ASCII-axe VS bearlibterminal

I've written an ASCII roguelike game that runs in the terminal, it draws the display using the Video unit. https://github.com/cyberfilth/ASCII-axe

Playable versions are available on the Releases page, it doesn't have even a fraction of the features that I want yet but it's a complete demo game that can be played and won (or lost).

This week I started adding projectiles to Axes, Armour & Ale. Nothing too advanced yet, just little Red Cap sprites who throw rocks at you. The hardest part was figuring out how to implement animation in the game loop. Axes runs on the terminal, so the animation blocks the main loop whilst it plays out. Projectiles are quite fast though, and I'm trying to balance the NPC distribution so that there aren't too many enemies throwing projectiles on screen at once. Animated GIF I also added the beginnings of the Game Over screen, it randomly chooses an ASCII art image like the one below. RIP Screen Next I want to add scrolls, spells and improved projectiles for the player (slings, bow and arrow etc). Actually my 'to do' list is much longer than that, but those are the low hanging fruit coding-wise. Test alpha versions are available here http://rogue-axe.tk/

The second challenge was bug fixing an issue where the game would occasionally freeze on the title screen. I've written a logging unit that only runs in Debug mode and spits out information about which functions are successfully being called. With it, I was able to diagnose the issue. The cave generator tries to place stairs at opposite ends of the map, occasionally though one half of the map would generate without any floor tiles and the game would hang. I've added an extra line that checks that each map generated has floor tiles on the left and right side of the level, discarding any that don't https://github.com/cyberfilth/ASCII-axe For bugfixing, the biggest help has been:

More work on the terminal version of Axes, Armour & Ale https://github.com/cyberfilth/ASCII-axe

I've put together a terminal version of the game, running in a 80x25 terminal window. The code for this is at https://github.com/cyberfilth/ASCII-axe

Yeah looks like good practice. Although it's better to make console programs with simple libraries like bearlibterminal, so you don't need perfectly formatted whitespace and it's not so ugly.

The old frontend was using BearLibTerminal via Cursive, a Rust crate to handle terminal UIs. BearLibTerminal is a great library and can handle font/tiles of different sizes. See the "spacing" parameter at http://foo.wyrd.name/en:bearlibterminal:reference:configuration.