Go · WebAssembly · Bubble Tea
termcade draws its playfield out of Unicode block elements, so one terminal cell becomes a 2×2 or 2×3 grid of pixels and the games come out sharper than the font should allow. Asteroid and Tetris are in the binary, and play offline the moment it starts.
go run github.com/aviorstudio/termcade@latest One static binary · a truecolor terminal at 80×24 or larger
ASTEROID HIGH 1380 ╭────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮ │ ▗▚ │ │ ▌ ▌ │ │ ▟▀▀▟▖ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ │ ▗▄▄▄ │ │ ▄▞▘ ▀▀▌ │ │ ▄▀ ▐ ▗▄▖ │ │ ▐ ▌ ▄▀▀▘ ▝▖ │ │ ▚ ▞ ▗▄▄▖ ▞ ▗▘ │ │ ▀▄ ▐ ▗▞▀▘ ▝▀▀▄ ▝▚▄▖ ▄▀ ▄▄▄▄ │ │ ▀▄▄▄▀▀▘ ▞▘ ▐ ▝▀ ▗▀ ▀▌ │ │ ▌ ▌ ▝▖ ▄▘ │ │ ▀▚▄▖ ▄▘ ▀▄▄▄▞ │ │ ▄▖ ▝▀▚▖ ▄▀ │ │ ▄▞▀ ▝▚▖ ▝▀ │ │ ▄▀ ▝▀▄▖ │ │ ▞ ▐▘ │ │ ▝▚ ▗▞ ▗▖ │ ╰────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯ SCORE 000020 WAVE 1 ▲ ▲ ▲ ←/→ turn · ↑ thrust · space fire
In the arcade
The starter pack is committed as packages and embedded in the binary, then unpacked into your games directory the first time it runs. The games that come with the arcade are installed exactly the way an added one is — and can be removed exactly the same way.
Asteroids-style rock shooter. An inertial ship on a wrapping field, and big rocks that split into faster small ones.
Falling-block stacker with Super Rotation System kicks, a 7-bag randomizer, ghost piece, lock delay, and gravity that tightens by level.
Breakout-style brick breaker: steer the ball with paddle english, clear the wall, survive the speed-up.
TERMCADE_PIXELS
Every setting draws the same game into the same terminal cells; only the sharpness,
and what the font has to know how to draw, change. Below is Asteroid's ship at the
start of a wave, captured four times over and blown up — the same five columns of
cells every time, a different number of pixels inside them. In the arcade p cycles the
style and keeps it, and TERMCADE_PIXELS overrides the saved choice for a
single run.
▗ ▗▘▚ ▟▄▞▖ ▝▘ ▝▀
Unicode 1.0 block elements. Renders anywhere, and the default.
🬦 🬞🬄🬣 🬔🬭🬁🬓 🬉🬂 🬂🬍
Sharpest, near-square pixels. Needs Unicode 13, or you get tofu.
▄ ▄▀▄ ▄ ▄▀▄ ▀ ▀▀
The original look, for fonts that struggle with the rest.
- ::: .:_:, -" "-
A density ramp and line characters. No block glyphs at all.
Every game is a WebAssembly package, and it runs under wazero with no filesystem, no network, and a watchdog on every call into it. One that panics gets a crash screen instead of taking the arcade with it, and one that fails to install is listed dimmed, with the reason, rather than quietly missing.
Terminals send no key-release events, so a held key is normally guessed from auto-repeat — which stalls for the OS repeat delay after the first press and makes a paddle feel like it is ignoring you. termcade asks for the Kitty keyboard protocol's event-type reporting, and on terminals that answer — kitty, Ghostty, foot, WezTerm, recent xterm — held keys are exact. Everywhere else it falls back without saying anything.
Games draw in square logical units and never see the pixel grid, so the block style, the cell shape and the ANSI batching are the arcade's business rather than theirs. A game written before a pixel style existed renders in it anyway.
The front door
The library is one keystroke away and the marketplace one more. Browsing is open; signing in adds a game to the account library and installs it on this machine. The library follows you to the web app and every terminal where you sign in, and the arcade has its own account screens.
The live registry is api.termca.de. Package bytes pass through it and are
checked against the sha256 recorded when the release was published before either the
terminal or web app runs them. TERMCADE_REGISTRY selects a local registry
for development.
termcade | play — the marketplace is in here too, on m |
|---|---|
termcade add author/slug | add a marketplace game to your account and this machine |
termcade list | what is in your arcade |
termcade remove author/slug | take one off, and off your synced library |
termcade signup | create an account — or termcade login, termcade logout |
termcade dev new you/mygame | scaffold a game that is already playable |
termcade dev build | package a game directory into a .tcade |
termcade dev install build/game.tcade | install a local package while developing |
termcade dev
termcade dev new you/mygame scaffolds a game that already runs,
termcade dev build turns the directory into a .tcade, and
termcade dev install puts the local build on your own menu. A game is a Go package implementing
one interface — and because the boundary is a frozen wasm ABI rather than a Go one, Go
is a convenience and not a requirement.
Three games in the box.
The rest is yours to write.