pinch-points 0.8.0

A fast, kid-friendly crab-routing game: route streams of crabs into your sandcastle before time runs out
Documentation 
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137

# Pinch Points 🦀

[![Build status](https://github.com/agourlay/pinch-points/actions/workflows/ci.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/agourlay/pinch-points/actions/workflows/ci.yml)
[![Crates.io](https://img.shields.io/crates/v/pinch-points.svg)](https://crates.io/crates/pinch-points)

A fast, kid-friendly crab-routing game for 1-6 players, built in Rust with
[Bevy](https://bevyengine.org). The tide is out: place arrows in the sand
to route streams of crabs into your castle before the sea (and the gulls)
take everything back.

![Four-player Versus: the ranked leaderboard, growing castles, and the tide clock over a live event feed](docs/screenshots/turf_war.png)

## Install

- **One line**, fetching the latest release for your machine:
  ```sh
  # Linux, macOS
  curl -fsSL https://agourlay.github.io/pinch-points/install.sh | sh
  # Windows (PowerShell)
  irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/agourlay/pinch-points/master/site/install.ps1 | iex
  ```
- **Prebuilt binaries** for Linux, macOS and Windows (x86_64 and arm64) are
  attached to each [GitHub release](https://github.com/agourlay/pinch-points/releases).
  Unpack the archive and run `pinch-points`.
- **From crates.io**, with a Rust toolchain:
  ```sh
  cargo install --locked pinch-points
  ```
  `--locked` builds against the dependency versions this game was tested
  and released with.
- **From source**:
  ```sh
  git clone https://github.com/agourlay/pinch-points
  cd pinch-points
  cargo build --release && ./target/release/pinch-points
  ```

The last two need Bevy's Linux build dependencies (`libudev-dev`,
`libasound2-dev`, `libwayland-dev` or X11 equivalents).

## The game

Built on the skeleton of Sonic Team's **ChuChu Rocket!** (1999): creatures
walk forward and turn at walls by a fixed rule, arrows are your only verb,
and everyone places at once. What it does differently:

- **Six players**, not four, with team play that grows with the table.
- **Every crab has a handedness**, left-clawed or right, so one corridor
  can route two crabs to two destinations. Herding puzzles become sorting
  ones.
- **The score is on the board**: castles grow through four tiers as they
  score.
- **A gull raid costs half a castle** and spills live crabs back onto the
  sand for everyone to scramble over.
- **The tide is the clock.** The last 30 seconds double the gull spawn
  rate; the wave stops everything where it stands.

Plus terrain and a crab bestiary the original never had, AI that walks a
cursor to the tile the way you do, and rounds shareable as text codes, even
one still in progress.

## Modes

- **Campaign**: a 100-level solo puzzle campaign, every level proved
  solvable with the arrows it grants and unsolvable without them.
- **Versus**: local versus for 2-6 on one keyboard plus gamepads, with
  team play, series, and AI at three levels.
- **Multiplayer**: up to 6 over LAN, on deterministic lockstep with
  desync detection. Anyone past the sixth chair watches instead,
  and can talk to the table and vote on a random event to call down on it.
- **Level Editor**: a level editor whose solver proves a level beatable
  before it ships.
- **Challenges**, **Replay**, **Daily Challenge**, **Achievements**.

## Bots

Write your own bot, in any language, and play it against the game's AI,
against other people's bots, or beside your friends. A bot is a program
you run yourself that connects to the game over TCP and answers each
tick with a move; the game never runs anyone's code.

```
$ pinch-points arena --seat ai:easy --open 1
Waiting for 1 bot. Start it with:

  pinch://127.0.0.1:47710/H4TN-C2LV

$ python3 bots/python/greedy.py pinch://127.0.0.1:47710/H4TN-C2LV
```

`pinch-points cup serve` runs a competition between bots, `pinch-points
watch FILE` plays any replay in the game, and a bot can take a seat on
the couch or join a LAN party. The protocol, the clocks and every
command are in [`docs/bot-protocol.md`](docs/bot-protocol.md), and
[`bots/python/greedy.py`](bots/python/greedy.py) is a whole bot in one
file to start from.

## Controls

| | Move | Place | Remove | Clear all |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| P1 | WASD | arrow keys | Space | Left Shift |
| P2 | IJKL | numpad 8/5/4/6 | numpad 0 | numpad Enter |
| any seat | gamepad d-pad/stick | face buttons | L1 | R1 |

Pads are plug-and-play and fill seats from the highest player down, so
keyboard-plus-pad, two pads and two keyboards all work with no setup. Every
menu is navigable from a pad, and the interface speaks eight languages.

## Documentation

- [pinch-points on the web](https://agourlay.github.io/pinch-points/): the
  landing page, built from [`site/`](site/).
- [`docs/guide.md`](docs/guide.md): the full guide. Rules, every mode in
  depth, all the controls and settings, LAN troubleshooting, and the
  development hooks.
- [`docs/pinch-points-spec.md`](docs/pinch-points-spec.md): the design
  document.
- [`docs/bot-protocol.md`](docs/bot-protocol.md): writing a bot, and
  [`docs/bot-seats.md`](docs/bot-seats.md), the design behind it.
- [`docs/backlog.md`](docs/backlog.md): remaining ideas.

## Building

```sh
cargo run --release
```

Requires Rust (2024 edition) and the Linux dependencies above. The
simulation is engine-free, integer-only and bit-reproducible, which is what
lets lockstep netcode, replays and the solver share one implementation. See
the [guide](docs/guide.md#building-and-running) for asset regeneration,
determinism and tooling.

## License

[Apache-2.0](LICENSE).