Portugues
Terminus
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About the game
Terminus is a text adventure in which the world is a file system. In a mysterious land where physical and magical powers have been surpassed by a new power, the command line, you wake up lost, with no idea how you got the power to use it. Every place is a folder, every object or person is a file, and the way you act on the world is by typing the same commands that a Unix terminal understands.
At the start you can only look and move. ls lists what is around you, cd takes you into a path, cat or less examines an object or
talks to a person, pwd tells you where you are. As you explore, villagers, a professor of the Spell Casting Academy, a pony with an
opinion about keyboards and a few trolls teach you more: mv to move and rename, cp to copy, rm to make things disappear, mkdir
and touch to create, unzip to open bags, grep to search a text, and the idea of options and arguments. Some commands you must earn.
The puzzles ask you to use them, not to know them in advance.
Playing it here
Click Play, read the welcome tips and type ls. There is background music and sound, and help lists the commands you have learned so
far. Press Tab to complete a name (it helps a lot with long ones), and the up and down arrows to repeat an earlier command. The game
saves your progress in the browser through a cookie; if it asks, in its own words, whether you want to eat a cookie, say yes.
The English text of the original author is incomplete, so this version includes an English translation, made by us, of the parts that only existed in French (most of the messages of the commands and some of the later areas). If a line looks odd, it is likely a translation of ours.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Keyboard | type a command and press Enter |
| Tab | complete the name you are typing |
| Up and Down arrows | earlier and later commands of the history |
| Left and Right arrows | move the cursor in the line |
| Ctrl + U, Ctrl + C | erase the text before the cursor, interrupt what is running |
| Buttons under the prompt | cancel, Tab and Enter, for touch screens |
| ls, cd, cat, pwd, help, man | look around, move, examine, where am I, commands, manual |
A few things worth knowing
Names count. Places, objects and people have names with capital letters, like WesternForest or Nutshell, and you have to type them
as shown; Tab saves you from typos.
The prompt teaches. When you try something the game has not taught you yet, it tells you so; when you finish a puzzle, it tells you which command you have just learned.
Read everything. Signs, books and people hold the hints, and man explains the commands you have learned.
It is a beta. The author calls this version a beta, and parts of the world are unfinished; if you get stuck on something that seems broken, try another path.
Credits and licence
Terminus is a rewrite by luffah of the game Terminus by Michele Pratusevich and Shawn Conrad, with artwork by Emma Tolley, storyboard by Michaela LaVan and David Zhou (a 2014 MIT class project), with translations by luffah, manuh, axelsimon, daufinsyd, Sbgdin, etnx, ludogre and SuperLutin. The code is under the GNU GPL version 2; the pictures of the original game are MIT. The music is by yd, ShwiggityShwag, TinyWorlds and celestialghost8, and the sounds by Juhani Junkala (SubspaceAudio) and Spring, from OpenGameArt (CC0, and for one sound CC BY, CC BY-SA, OGA-BY or CC0); the font is Terminal Grotesque by Raphael Bastide (SIL Open Font License) and the sound engine is howler.js (MIT). The two typing sounds of the author are not in the repository, so we generated two short beeps. Besides the English translation and the beeps, we changed one French label in the engine and removed two development notes; nothing is requested from other websites. The complete source of this build, with the list of the sounds it downloads, is hosted next to the game and linked from this page, together with the licence texts.