Consoul

Inspiration

Old school graphics and ASCII art

What it does

Consoul™ is a Windows premium exclusive exploration style game. The program takes place within the Windows command prompt window and relies heavily on the Win32 API.

How I built it

Our code relies extensively on the Windows API for major functions such as client cursor information for buttons and virtual terminal sequences which let us take full control of the console. Each section of our game is a 2 frame animation made of ASCII characters that have been entered line by line.

Challenges I ran into

We ran into issues mainly with the Win32 implementation and our compiler choice, since GCC seemed to be giving us problems that the MSVC compiler never complained about. In addition to this, we had to drop our coloured output feature before it made it's way into our project due to the time constraints.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The first time we successfully managed to read user input in the console, we felt as though we'd crossed a major milestone and knew that our code had the potential become very useful to someone in the future.

What I learned

As a team, we've learned that time management is among the highest priorities while working on a project like this, especially with the 12 hour time frame. Despite this, I believe that we spent our time with little regret.

What's next for Consoul

Although the functionality of our program is simple on the surface, the groundwork is already laid down for extensive applications and extensions of our work. This includes but is not limited to: * Expansive 3d games with large planes * Installations and other functions of command line by click rather than key * Playing music tracks

Our program allows for the versatility of the command line to reach its potential and explores all the new possibilities that are frequently overlooked when working with the command line.

This command line UI is extremely basic, however in the 12 hours spent originally creating this, we have foreseen several use cases for this program: * Games * One-click command line installations * Applications that require a GUI and command line element

In the future, we hope to further expand on this application by adding support for 24-bit colors and improving portability.