Experimenting Retro Gaming with Textual

written by Ricky Lim on 2025-09-07

After building TimerTui, I've got the basics of how to build a TUI. So, I rolled up my sleeves to experiment something fun. That led me to create a simple retro game "Invader".

This is what the gameplay looks like:

Why Textual

Textual as a framework provides terminal hacks that make creating a retro game surprisingly simple. With just about 200 lines of code, you can create a fully playable retro game. If you'd like to explore the code, or even play around with it, check out the script here. This script does not pretend to be production-ready invader game, just a fun toy example how to build a game with Textual.

Game Plays

• You're the brave pilot of a spaceship 🛸, zipping left and right to fire your glorious shots.
• From above, swarms of invaders 👾 march down aiming to reach your last line of defense.
• Unlease your blazing shots to obliterate the invaders in bursts of glory.
• Victory is yours if you wipe them all out, but if even one invader slips through to the bottom, defeat will be your eternal companion.

Lessons learned

Building terminal games with it isn't just possible but it's also a great way to explore the framework's capability for fun.