🐍 Snake MCP App

A fully playable Snake game, built as an MCP App — play it directly inside ChatGPT, Claude, or any MCP-compatible chat client, no separate browser tab required.

Live server: https://snake-mcp.onrender.com/mcp

⚠️ Hosted on Render's free tier — the first request after ~15 minutes of inactivity can take 30–60 seconds while the instance wakes up. After that, it's instant.

What this is

This project demonstrates how a real game can be embedded directly inside any MCP-compatible client — ChatGPT, Claude, or anything else that speaks the protocol — turning a chat interface into a place you can actually play, not just talk.

Most MCP tool calls round-trip to the host for every single action, which makes anything real-time (like a game) feel laggy if implemented naively. This project avoids that by exposing just one MCP tool (start_game) that opens a self-contained, client-side HTML/JS app inside the host's UI. Once launched, the game runs entirely in the browser — movement, collisions, scoring — with zero network calls per frame, so it plays smoothly regardless of which MCP client it's running in.

Related MCP server: 魂斗罗 MCP Demo

Features

• Classic Snake gameplay — arrow keys or WASD, Space to pause

• Walls or No Walls (wrap-through) modes

• Speed control — Slow / Medium / Fast, adjustable live mid-game

• Pause / Resume

• Bonus food — a pulsing ⭐ worth +50 points, appears randomly and disappears after 5 seconds if not eaten

• Emoji food (🍎🍌🍇🍊🍓🍒🍉🍍) instead of plain shapes

• Rounded, animated snake with a directional face

How to play

1. Connect the MCP server URL above in your client (ChatGPT Developer Mode / custom app, Claude, or any MCP-compatible host).

2. Ask it to start the game — e.g. "Start the snake game".

3. Play using arrow keys, WASD, or the on-screen controls.

Architecture

ChatGPT / Claude / any MCP host
            │
            ▼
   start_game (MCP tool)
            │
            ▼
   ui://snake/game (MCP App resource)
            │
            ▼
  Self-contained HTML/CSS/JS
  (game logic runs entirely
   client-side after launch)

• server.py — Python MCP server (mcp SDK v2) wrapped in a small Starlette app. Exposes the single start_game MCP tool (mounted under /mcp), plus a /health endpoint and a / info endpoint.

• ui/ — Vite-built frontend. game.js contains the full Snake game logic (movement, collisions, scoring, bonus food) — nothing here calls back to the server during gameplay.

• build_ui.py — inlines Vite's built CSS/JS into a single self-contained dist/mcp_app.html, since MCP App resources work best as one file with no external asset requests.

• Dockerfile — two-stage build: Node stage builds the UI, Python stage runs the server. Used for deployment on Render.

Running locally

npm install
npm run build              # builds ui/ -> dist/mcp_app.html
python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\activate      # Windows; use source .venv/bin/activate on macOS/Linux
pip install -r requirements.txt
python server.py            # runs on http://127.0.0.1:8000/mcp

Test it with MCP Inspector (Streamable HTTP, connect to http://127.0.0.1:8000/mcp) before connecting a live host.

Deployment

Deployed on Render as a Docker-based Web Service, built directly from this repo's Dockerfile. Any push to main triggers a new deploy.

Tech stack

• MCP Python SDK v2 — server + Apps extension

• Vite — frontend build

• Vanilla JS/HTML5 Canvas — no frontend framework, kept intentionally lightweight

• Render — hosting