Terminal Escape released

I created this game for Confounding Calendar 2023. The calendar is a community collection of puzzles made in November that are slowly released throughout December.

Where did this idea come from?

Terminal Escape started with the “it’s impossible to quit vim” memes that went around developer communities a while back. It seemed like an escape room on the terminal might be a funny premise.

From there, it would often strike me how unintuitive and weird it is to use a terminal. So many strange commands that need you to run three other commands before they’ll work correctly. There are so many weird things I’ve internalized as “normal” by using a terminal for years.

I’ve toyed with a few fake terminals in some of my other projects, like Status Code and Shield OS tech test. This jam seemed like a good time to put that tech to use and make the terminal front and center.

Anyway

I’m super happy with how Terminal Escape turned out. I’m pretty proud that I built a text only game that feels kinda outside of my normal wheelhouse. There’s a lot of stuff I’d like to improve, but I think I’ll save that for a sequel.