Maze Game

Maze game presents a fame where the player moves through a maze searching for the exit. The maze grids are randomly generated using theseus, a maze generator (from https://github.com/jamis/theseus.git).

The player can:

• save the current maze and replay it at a later time,
• load a demo maze (10 by 10), start the game with -d option,
• force the generation of a new maze at any moment,
• start the game with a timer

The project

It currently displays a Text UI using Unix curses. As it only runs on Unix-like systems, I added a basic implementation of the curses library for jRuby using the Java/Swing GUI layer, so that it can run on all systems. The curses support is limited to make the game run and is not 'curses' compatible. I published it as a gem (https://github.com/jeanlazarou/jruby_curses).

How to run the game

To run the game you need to first install theseus, then with RMI 1.9.2:

ruby maze_game.rb

With jRuby:

Install the "jruby_curses" gem (see above) and then use it as

jruby --1.9 maze_game.rb

"maze_game.rb" script usage

Here is the usage message of the script:

Usage: maze_game.rb [options]

Where options include:
    -d, --demo                       Use the demo maze
    -t, --time                       Display ellapsed time
    -p, --position                   Display cursor position
    -f, --file maze_file.yml         Load a saved maze from the given YAML file
    -w, --width w                    Width for the maze to generate (defaults to 20)
    -h, --height h                   Height for the maze to generate (defaults to 20)
    -?, --help                       Show this message

Notes

• Unfortunately, both MRI 1.9.2 and 1.9.3 did not include 'curses' after installing them with rvm, I managed to make it work by copying the curses.so file from 1.9.1 to lib/ruby/1.9.1/i686-linux.
• As of Ruby 2.1 the curses library is not part of the standard library anymore, and is available as a Ruby gem (https://github.com/ruby/curses).
• The curses gem also works fine with the Rubinius implementation of Ruby.

- Jean Lazarou