nCurses Game Engine

A TUI game engine built in C++ and ncurses.

Note: This project is a work in progress and is being actively developed.

Current Architecture

The engine is structured around a few core components:

• Game - An abstract base class users can use to derive their custom games from.

  • The Game Class provides users:
    • A public run() function to start their games.
    • Three pure virtual functions (input(), update() and render()) they can use to interface into the game loop and write their custom game logic.
    • A simple get_input() function to get input chars from users.
    • An interface to the Screen class so users can create Windows.

• Screen - The main interface to the terminal.

  • The Screen Class:
    • Manages ncurses initialization and cleanup.
    • Lets us get user input (in Blocking and NonBlocking modes).
    • Creates and destroys all Windows.

• Window - The main interface users use to print output to the screen.

  • The Window Class provides users a way to:
    • Move the cursor (our current printing location) around the screen.
    • Add strings and chars to the screen.
    • Clear and refresh the screen.
  • Note: Windows need to be created through the Screen create_window() factory.
    • We don't want windows to exist unless we already have a Screen initialized, so we tie their creation, ownership and destruction to the Screen Class.

• Coord - A 2D coordinate struct with arithmetic and logical comparison operators.

A typical user game would have the following structure:

UserGame : Game (abstract)
 ├── run()          # game loop calls user defined: input() -> update() -> render()
 ├── get_input()    # users can call during input() to get input for their game
 ├── Window* w0     # users access the window through Window* handles
 ├── Window* w1
 └── Screen
      ├── Window w0 # Screen owns the actual Window objects
      └── Window w1

Next Steps

• The next features I am about to start implementing are:
  • Entity Component System (ECS)
  • ASCII Sprite rendering system

Demo

I currently have a very simple TestGame demo written out in test_game.h, test_game.cpp and main.cpp. The demo prints a 2x2 cube to screen and lets the user move it around.

• Demo controls
  • Press the 'w' 'a' 's' 'd' keys to move the cube up, left, down and right.
  • Press the 'q' key to exit the game

testgame_demo.mp4

Build

You can use the following commands to either build, cleanup or run the TestGame demo:

make        # build TestGame and Game Engine Library
make clean  # cleanup the build
./main      # run the demo

Note: Building requires ncurses and g++