space-invaders-tui

Space Invaders in your terminal — with one rule changed: time only moves when you move.

Stand still and the world freezes mid-frame. Bombs hang in the air, the formation stops mid-step, your own shot waits above the cannon. Every move you make lets time flow again. The reflex classic becomes a duel of timing and position.

Play

Straight from your terminal, no install:

ssh -p 2222 invaders.m2-webvision.de

Or run it locally:

npx space-invaders-tui

After game over, enter three letters arcade-style — the high-score table is global. You are playing against everyone who ever ssh'd in.

Related MCP server: textual-mcp-server

Let an LLM play

The game logic is pure TypeScript with no terminal dependency, so it also ships as an MCP server. Point any MCP client at it and let a model fight the invaders turn by turn:

claude mcp add invaders -- npx -y space-invaders-tui mcp

Three tools: invaders_new_game, invaders_state (returns the board as ASCII plus structured state), and invaders_act (hold left/right/fire for N frames). The SUPERHOT rule applies to agents too: doing nothing freezes the world — moving is what spends time.

How it works

• src/game.ts — pure game logic. No rendering, no I/O, fully unit-tested. The SUPERHOT mechanic is a per-frame time scale that ramps between 0.08 (idle) and 1 (moving); the world updates with scaled time, the player always moves in real time.

• src/render.ts / src/app.ts — OpenTUI rendering and input wiring. Uses the kitty keyboard protocol (press/release events) where available, falls back to event-driven movement elsewhere.

• server/ssh-server.ts — the SSH arcade. Every connection gets its own in-process OpenTUI renderer writing ANSI straight into the SSH channel: no shell, no PTY subprocess, no auth. Hardened with session caps, idle timeouts, dimension clamping, and backpressure limits.

• server/leaderboard-api.ts — small Bun + SQLite API behind the global high-score table, with validation, plausibility checks, and rate limiting.

• mcp/server.ts — MCP server on top of the pure game core, runs on plain Node.

Self-host

cd deploy && docker compose up -d

Runs the SSH arcade and the leaderboard API in one hardened container stack. See deploy/ for details. LEADERBOARD_URL="" disables the global leaderboard, LEADERBOARD_URL=https://… points the game at your own instance.

Development

npm install
npm start           # play locally (needs the bundled bun runtime)
npm test            # game logic (node) + headless rendering smoke test (bun)
npm run typecheck

The test suite plays the game headlessly through OpenTUI's test renderer — including the SSH server, which is tested end-to-end with a real ssh2 client against an in-memory session.

License

MIT