Rat Run

A bullet-hell horde survivor that runs entirely in a text terminal, built in Rust and ratatui as a half-day benchmark (eleven commits, about eight hours) when Claude Fable shipped in mid-June. The brief was deliberately silly: a terminal Vampire Survivors clone. You’re a rat, your weapons fire themselves, and you dodge, collect XP, and pick upgrades until the five-minute boss.

What came out was a complete game, not a tech demo: six weapons with upgrade tracks, three maps, a bestiary, dashes, pickups, high scores, procedurally synthesized chiptune audio, flow-field pathfinding, and unrequested lore. The renderer packs two truecolor pixels into each terminal cell with the ▀ half-block glyph, which is what makes the particle effects and screen shake possible.

It’s finished and hasn’t needed a commit since, but it earned its keep: this is the experiment that convinced me the models had crossed a line. Everything after traces back here: Motif Forge for the album, then Riglab and pvc-builder for the Burning Man raptor.