CUYO(6)

okay so picture this: it's CUYO(6), and it lives in the Games Manual section of your man pages, bestie. that's the whole vibe. it's a game, it goes in section 6, and it's about to eat your entire afternoon. let's get into it 💖

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✨ NAME ✨

cuyo — a Tetris-like game with many suprises 🎀

(no that's not a typo i made, that's the actual word, we're keeping it, it's iconic)

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

cuyo [-d] [-f] [-g widthxheight] [-h] [-?] [--version versions] [ld-file]

cuyo -?

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so here's the gameplay, bestie, listen up 👑

Use A, D, W and S or the arrow keys to move left, move right, turn and drop the falling piece. that's it, that's the controls.

Now the actual goal: try to put blobs of the same color together. and here's the part that makes it not-Tetris — you do not need to form rows or columns. any shape will do, literally any shape, we're not picky 💅 When enough blobs of the same color are connected, they explode. (and what "enough" means? depends on the level, it's giving mysterious ✨)

Then — and this is the main character move — try to make explosions next to the grass (or whatever there is in the level instead of the grass). Then it will explode too, no cap. 🌈 The level is finished when no grass is left. periodt.

In some levels, you will need a chain reaction to get rid of the grass-equivalent. and many other things may happen in other levels. we don't elaborate. it's a surprise. 🎁

In two-player mode, each time one player causes an explosion, the other one gets grey things (which explode when something else explodes next to them). and if one player builds a too big tower, the other player may get one of his rows. 💀 toxic? yes. fair? also yes.

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -d — debug mode. for when you wanna see the guts of it 👀
• -f — fullscreen mode. whole screen, no distractions, main character energy 🖥️
• -g widthxheight — set the window size. you pick the dimensions, you pick the drama.
• -h — print a short help message and exit with status 0. polite exit 🫶
• -? — print a short help message and exit with status 1. same help, spicier exit code 💀
• --version versions, --version=versions — activate special versions of levels and level tracks. versions is a comma-separated list of version specifiers. version specifiers pertaining to difficulty setting, numbers of players, and level tracks can also be set from the main menu. see the cual(6) manpage for the relevant values. the other version specifiers which are actually used in levels are eco and geek.
  • eco makes a very few levels less resource-hungry. in the consequence, they also become less beautiful. 😭 tradeoffs, bestie.

okay and if you're trying to design own levels, you can pass the name of your .ld file (level description file) to test the level. if you do that, this will be the only available level. just so you know what you're signing up for 🙈

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🧚 CREATING NEW LEVELS 🧚

The main work is to draw all those little icons. then you have to create a level description file which tells cuyo how to put everything together.

There is an example level with many comments. Its description file is example.ld. (It should be part of the cuyo distribution and probably lies in the same directory as the other cuyo level description files.) It is rather outdated but may still be a good starting point. ⭐

Other sources of information are:

• Try man cual. Cual — the Cuyo Animation Language — is the format of level description files. 📖
• And of course, there are the level description files of the existing levels (files ending in .ld, probably located somewhere like /usr/share/games/cuyo/). go read them, they're free 👑

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💜 SEE ALSO 💜

cual(6)

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💀 BUGS 💀

• The level description language is still under development.
• In the preferences dialog, some keys are not displayed correctly.
• The AI Player is not very intelligent. In particular, it doesn't understand most of the special features of the levels, and so, it sometimes behaves very silly. 😭 (relatable honestly)
• See the TODO file for other bugs.

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👑 AUTHORS 👑

Mainly Immanuel Halupczok <cuyo@karimmi.de>.

Other contributors to the source code: Bernhard R. Link, Mark Weyer, Bernhard Seckinger.

Other contributors of levels: Daniela Lipps, Simon Huggenberger.

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and that's the whole page, bestie ✨ this beauty is dated 2014-10-25, and yeah, it's still filed under CUYO(6) — go forth, stack blobs, explode grass, slay 💖🌸🦋🎀