Piu-piu-SH
Version: GIT Web: http://bit.ly/2xLpTfV
Whatever your imagination conjures up with the words ‘arcade shooter’, here’s a brand new approach to the well-established genre. Forget about GPU-accelerated graphics with shaders, textures and mind-blowing details, it’s time for terminal fun! The name of the game echoes laser blasts and machine gun fire that your Red Star jet fighter produces. In Piu-piu-SH you need to shoot the endless swarms of UFO saucers, pick up extra ammo and lives, avoid trees and destroy at least 100 UFOs to fight their boss. Haven’t we forgotten something? Oh, yes, the game is written purely on Bash. The game engine, and the sprites of all objects, including enemies, trees, the sun, bullets and bombs, all are rendered in ASCII pseudo-graphics.
As such, Piu-piu-SH fits nicely into a single executable shell script, consisting roughly of 920 lines of code. Although it’s a fairly simple game, you can configure the plane colour and change the symbol on its tail. Five keys are used to control the plane – the usual WASD set and P to shoot – and you can move the plane into any position on the screen, not just up and down.
A little Easter egg for the curious: Piu-piu-SH makes use of different colour palettes depending on the season (look for month=$(date +'%m) in the code). It’s autumn at the time of writing, and by the time you get to read this, the game will likely be coloured in white and grey. The gaming experience with Piupiu-SH will depend on the terminal emulator you use. Normally, you wouldn’t notice any performance difference between various console emulators, but this game creates serious challenge for them. We discovered that Konsole was far snappier than GnomeTerminal, and also that the Cygwin terminal in Windows was a slow poke.
“Shoot the swarms of UFO saucers, pick up extra ammo and lives, and avoid trees”