Antsy Alien Attack!

A game, written in Bash, that is a somewhat retro-a-like shoot 'em up. Hopefully.

Made with 💝 for

Building, Testing, and Installation

Ubuntu

You'll need the following dependencies:

• coreutils for stty
• joy2key (optional)
• lolcat
• mpg123
• ncurses-bin
• procps
• vorbis-tools

sudo apt install coreutils lolcat mpg123 ncurses-bin procps vorbis-tools

Or with Nix:

nix shell nixpkgs#lolcat nixpkgs#mpg123 nixpkgs#ncurses nixpkgs#procps nixpkgs#vorbis-tools --command ./aaa.sh

Execute ./aaa.sh to run the game.

./aaa.sh

XBox controller support

This step is optional.

sudo apt install libx11-dev x11-utils
wget -c http://sourceforge.net/projects/joy2key/files/joy2key/1.6.3/joy2key-1.6.3.tar.bz2
wget -c http://sourceforge.net/p/joy2key/patches/_discuss/thread/e73f20a1/33d7/attachment/button_list_segfault.patch
tar xvf joy2key-1.6.3.tar.bz2
patch -p0 -i ../button_list_segfault.patch
cd joy2key-1.6.3
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install

Steam Controller

Player 1 and Player 2 control profiles for sc-controller can be found in the cfg/ directory.

• Antsy Alien Attack - P1.sccprofile
• Antsy Alien Attack - P2.sccprofile

Plans

• Tick
  • Hardware interrupt trap to govern the game loop via a subshell.
• Input handler
  • Keyboard
  • Xbox360 Controller
• Graphics
  • Framebuffer
  • Sprite engine
  • Sprite collision detection
  • Sprite overlays
  • Starfield
  • Performance metrics
• Animators
  • Player thrust
  • Player roll
  • Explosion animations
• Audio
  • Sound effects engine
  • Music engine
  • Disable audio for remote connections
• Title screen engine
  • Main screen artwork
  • Game over artwork
  • Victory artwork
• Enemies
  • Fighters
  • Hunter Fighter AI
  • Sniper Fighter AI
  • Boss ships
  • Boss ship AI
• Power ups
  • Bonus points
  • Weapon upgrades
  • Shields
  • Smartbomb
  • Extra life
• Level progression
  • Number of enemies rises
  • Enemy firepower increases
  • Enemy speed increases
  • Bonus spawn rate decreases
  • Bonus value increases
  • Canyon levels, narrow playable area
  • Level progression announcements
  • Level-up skill points
• 2P
  • Local
  • Network
• Title screen attract mode
  • High score
  • Configuration
  • Credits
• Install
  • Script
  • PPA
  • Snap

Title Screens

The title graphics are using toilet and lolcat via tools/render-titles.sh. You can preview of all the toilet font styles using this:

for FONT in /usr/share/figlet/*.tlf; do echo $(basename $FONT) && toilet -t -f $(basename $FONT) --filter border "Antsy Alien Attack!" | lolcat -f -F 0.2; done

Game Assets

I found music and sound effects on Open Game Art. I ended up using Creative Commons licensed music from Patrick de Arteaga and sound effects from Kenney Vleugels and Viktor Hahn.

Fonts

Terminal fonts

• https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/
• http://www.fixedsysexcelsior.com/
• https://github.com/ansilove/BlockZone

ANSI & ASCII

• https://shiroyasha.svbtle.com/escape-sequences-a-quick-guide-1
• Code page 437)
• ASCII table , ascii codes

Editors

• http://bruxy.regnet.cz/web/linux/EN/ansi-art-sh-paint/
• http://picoe.ca/products/pablodraw/
• http://tetradraw.sourceforge.net/
• https://sourceforge.net/projects/tundradraw/
• https://sourceforge.net/projects/mysticdraw/
• http://syncdraw.bbsdev.net/
• https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/index.html

Learnings

• subshells and traps.
• case is twice as fast as if, elif, else, fi.
• echo -e is faster than tput and tput is faster that printf.
• Arithmetic comparison are faster than tests
  • For example if ((HUNT_P1 == 1)); then is faster than if [ ${HUNT_P1} -eq 1]; then
• Bash has C style loops
  • Like this for (( FIGHTER_LOOP=0; FIGHTER_LOOP < TOTAL_FIGHTERS; FIGHTER_LOOP++ )); do
• I never knew about ((TOTAL_STARS++)) or ((TOTAL_STARS+=5)) or ((TOTAL_STARS+=MORE_STARS))
• Px437 IBM VGA Regular at 16px is best font.

Slides from a presentation I gave at FOSS Talk Live 2019 as part of the Ubuntu Podcast live show are also available:

• fosstalklive-2019-06.odp
• fosstalklive-2019-06.pdf