awkaster, a Doom-like game running in your terminal and with awk!
A quick look at this very fun game which I recently discovered
The game
Available here, awkaster makes use of raycasting.
It is not really a new game, both graphically and timing wise: it got released in... 2016.
It is programmed using AWK, which is where things are interesting: for those who know AWK, it is "designed for text processing and typically used as a data extraction and reporting tool" (still according to Wikipedia).
Goal
The goal of the game is... well, expected - very Doom-like:
Your objective is to navigate the map and activate exit elevator, killing
hordes of monsters in the process.
Let's go!
Moving
Quite easy and it's even mentioned at the bottom:
- W: Up
- S: Down
- A: Strafe Left
- D: Strafe Right
- J: Turn Left
- L: Turn Right
- Space: Fire
As you can see above, the map is composed of colored walls, and you must move and kill the enemies, and find the elevator platform.
The enemies
Of course the enemies are not some fancy monster like you would find in modern games: instead, you're looking at some big, red dots that come at you and that you must kill before they hit you:
In the 3 screenshots above, you can see a monster appearing, then me firing (the green dot), and then the monster is no longer there as I killed it.
Bear in mind that the game only changes when you move, so you can stand still for a while if looking at enemies (although they're easy to spot!).
Finding the elevator!
Ultimately, your goal is to find the elevators and press "X".
I had a hart time figuring out where they are, since there's no indication on
the Github's page.
A quick search on YouTube gave me that video, which mentions:
"The exfil point is a green room, which is an elevator, somewhere in the map."
Wrap Up
A simple and fun game, not necessarily easy as killing the enemies and finding the elevator requires some time and skills.
Plus, it's the kind of game which works across platforms - I can even SSH into one of my machines at home to play it :)
Tags: Retrogaming