ASCII-axe VS Cursive

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

Rust has great libraries for TUIs. tui-rs (https://github.com/fdehau/tui-rs) has been used in numerous popular applications, but is unmaintained. ratatui (https://github.com/tui-rs-revival/ratatui) is the maintained version, and is pretty new. Less widely known is cursive (https://github.com/gyscos/cursive), which I have yet to try.

Aside from the libraries, I just wanted to start a project that would make be better at Rust. The easy distribution with cargo is a huge bonus though.

There are plenty of terminal UI libraries that are actually nice to work with. For Python, there's Textual and PyTermGUI. For Rust, there's ratatui and Cursive (or, if you want something a bit lower level, crosster or termion). For Go, there's bubbletea.

Switching the backend of Cursive to crossterm removed dependence on ncurses

I'd hear of TUIs so I just searched for tui libraries in Rust and Cursive seemed like a good choice and it turned out great!

This weekend I started porting my game to a different UI library (egui) as a way of familiarizing myself with egui. I don't think I'll have something useable to build off of before this year's 7DRL challenge so I guess I'll be reusing my existing UI code (using cursive). But, once I finish porting the UI it should be a lot easier to add fancy stuff like animations, tooltips, and graphical tiles since I won't be tied to constraints of a terminal UI.

Cursive should let you easily build a layout with a menu and status bars (and mouse works).

The thing that gets me about Dwarf Fortress is that it's a 64-bit text-mode game.

As a grey-haired developer who got excited about "DOS Extenders" that allowed 32-bit mode, seeing a text-mode game written as a native 64-bit application is bizarrely anachronistic.

I get a similar feeling from text-mode GUI frameworks for Rust, which allow multi-threading and 64-bit but are essentially clones of Borland Turbo Vision, where you had to be mindful to keep lists smaller than 64KB: https://github.com/gyscos/cursive

Maybe this helps?

cursive