Mission Terminal

Mission Terminal teaches pupils the shell, in French, through missions that the game checks. The story is that of a space station to be brought back into service: the station is a folder of files that you move around in, and every command typed is judged. Missions are grouped into chapters, with hidden secrets, challenges and a helper robot. It has been played in class, on the pupils’ workstations.

The game opens a real bash. A hook run at every prompt judges the command you have just typed, shows the objective in a bar above the prompt, and offers a memo and help on two keys. The safeguards are shell functions: you stay in your home folder, you can only delete or move the station’s files, and dangerous commands are refused with an explanation. After repeated errors, the help becomes precise (a capital letter, an accent, a file put away in another room).

Each mission has a solution, and the tests replay them all in a real bash. From one workstation to another, a few details vary, such as the location of the fuse or the door code, drawn from the machine’s name. The screen stays plain: dark blue background, contrasting text, no area of colour behind the text, a single one-line animation. The game is a Python package with no external dependency, launched in a terminal installed with it.

The pupils’ workstations had no terminal, and I installed one. The game runs in a real bash and does not mimic a terminal. After a first round of play, I made bad commands impossible and made the help more precise when an error repeats, so that a mistake costs nothing.

The layout was born from my trials on a laptop: clarity first, then, round after round, more contrast without overload, smaller and simpler movements, and fewer colours, because colours distract. The coloured frames of an earlier version have therefore gone.