How can I make a snake's tail follow the head?

Question

Following an assignment and just getting started with libGDX by building a small Snake clone I've run into an issue that I'll probably be ashamed for in a little while.

I currently have a snake's head (a simple rectangle at this stage) moving around the game's canvas. The most straight-forward way of building the rest of the snake was to have the head own a Java Collections LinkedList of SnakeElements which would in-/decrease in size according to what the player does.

Having this list of SnakeElements follow the head however has proven to not be trivial.

The current function doing this is as follows and is called every time the head updates its position:

private void moveTail (float x, float y, int direction) {
    float tmpx, tmpy;
    int tmpdirection;
    int offset_x, offset_y;

    for (SnakeSegment snse : tail) {
        offset_x = 0;
        offset_y = 0;

        tmpx = snse.getX();
        tmpy = snse.getY();
        tmpdirection = snse.getDirection();

        switch(direction) {
            case 0:
                offset_x = 0;
                offset_y = -(2 + snse.width);
                break;
            case 1:
                offset_x = -(2 + snse.width);
                offset_y = 0;
                break;
            case 2:
                offset_x = 0;
                offset_y = (2 + snse.width);
                break;
            case 3:
                offset_x = (2 + snse.width);
                offset_y = 0;
                break;
            default:
                System.out.println("wrong direction");
        }

        snse.setX(x + offset_x);
        snse.setY(y + offset_y);
        snse.setDirection(direction);

        x = tmpx;
        y = tmpy;
        direction = tmpdirection;
    }
}

which unfortunately results in this behavior:

Any tips on how to make a correctly working snake tail would be much appreciated :)

Answer 1

Think of the problem like this:
How does a snake move in the original game?
The snake moves towards its current direction. The behavior looks like the head appears out of nothing, and the last tail part disappears.

You can have a list of snakeparts. What you want to do is remove the last item in the list which represents the last tail part.
Then you want to create a new headpart where it should be positioned and put it in the first position of the list.
This means the remainder of the snake is not moved since you only alter first and last position.
This creates a snakelike behavior.

Answer 2

The way I see it is as a "Caterpillar" like system, where each part of the snake follow the part ahead of it.

In another words, each part of the snake would be an Object with Position (x, y), a reference to the part ahead of it that it would use to move around and a function to process the position of the part ahead of it and move accordingly. The main snake (the Head) should have references for every part of the snake, and would call the function responsible to make the part follow its predecessor, being the Head the predecessor of the first part.
Hope it helps!