Show HN: Termcraft – Terminal-first 2D sandbox survival in Rust

135 points
1/21/1970
3 days ago
by sebosch

Comments


verdverm

Tangential to this cool project, Hytale has an amazing modder experience and toolset built into the game. Everything is JSON driven, with hot reload, so we can build tooling in any language (without needing to name said language, lol to that thread here, ahem, I'm using CUE, ahem). They have flags to dump the JSONschema for everything, including mods, as well.

More related, Worldgen v2 is pretty amazing compared to Minecraft. What is the basis for the Worldgen in this project? Not too different from a 3d voxel game? I'm pretty new to it and have a general curiosity still.

https://hytalemodding.dev

2 days ago

Gigachad

Seems like it would be possible to create a cool demo where you can play the game over ssh rather than having to compile locally.

2 days ago

apitman

Nice. Is this terminal-first or terminal-only?

3 days ago

sebosch

good point, it is terminal only

2 days ago

p0w3n3d

Wow finding the nether fortress will sure take time in 2d world and will render it unskippable

2 days ago

sudo_cowsay

That is kinda true, I wonder how the end will be like... 2D dragon!

2 days ago

danielszlaski

Terminal Minecraft with brewing and dragon progression in Rust. Didn't expect to want this, but here we are. Bookmarked.

21 hours ago

nickdothutton

I wonder if you could do a good Atari Gauntlet clone as a terminal only game.

2 days ago

swaminarayan

How do you build a procedurally generated survival game in a terminal without a graphics engine?

2 days ago

tdeck

Folks have been doing it for decades. E.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike

2 days ago

johnisgood

Wait till he finds out there are text-based adventure games!

2 days ago

samiv

Is this a serious question?

Well OF COURSE you just prompt Claude... /s

No seriously why would you need a graphics engine for procedurally generating content? In this particular case for example his "content" is the world map expressed in some units (tile grid) across two axis. Then you generation algorithm produces that 2d data and that's that.

2 days ago

absynth

good stuff. keep going.

any way to link instances together? I'm interested in something like this to import/export resources etc.

2 days ago

kehao95

This is art!

3 days ago

yuppiepuppie

This is cool! Feel free to add it to https://hnarcade.com :)

2 days ago

torginus

[flagged]

3 days ago

vunderba

Rust is the crossfit of programming languages. Everybody around you needs to know at all times.

On a serious note, nice job OP. This game kind of feels like an ASCII version of Terraria. Might I recommend extended ASCII or unicode for the player though? Right now they look a bit like a lollipop.

2 days ago

sudo_cowsay

Kind of hard to see the player's motion

2 days ago

xylophile

If somebody announces that their project is written in Rust but nobody complains, what happens?

Writing any non-trivial video game with Rust is (arguably) interesting in itself since developer velocity in gamedev is generally considered paramount, and Rust has a reputation (rightly or wrongly) for hindering velocity.

So yes, the fact that this is written in Rust is actually relevant and valuable. As opposed to your hollow snark.

Now, OP: tell us more about how that's played out for you.

2 days ago

frail_figure

Rust is fine, but so is C, Zig, Odin, Lua, etc.

I dont think the parent comment was complaining, just pointing out the "written in rust" meme. Being the top comment, seems like plenty of people enjoyed it!

It's the weekend, take it easy :)

2 days ago

zeroq

One does not simply write an app in Rust in silence.

It is customary to announce the fact so that the astrologers can proclaim that the population of recruiters on linkedin has increased.

2 days ago

cjkaminski

Based on the evidence presented by the Hacker News front page, the hype is boundless. Rust is the ur-language that we never realized until... idk, three years ago?

2 days ago

zeroq

It's a PR ploy. It sounds better than X done in C, mainly because the X has been done countless times in C by now, while "Hello World, but in Rust" still felt sexy three years ago.

2 days ago

westmeal

You really don't want to know. The results could be disastrous.

2 days ago

sebosch

haha, guilty

2 days ago