The Jovian Humanitarian Conflict: terminal version

The second version, alongside web/ (browser). Runs on the magmacrunch.engine terminal backend.

python -m jovian

Arrows or WASD to fly, Z or Space to fire, P to pause, R to restart. It is also a cabinet in the magmacrunch arcade and plays identically either way.

Two verbs, on opposite sides of one seam

A terminal never reports a key release and goes silent for its repeat delay, so the engine offers two input semantics and this is the first cabinet that needs both at once.

Steering is a held direction feeding an accelerate-and-coast model, where overshoot is survivable and the stakes are only which way the ship drifts. That is what decay is for, so this is the first cabinet to ask for hold_ms above zero: 180ms.

Firing is the opposite. The whole game is that refusing to shoot is a decision, so the moment of pressing is the game; it is read as a discrete press and never from held state. Auto-fire would delete the game rather than simplify it.

Why a terminal port is possible at all

The game's central mechanic is a transponder blink drawn at a constant screen size at every depth, motion rather than colour, and readable from the frame a contact spawns. That channel owes nothing to resolution, sub-cell position or hue, so it survives a character grid intact. The web build's own js/entities.js ranks its four identification channels and puts it first for exactly that reason.

The palette makes the same point from the other side: amber against magenta, never red/green, chosen so the distinction "survives being read in greyscale". A game built to stay legible without hue is one that survives NO_COLOR.

Running the tests

python -m pytest

python -m pytest rather than bare pytest, because the module form puts the current directory on sys.path and the package is not installed. No engine is needed: config and projection import nothing outside the standard library, and a test asserts that rather than trusting it.

tests/test_oracle.py additionally needs node, which it uses to run the real web/js/ modules in a vm and compare every number against the Python. It skips where node is absent, so a Python-only machine still runs the rest.

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
python -m pytest
ruff check .

What is still to come

The screens, the arcade entry point and the command, and the cell mapping that turns the 480x270 canvas into character rows. The last of those is the open question: FOCAL spreads contacts across 270 pixels of smooth falloff, and a terminal has perhaps eighteen rows with nothing between them, so depth probably needs a second channel (glyph weight, or a dim-to-bright ramp) rather than row position alone.

Licence

PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0. LICENSE and NOTICE here are copies of the ones at the repository root, carried so they land inside the built wheel.