Serendipity sparked creativity.

On Tuesday, I randomly discovered a Star Wars movie rendered in ASCII that can be streamed by ssh. Of course, I tried it and watch it for a while.

While watching, I started thinking about what could be done with ASCII. And for some time, I have also been toying with the idea of making SSH-based websites. Meaning, having a server and allowing people to interact with it from the terminal. This was the perfect combo.

So, I decided to spend some evenings building a small flight game in ASCII that can be played using the terminal. I know, this is very geeky. Translation: I created a flight-themed game, that runs in a text-based format. Like the old-school computer games. Anyone is able to play it by connecting to a special address using a terminal, a command-line interface. Think of it as flying a plane made out of keyboard characters.

Welcome ASCII Games.

I wrote the game in Python, my language of choice. And it is simple:

• Control the plane using the ‘up’ and ‘down’ arrows,

• Try to avoid the storm,

• If you get into three clouds, you loose.

The game counts how many clouds you are able to avoid, and how many you have gone through. Once you hit your third cloud, it’s game over and you can replay the game. Simple, but fun.

You want to play it?

• Open the terminal,

• Type ssh asciigames.sh

• Enjoy!

It was a simple and fun project to do. I’ll make sure to keep adding some extra stuff in the game. Let me know any suggestions and what to improve!