Skip to main content

A roguelike framework for Python 3 using BearLibTerminal

Source code

API docs

What is this?

Imagine you want to write a roguelike, you don’t want to roll your own framework from scratch, and you want to use Python.

The most mature option for doing this is libtcod-cffi, which is a kitchen sink of roguelike development utilities like terminal graphics, pathfinding, random numbers, noise generators, config file parsers, and data structures. But it’s pretty heavy, the docs aren’t great, and it’s an icky C API. And while it covers a lot of things you need for a roguelike, it doesn’t help you much with your UI or state management.

If that sounds like a decent tradeoff, go try libtcod-cffi and be happy! But there’s another library, BearLibTerminal, that only handles terminal graphics. It’s tiny and understandable. Clubsandwich builds on BearLibTerminal (BLT…) to add a nice API, state management, easy UI, and some other helpful stuff.

Features

Scroll down for examples.

  • Event loop

  • Scene manager

  • Geometry data structures

  • Convenience functions

  • UIKit-like interface framework

  • Script runner to help you iterate quickly

Dependencies

  • Python 3.4+

  • And BearLibTerminal, of course

Installation

This package is not yet on PyPI. It is under heavy development. But you can expect reasonable API stability!

pip install -e 'git://github.com/irskep/clubsandwich.git@master#egg=clubsandwich'
readme_images/screenshot1.png readme_images/screenshot2.png

Feature examples

An event loop

clubsandwich uses the asyncio library to run an asynchronous update loop. The terminal_read(val) method is called whenever events are in the queue. terminal_update() is called every frame.

from clubsandwich.loop import BearLibTerminalEventLoop

class BasicLoop(BearLibTerminalEventLoop):
    def terminal_read(self, val):
        print("User pressed a key:", val)

    def terminal_update(self):
        # this is called every frame
        self.draw()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    BasicLoop().run()

A scene manager

Most games have more than one screen! This simple “director” object manages them for you in a really obvious way.

from bearlibterminal import terminal
from clubsandwich.director import DirectorLoop, Scene

class BasicLoop2(DirectorLoop):
    def get_initial_scene(self):
        return MainMenuScene()

class MainMenuScene(Scene):
    def terminal_update(self):
        print(0, 0, "Press Enter to begin game, Esc to quit")

    def terminal_read(self, val):
        if val == terminal.TK_ENTER:
            self.director.push_scene(GameScene())
        elif val == terminal.TK_ESCAPE:
            self.director.pop_scene()

class GameScene(Scene):
    def terminal_update(self):
        print(0, 0, "You are playing the game, it is so fun! Press Esc to stop.")

    def terminal_read(self, val):
        if val == terminal.TK_ESCAPE:
            self.director.pop_scene()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    BasicLoop2().run()

A geometry library

Basic data structures for Rect, Point, and Size, and a very thin wrapper around bearlibterminal.terminal to support them.

from clubsandwich.blt.nice_terminal import terminal
from clubsandwich.geom import Rect, Size, Point

terminal.open()
terminal.bkcolor('#ff0000')
terminal.clear_area(Rect(Point(2, 2), Size(10, 10)))
terminal.refresh()
terminal.read()
terminal.close()

Convenient terminal state access

A super simple wrapper around terminal.state() to conveniently read state values.

from clubsandwich.blt.state import blt_state
from clubsandwich.blt.nice_terminal import terminal
from clubsandwich.geom import Rect, Size, Point

terminal.open()
terminal.bkcolor('#ff0000')
terminal.clear_area(Rect(Point(2, 2), Size(10, 10)))
terminal.refresh()
# less verbose than terminal.state(terminal.TK_ESCAPE)!
while not blt_state.escape:
terminal.read()
terminal.close()

Transform stack

Easily translate view coordinates between frames of reference.

from clubsandwich.blt.state import blt_state
from clubsandwich.blt.context import BearLibTerminalContext
from clubsandwich.geom import Rect, Size, Point

terminal = BearLibTerminalContext()

terminal.open()
terminal.bkcolor('#ff0000')
with terminal.translate(Point(blt_state.width, blt_state.height)):
terminal.clear_area(Rect(Point(2, 2), Size(10, 10)))
terminal.refresh()
# less verbose than terminal.state(terminal.TK_ESCAPE)!
while not blt_state.escape:
terminal.read()
terminal.close()

A UIKit-like user interface library

This is too sophisticated for a short demo, but here’s the code for the scene in the first screenshot:

from clubsandwich.ui import (
    LabelView,
    ButtonView,
    UIScene,
)
LOGO = """
  _______     __     ____             __       _     __
 / ___/ /_ __/ /    / __/__ ____  ___/ /    __(_)___/ /
/ /__/ / // / _ \  _\ \/ _ `/ _ \/ _  / |/|/ / / __/ _ \\
\___/_/\_,_/_.__/ /___/\_,_/_//_/\_,_/|__,__/_/\__/_//_/
"""
class MainMenuScene(UIScene):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        views = [
            LabelView(
                LOGO[1:].rstrip(),
                layout_options=LayoutOptions.row_top(0.5)),
            LabelView(
                "Try resizing the window!",
                layout_options=LayoutOptions.centered('intrinsic', 'intrinsic')),
            ButtonView(
                text="Play", callback=self.play,
                layout_options=LayoutOptions.row_bottom(4).with_updates(
                    left=0.2, width=0.2, right=None)),
            ButtonView(
                text="Settings", callback=self.show_settings,
                layout_options=LayoutOptions.row_bottom(4).with_updates(
                    left=0.4, width=0.2, right=None)),
            ButtonView(
                text="Quit", callback=lambda: self.director.pop_scene(),
                layout_options=LayoutOptions.row_bottom(4).with_updates(
                    left=0.6, width=0.2, right=None)),
        ]
        super().__init__(views, *args, **kwargs)

    def play(self):
        self.director.push_scene(CharacterCreationScene())

    def show_settings(self):
        self.director.push_scene(SettingsScene())

Script runner

When you install clubsandwich, it adds a script called babysit to your path. This script does one very simple thing: it runs a command, and when that command exits, it runs it again. This repeats until you Ctrl+C the babysit process.

This is useful when writing games because you don’t want to have to keep switching back to your terminal to run your script. Using babysit, you can just quit your game whenever you make a change and it’ll start back up again.

You can try it with the demo script like this:

babysit python demo.py

Release files for clubsandwich 0.1.3

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for clubsandwich 0.1.3
File Size Uploaded
clubsandwich-0.1.3.tar.gz 37.6 kB Details

Release files / clubsandwich-0.1.3.tar.gz

Download URL clubsandwich-0.1.3.tar.gz
Size 37.6 kB
Tags Source
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
78469078f6093ae9a7f03f9954b273285970b4ef763b3a0ca75b09c651511bb4
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
e5183cdde64407f4eac991b8b02a47d24f5c917012483747a991b44285ca5388
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
No

Release history Release notifications | RSS feed

This release

0.1.3 This release

1 release file

0.1.2

1 release file

0.1.1

1 release file

0.1.0

1 release file

Anthropic, PBC Visionary sponsor Bloomberg Visionary sponsor Hudson River Trading Visionary sponsor Meta Visionary sponsor NVIDIA Visionary sponsor Microsoft Sustainability sponsor Depot Continuous Integration AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Monitoring Fastly CDN Google Download Analytics Sentry Error logging StatusPage Status page