Arcade

A modular gaming platform written in C++, where both the graphics backend and the games are interchangeable shared libraries loaded at runtime. From the in-app menu you can switch the renderer (e.g. ncurses → SDL2) or the game on the fly, without ever restarting the program.

The whole point of the project is a strict separation of concerns: a game never knows which graphics library draws it, and a graphics library never knows which game it renders. They only ever talk through small, well-defined interfaces.

Features

• Runtime plugin architecture — graphics and game modules are compiled as .so libraries and loaded dynamically (dlopen); the core knows only the IDisplay / IGame interfaces
• Hot-swappable backends — change the graphics library or the game at runtime from the menu, keeping the rest of the platform untouched
• Three graphics backends — ncurses, SDL2 and Allegro5, each behind the same display interface (text and graphical rendering handled uniformly)
• Two games — Snake and Solarfox, fully decoupled from rendering
• Shared menu & scores — a graphical menu to pick game/backend, player name and persistent high scores
• Asset abstraction — sprites/fonts are described once and rendered appropriately by each backend (a textured sprite in SDL2, a character in ncurses)
• Tested & CI — unit tests and GitHub Actions workflows

Build

Requires CMake, a C++ compiler, and the graphics libraries you want to use (ncurses, SDL2, Allegro5).

cmake -B build
cmake --build build

This produces the arcade binary and the graphics/game modules as shared libraries in lib/.

Usage

./arcade ./lib/arcade_ncurses.so

Pass the path to an initial graphics library. Once running, use the menu to choose a game and switch graphics backends or games at any time.

Credits

Team project realized as part of the Epitech curriculum — OOP module.

• Nielsen Combe-Bracciale
• Mathys Aberkane