New. Daily Streak counter compounds the Daily Challenge — miss a day, streak resets. #58
New. 8-tier Switcheroo achievements with unlock toasts. Visible in the sidebar stats panel. #59
New. Per-difficulty bests panel — Practice / Easy / Medium / Hard tracked separately. #53
New. Tutorial overlay explaining the heat mechanic, dismissible, persists via localStorage. #49
New. Visual juice pass: score popups, PERFECT confetti on flawless runs, snake gradient, particle bursts on food. #46/#47/#48
Fix. Multiplayer keystroke loss, stuck-snake detection, and the mid-game tutorial popup that ate inputs. #55/#56/#57
Fix. Snake-color / food-color collision resolved with a pulsing border around food when the palette clashes. #44

Big. Daily Challenge — deterministic per-day boards plus a 24-hour leaderboard. Same seed for everyone. #33
Big. Replays (lite) — top daily runs are recorded and played back in the lobby. Watch how the leader did it. #35
New. TypeQuest MVP — typing roguelike with bosses and modifier cards. Sibling page, separate run loop. #50/#51/#52
New. Country override v0.5 — manual flag picker for users in shared/VPN networks. #28
Fix. Multiplayer stuck-snake detection — server now nudges snakes that haven't moved in N ticks. #41

New. WebSocket heartbeat plus reconnect — drops on flaky wifi recover instead of dead-ending the run. #24/#26
New. Personal stats v1: plays / deaths / foods / longest snake / perfect runs, persisted locally. #25
New. Sound preferences (mute, volume) persist across sessions. #29
New. Quick Match button — no lobby, no waiting; tap and the matchmaker pairs you. #27
New. i18n pass: 10 languages live (en, zh, es, hi, ar, pt, ru, ja, de, fr) with auto-detect. #30

New. Initial soft-launch readiness — share scorecards, OG image, sitemap, schema.org markup.
New. Difficulty tiers (Practice / Easy / Medium / Hard) with the Practice tier as a no-death sandbox.
New. Bot opponents in single-player so the board never feels empty.
New. 24h leaderboard with anti-cheat sign-checks on submitted scores.
New. Hint highlighting — toggleable border around cells whose letter you can type next.