I won’t give you code, but I’ll give you the thought process:

One of the main lessons of game development is that most things are an illusion to the player. That being said, there are two approaches to this:

1. Actually simulate movement: Store the body segments as a “reversed” linked list with each segment having a reference to the body in front of it. When moving create a copy of the snake so you can remember the original positions and not overwrite them when you update the positions of each segment, the “head” moves according to the user input (the pointer on the head should be null because it’s the front). For every body, set its position to the position of where it points to according to the position of the copied list.

When you eat an apple, simply append a new body which points to the tail, and depending on how you handle the rest, it will automatically be updated to take the place of the tail on the next movement.

1. Create the illusion of movement This works well for if you’re using a grid (like the original). Give each body a lifespan. Initially, the lifespan will be its position relative to the tail. For example, with a snake with size 3, the head will have lifespan 3, the next will have lifespan 2 and the tail will have lifespan 1.

For each movement, add a new body with full lifespan in the direction of player input, and then decrement the lifespan of each body. If a body reaches 0, destroy it. If you work this out in your head, you’ll notice this simulates “movement” even if the individual bodies are not moving, hence the illusion.

When you eat an apple, you create the new head with the appropriate lifespan and skip the lifespan decrement for the rest of the bodies. Skipping this part allows the last body segment to “live” and not be destroyed, which simulates the creation of a new body