term_snake

snake game in x86 assembly for ANSI terminals (Only runs on Linux)

See the gif avobe or in the media folder to know how it should look when properly installed. It works out of the box on a new Ubuntu installation. I also tested it with a new version of Debian with the Xcfe4-terminal. It works well too, but I had to install an emoji font.

Information

• The game runs in the terminal. It reads keyboard input from /dev/input/ directly and the graphics are made with ANSI escape codes.
• The game has retro-sounding music.
• The best version is the one that uses Unicode emojis, but if your terminal does not support it, you can run the ASCII version.
• Pro-tip: You can customize your terminal to make the game look different (by changing the size of the window, the fonts, colors and even the background)

To build and run: (See the install.sh script)

• Run the install.sh script from within the term_snake folder (cd to it and run ./install.sh). You might need to run chmod +x ./install.sh to be able to run the script. To do it manually, you can:
  • Create a symbolic link from the correct keyboard device at ./symlink/keyboard pointing towards /dev/input/by-id/<name_of_keyboard>
  • Set the read permissions of the keyboard file to read, so the game can read the keypresses. Alternatively, you can run the game as sudo.
  • Compile the game for your machine using gcc
  • Go to the src folder with cd.
  • Run "gcc -o snake snake.s -no-pie"
  • Run "./snake" to play the game.

Issues

• If the audio does not stop after the game is over, run "sudo pkill sh && sudo pkill aplay".
• If you cannot move, it means the keyboard stream cannot be read. Make sure you created the symbolic link or ran ./install.sh.
• If you cannot see the emojis, you need to run the game from a terminal that supports them, or install an emoji font.
• Make sure you have the required software.

Required software: (The newer versions of Ubuntu should have everything that is required. Debian and other distributions might not have emoji fonts)

• aplay (Linux utility to play sound)
• grep
• pgrep
• a terminal with ANSI escape character support
• preferably a terminal with emoji support
• GCC and the C standard library