Poor man's Doom?
Anarch is a LRS/suckless, free as in freedom first man shooter game similar to Doom, written by drummyfish. It has been designed to follow the LRS principles very closely and set an example of how games, and software in general, should be written. It also tries to be compatible with principles of less retarded society, i.e. it promotes anarchism, anti-capitalism, pacifism etc.
The repo is available at https://codeberg.org/drummyfish/Anarch or https://gitlab.com/drummyfish/anarch. Some info about the game can also be found at the libregamewiki: https://libregamewiki.org/Anarch.
{ Though retrospectively I can of course see many mistakes and errors about the game and though it's not nearly perfect, I am overall quite happy about how it turned out for what it is, it got some attention among the niche of suckless lovers and many people have written me they liked the game and its philosophy. Many people have ported it to their favorite platforms, some have even written me their own expansions of the game lore, tricks they found etc. If you're among them, thank you :) ~drummyfish }
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screenshot from the terminal version
Anarch has these features:
Anarch is written in C99.
The game's engine uses raycastlib, a LRS library for advanced 2D raycasting; this would be called "pseudo 3D" graphics. The same method (raycasting) was used by Wolf3D but Anarch improves it to allow different levels of floor and ceiling which makes it look a little closer to Doom (which however used a different methods called BSP rendering).
The whole codebase (including raycastlib AND the assets converted to C array) has fewer than 15000 lines of code. Compiled binary is about 200 kB big, though with compression and replacing assets with procedurally generated ones (one of several Anarch mods) the size was made as low as 57 kB.
The music in the game is procedurally generated using bytebeat.
All images in the game (textures, sprites, ...) are 32x32 pixels, compressed by using a 16 color subpalette of the main 256 color palette, and are stored in source code itself as simple arrays of bytes -- this eliminates the need for using files and allows the game to run on platforms without a file system.
The game uses a tiny custom-made 4x4 bitmap font to render texts.
Saving/loading is optional, in case a platform doesn't have persistent storage. Without saving all levels are simply available from the start.
In the suckless fashion, mods are recommended to be made and distributed as patches.
The following is a retrospective look on what could have been done better, written by drummyfish (a potential project for someone might be to implement these and so make the game even more awesome):
SFG_recomputePlayerDirection was an attempt at optimization but it's probably optimization in a wrong place that does nothing, ...Powered by nothing. All content available under CC0 1.0 (public domain). Send comments and corrections to drummyfish at disroot dot org.