Posted December 06, 2023 by Ryan Kubik
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.
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.
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.