This is an attempt to re-create the game of Rats, which I first played more than forty years ago on a Convergent Technologies IWS Workstation.
After a little searching, I ran across this video which has really helped to jog my memory in terms of both graphical appearance and gameplay mechanics.
The game's controls are pretty simple.
- Arrow keys control player motion. You can move on a diagonal by pressing two keys at the same time. e.g. Holding down both up and right arrows will move the player up and to the right at the same time.
- WASD keys control firing. You can shoot in a different direction than the direction you're moving in. You can also shoot on diagonals by holding down two firing keys at the same time.
- Space bar pauses game.
- Esc exits game.
Rats has a number of command-line options which let you set maze size and
density and a few other parameters. My original intent was to emulate the look
of the game as close as possible, but I eventually took some liberties like
adding a little color. You can use the --classic option to make the game look
and play more like the original.
Run rats --help for a more detailed list of options.
The sound effects came from kronbits
- Rust compiler
- Development version of SDL2. On an Ubuntu-based system, you can install this
with the command:
sudo apt install libsdl2-dev sudo apt install libsdl2-mixer-dev
then you can install the game:
cargo install --git https://github.com/ferruccio/rats.git ratsTheoretically, this thing should run on macOS and Windows as well, but I don't have the time to try to tackle either of those right now.