DEV Community

Cover image for Recreating a Nostalgic Game with Q CLI

Recreating a Nostalgic Game with Q CLI

Back when I was studying at the College of Engineering, Trivandrum (Any CETians here?), during my MCA days, we had tons of fun in our hostel rooms. Only one of us had a UPS for his computer, so whenever there was a power cut, we all gathered in his room. His screen was the only one lit up, and we’d play a Flash game called Hangaroo—a Hangman clone where you had to guess the word before the kangaroo met its fate! Those memories still bring a smile to my face.

When I came to know about the Q CLI Game Challenge, I immediately knew what I was going to build - a recreation of dear old Hangaroo!

Q CLI is a wonderful coding assistant that natively works in your terminal. I was able to build 90% of the functionality with just one prompt. Then I spent a couple of hours tweaking the looks and gameplay to suit what I had in mind.

Why would you use Q CLI, when many other coding assistants exist? Let me list the superpowers:

  1. Natively list and describe AWS resources
  2. Multi-turn conversations
  3. Can connect to MCP servers and use tools on them
  4. Finds and uses your file system, Git, and OS tools.

Do you also want to create an app using Q CLI? Below are the steps:

Install Q CLI:
Q CLI Setup This should take care of most of the usual usecases.

Special situations
Wonderful article from Ricardo, if the usual cases did not apply to you.

Use the command q chat to start conversing with the Q CLI Agent. I asked it to create a hangman-like game using pygame, and told the agent what I remembered about Hangaroo.

In minutes I had a working game ready to play. Core functionality was up and running. Then I spent some time tweaking some of the looks and game play details, which I had forgot to give in the first go. I believe if you go with a plan, review, execute flow with Q you can probably achieve better results. I wanted to go raw at it and see how much the AI is able to achieve with the least amount of input, and I was impressed.

Gameplay (See if you can guess the movie title before I do) :

I showed the game to my son who was hooked. Now he plans to make his own version of Amongus with Q.

Top comments (0)