This is a binary-encoding puzzle game implemented as a Python console application.
I fully intend to release this as free software, but I haven't figured out the details, like settling on a license. If all you want to do is play the game and tinker with the code, then please, be my guest. But for now I, Nate Grigg, retain the copyright: all rights reserved. Please contact me for any use cases which fall outside of "tinkering with" and "playing" the game.
If you just run console_magie.py with a recent(ish) release of Python 3 it should work. There's nothing very exotic going on.
The only way to quit right now is to CTRL-C out. (I don't know how that works with Python on Windows, I've done practically zero Python in Windows.)
I have "add a back option to the menus" on my TODO list
A lot of the lines of text are constrained to 13 characters. This reflects the stylistic choices from the Mobile/Unity versions of the game.
It had a very retro asthetic, with an LCD-screen motif. My designer buddy had created a nice-looking, chunky pixel font for us. That, plus the retro-ness of it kept the text display narrow.
So if you feel cramped, it may help if you imagine yourself as a 10 year old who's family apartment and school are both attached to a rad, retro-future, 80's shopping mall.
I originally implemented this game in the Unity 3D game engine and made it available in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
I stopped paying my Apple Developer Dues, so they de-listed the game. And I can't seem to find it in the Google Play Store, but I believe it's there.
Anyway - there is probably a large overlap between (a) people who will enjoy this game and (b) people who use Raspberry Pi and Linux. So I set out to create a version of the game that runs in Python.
The Unity/Mobile game was very interactive. And my initial goal was to duplicate the same experience here. I thought Curses looked like a good way to provide that immediate interaction. And as I started learning curses and implementing the game in it, I was proven right: Curses did turn out to be a great way to get a very responsive game with a rich text user interface.
But it was very hard to debug as the implementation got more complex.
So, you will see references to Curses (and maybe even a bit of working code), but the active development right now is in the plain "console" version of the game.
(Where you have to press [enter] every time you want to submit a guess 😩)
I've been developing against fairly recent releases of Python 3. (I believe I have used v3.9 and v3.10 quite a bit.) I have also played it a bit in Pythonista on my iPhone, which I believe is Python 3.6. If you find any compatibility issues or bugs, don't hesitate to let me know. Perhaps we could even use this nifty "Issues" feature of GitHub.