Philippa Cowderoy in Elk: "@chrisamaphone @surobaki I assume..."

have people on the indie game scene made any weird terminal based games lately? seems like an underexplored “platform”

what does terminal based mean here? A TUI theme, or a straight up terminal interface through which you process all of the gameplay?

the latter; POSIX terminal (or similar) as player interface. i’m not sure to what extent i’d consider use of ncurses (e.g. nethack, zzt-style things) to be in scope but i’ll allow it if there’s good recent examples :)

I assume parser IF/text adventures aren't weird enough!

May 10, 2025 at 1:20:33 PM

well those usually run in a browser these days! even a z-machine emulator isn't quite what i mean here, but closer

like i kind of think of z-machine as its own "platform" separate from "the terminal" (though i'd have difficulty arguing with the point that "the terminal" on present day machines is a polite fiction)

Unless the game itself's notably weird for IF I think it reasonably fails on those grounds however it's implemented anyway?

People usually do things like fake shells with a little more graphics, you could look at the 2006 ICFPC as a console CTF "game" once you'd got the VM built though.

i have to laugh at this suggestion (not to deny that it's a good one!) because the authors of that problem are all people i met around 2006 and (mostly) remain good friends with today :)

I fucked up: wrote two VMs - one Haskell, one C++ - with the same "when you're on Windows..." bug!

(text mode default vs binary mode IO being what I actually needed)