termcade

A Rust terminal arcade with a Ratatui interface and sandboxed WebAssembly games. It includes Asteroid, Tetris and Brickough. Use a truecolor terminal at least 80×24 cells; larger games may need more space.

Install

Linux and macOS (x86_64 or arm64), using prebuilt binaries:

curl -fsSL https://termca.de/install | sh

Or with mise:

mise use --global github:aviorstudio/termcade@latest

The shell installer verifies the release checksum and installs to ~/.local/bin; add that directory to your PATH if necessary. Mise manages its own installation directory and PATH through its shell activation. Windows x86_64 ZIP archives are available from Releases.

Play

termcade
termcade login
termcade add aviorstudio/tetris
termcade sync
termcade --help

Bundled and locally installed games work offline. Signing in uses browser approval; games added to your account follow you with sync. In the interface, removing a game from Library changes your account, while Uninstall here removes only this machine’s copy. The CLI remove command removes both account membership and the local copy.

Tab and Shift+Tab change focus, arrows select, Enter activates, Esc goes back or pauses, Ctrl+N opens navigation, and Ctrl+C quits. Games use arrows/WASD, Space/Z for action A, X for action B and Enter for start; each game displays its own controls.

TERMCADE_PIXELS selects quad, sextant, half or ascii rendering. Settings saves a preferred style for the next game start. Local scores survive offline play and sync with your account when you reconnect.

Machine commands

Place --json before a finite command, for example termcade --json whoami, termcade --json list or termcade --json dev new you/my-game. Stdout contains one versioned {v, ok, result} or {v, ok, error} document; progress uses stderr. API failures retain safe messages, status, code and server request ID. Help/version succeed, unknown commands exit 2 and failed operations exit 1. JSON mode refuses the default terminal interface and interactive browser login. Creating a publishing key returns its one-time token in the explicit command result; account and key-list results omit saved credentials.

Configuration follows XDG_CONFIG_HOME and data follows XDG_DATA_HOME, with native platform defaults when unset. TERMCADE_REGISTRY explicitly selects the registry; a saved session remains scoped to its registry. TERMCADE_TOKEN supplies a publishing key for publish.

Build a game

Install Rust 1.94 or later, then:

termcade dev new you/my-game
cd my-game
rustup target add wasm32-wasip1
termcade dev build
termcade dev install build/my-game.tcade
termcade

Edit src/lib.rs for the game and termcade.toml for its identity, playfield and controls. The generated Cargo project pins the Rust termcade-sdk crate to an exact source revision. dev build compiles a WASI reactor and packages it as a .tcade; the arcade runs it with ABI v1. Existing ABI-v1 packages remain compatible.

Publish a package already uploaded to a GitHub release:

termcade publish https://github.com/you/my-game v0.1.0 my-game.tcade

termcade org manages studio handles and membership. termcade keys manages scoped publishing keys for CI; TERMCADE_TOKEN accepts a publishing key for publish.

Contributor verification

Tool versions and native tasks live in mise.toml. Prepare the pinned helper source and run the complete gate:

git clone https://github.com/nicodes/tools.git .ci-tools
git -C .ci-tools checkout --detach a1c0321f3b4917a7e99eca42e241e46670f6e1e1
mise install
mise run check

The gate checks Rust formatting, Clippy, SDK and sandbox contracts, CLI and terminal journeys, installer behavior, release archives and locked dependencies. GitHub Actions builds the five native Linux, macOS and Windows archives. Source and output receipts remain in .artifacts/verification.

Contributor task interface

Contributor tool versions and task entry points live in the native Mise configuration. Use mise run lint for source checks, mise run test for the applicable behavioral tests, and mise run check for the complete supported gate. mise run clean removes declared generated outputs while preserving source, credentials and retained data. This package has no separate Mise development service; use its native entry points directly.