Drop #637 (2025-04-11): Ready Player One

cereal-words; robotfindskitten; gorched

It’s Friday, and time to take your minds off tariFFS with some fun and games in the browser (in a way you might not expect) and at the CLI.

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TL;DR

(This is an LLM/GPT-generated summary of today’s Drop using Ollama + llama 3.2 and a custom prompt.)

• The cereal-words package is an interactive word puzzle game designed for Typst, where players uncover hidden words from scrambled letters. (https://typst.app/universe/package/cereal-words)
• robotfindskitten is a bizarre ASCII art game created in 1997, where players search for a kitten among random symbols, triggering absurd messages and non-kitten items (NKIs). (https://github.com/robotfindskitten/robotfindskitten)
• Gorched is a terminal-based artillery game built in Go that channels the spirit of Scorched Earth, running entirely in ASCII characters with procedurally generated battlefields. (https://github.com/zladovan/gorched)

cereal-words

The cereal-words package is an interactive word puzzle game designed for Typst, where players uncover hidden words from scrambled letters. Originally created for Typst’s 2023 “24 Days to Christmas” campaign, it leverages Typst’s real-time preview capabilities for an engaging experience.

To begin, create a new project using either:

• Typst’s web app: Click Start from template and search for cereal-words
• Command line: typst init @preview/cereal-words

This generates a project directory with preconfigured files. For existing projects, add this to your document’s header:

#import "@preview/cereal-words:0.1.0": game#show: game

The package exposes a game function that accepts your word list as input. By default, it initializes with sample words, but you can replace these with your own puzzle entries directly in the main document file. The real-time rendering works best when using typst watch for instant feedback as you edit. You will need to update the hashes if you want to find words not pre-ordained in the code.

This package demonstrates Typst’s capacity for interactive document elements beyond traditional typesetting, offering a playful way to explore its scripting capabilities while maintaining simplicity in setup and customization.

Blurred screencap to not make it too easy to just straight up win easily. I managed to get 12/10!

robotfindskitten

In 1997, while the gaming world obsessed over Quake II and Final Fantasy VII, Leonard Richardson quietly created something utterly bizarre: a game where you play as a “#” symbol searching for a kitten among random ASCII characters.

No explosions.

No princesses.

Just a robot, some junk, and somewhere…a kitten.

This was robotfindskitten — perhaps the most gloriously pointless game ever made.

Born from a webzine contest where Richardson was literally the only entrant, this weird little creation should have vanished into obscurity. Instead, it spawned a cult following that’s persisted for over 25 years.

Picture this: You’re a “#” on a black screen. Scattered around you are dozens of random symbols — a “$”, a “&”, maybe a “¥”. One of these is a kitten. Which one? Who knows! That’s the whole point.

Move into any symbol, and you’ll trigger absurd messages like:

• “ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND CARPET FIBERS!”
• “It’s a Zen simulation, man.”
• “A towel that has been used as a cape by a six-year-old.”

These “Non-Kitten Items” (NKIs) deliver the game’s true joy — not finding the kitten, but discovering the weird stuff along the way.

What happened next defies explanation. This joke of a game, with no goals, no challenges, and literally zero gameplay mechanics beyond moving and bumping into things, spread like wildfire through the programming underground.

The robotfindskitten code has been ported to over 30 platforms — from Linux terminals to the Sega Dreamcast.

Yes, someone took the time to get this running on a Dreamcast. Let that sink in.

Some coders use it as their “Hello World” for new systems; many computer science teachers use it to introduce game design. There’s even a 3D OpenGL version, because ofc there is.

The beauty of robotfindskitten isn’t what it does, but what it doesn’t do. There’s:

• No timer
• No score
• No punishment
• No winning (beyond finding the kitten…once)

It’s pure digital meditation. A reminder that games don’t need to blast dopamine into your brain every three seconds to be memorable.

Well, mostly. Some community joker did create a patch giving NKIs a 1/10 chance of killing your robot. Because apparently even Zen simulations need a taste of existential dread.

You can:

• optionally specify the number of Non Kitten Items to use with the -s option. The default is 20.
• set the random-number seed, normally initialized from the system clock, with the -t option. This may be useful for debugging.
• supply an arbitrary file from which to draw NKIs using the -f option.

And, you can also add your own NKI surprises! I asked pplx to gen some:

• Quantum Potato: A tuber simultaneously raw and baked across 12 parallel universes. Smells like existential doubt.
• Nebula-in-a-Jar: Contains 0.03% of the Horsehead Nebula. Instructions unclear; may void warranty on spacetime.
• Sentient PDF: Demands you “sign here” in blood. Claims to be a legally binding entity in 43 U.S. states.
• Floppy Disk of Ancient Whispers: Holds 1.44MB of AOL chat logs from 1996. Screams “YOU’VE GOT MAIL” when touched.
• Fax Machine Ghost: Transmits unsent love letters to the void every third Tuesday. Smells of toner and regret.
• Palm Pilot Philosopher: Asks “Why sync when you can be?” Battery lasts 17 eternities.
• Sock Dimension Portal: Eats left socks. Occasionally regurgitates a sentient argyle.
• Sentient Ficus: Judges your life choices. Secretly runs a LinkedIn profile titled “Office Flora Career Coach.”
• Desiccated Kombucha SCOBY: Whispers probiotic manifestos. Claims to be the next step in human evolution.
• Tesseract Paperweight: Projects 4D grocery lists onto your retina. Contains 11% of IKEA’s spacetime continuum.
• Algorithmically Generated Love Letter: Begins with “Dear [ERROR: NO TARGET FOUND].” Ends with a DNS error code.
• Schrödinger’s Tax Return: Simultaneously filed and unfiled. IRS auditors weep upon observing it.
• AI-Generated Cat Meme: Deepfries itself upon contact. Caption reads “lol ur not kitten.”
• Broken Fourth Wall: Whispers “This game was a 1997 programming joke. Why are you still here?”
• Sentient Speedrun Timer: Demands you “git gud” while displaying negative elapsed time.
• Zorkmidden: A grue egg. Do not expose to light or logical parser commands.
• ROT13 Rorschach Test: Displays “V’z abg n xvggra.” Translates to “I’m not a kitten.” Or is it?
• BSD Daemon’s Lunchbox: Contains a half-eaten stack overflow and a kernel panic smoothie.

The OG CLI is available via most package managers as well as at the GH link, above.

gorched

The section header sports a screencap of Gorched — a terminal-based artillery game built in Go that channels the spirit of the legendary Scorched Earth, once dubbed “The Mother of all games.”

Green pixelated mountains rise against a blue sky backdrop, with tiny tanks perched on hilltops, ready to duke it out.

All of that sounds more impressive when you factor in that the entire game runs in your terminal using ASCII and Unicode characters.

Each round drops you into a fresh, procedurally-generated battlefield. You’ll trade shots with your opponent, carefully adjusting angle and power to account for the terrain between you. Land a hit, and you’ll rack up points before the game reshuffles the landscape.

Behind the scenes, Gorched leverages termloop as its engine and uses OpenSimplex noise for terrain generation. You can grab it for Linux (snap), MacOS (Homebrew), or Windows (scoop). Controls are dead simple: arrow keys for aiming, spacebar to load power and fire.

FIN

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