Chrome dinosaur game in the terminal with Go + Bubbletea

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 23:02:48 +0200

Introduction

The goal is to build a simplified version of the dinosaur game from Chrome but in the terminal using Go and the Bubbletea CLI library.

Here is the repo: https://github.com/ddahon/bubblesaur

1) Getting started

Let’s start with the skeleton of our Bubbletea program:

package main

import (
	"log"

	tea "github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea"
)

type model struct{}

func initialModel() model {
	return model{}
}

func (m model) Init() tea.Cmd {
	return nil
}

func (m model) Update(msg tea.Msg) (tea.Model, tea.Cmd) {
	switch msg := msg.(type) {
	case tea.KeyMsg:
		switch msg.String() {
		case "q", "ctrl+c":
			return m, tea.Quit
		}
	}

	return m, nil
}

func (m model) View() string {
	return ""
}

func main() {
	p := tea.NewProgram(initialModel(), tea.WithAltScreen())
	if _, err := p.Run(); err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}
}

Now we can create our player and add it to the model:

Go on Doryan Dahon

Chrome dinosaur game in the terminal with Go + Bubbletea

Introduction

1) Getting started