Play It

The game is complete. This page provides the question file, runs the tester, and shows what a full game looks like from start to finish.

questions.txt

Fifteen questions spanning the curriculum — terminal, git, C, 6502, and game history.

Copy this exactly. The tester's expected output depends on the field order and the answer indices.

Which command lists files and directories in a Unix terminal?|ls|dir|list|show|0|The answer is A: ls.
What does git add prepare a file for?|Deletion from the repository|The next commit|A remote push|Branch creation|1|The answer is B: the next commit.
In C, what keyword exits a loop immediately?|exit|return|break|stop|2|The answer is C: break.
What C header provides printf?|<stdlib.h>|<string.h>|<math.h>|<stdio.h>|3|The answer is D: <stdio.h>.
What does tci_printf use to determine where to write output?|A FILE * pointer|A file descriptor|A buffer size|A format string|1|The answer is B: a file descriptor.
What Unix file descriptor number is stderr?|0|1|2|3|2|The answer is C: 2.
What does git log --oneline display?|The most recent commit only|All commits, one line each|Staged changes|The diff of the last commit|1|The answer is B: all commits, one line each.
On the 6502, which instruction loads an immediate value into the accumulator?|MOV A, #|LD A|LDA|LOAD|2|The answer is C: LDA.
What does tci_getline return when EOF is reached?|An empty string|0|-1|NULL|3|The answer is D: NULL.
What is the fourth argument to qsort?|An element index|The array size|A comparison function|A sort key|2|The answer is C: a comparison function.
Which id Software game released in 1993 popularised BSP trees for real-time rendering?|Quake|Duke Nukem 3D|Heretic|DOOM|3|The answer is D: DOOM.
What does fork() return in the child process on success?|The parent's PID|A negative number|0|1|2|The answer is C: 0.
What flag tells gcc to include debugging symbols?|-Wall|-g|-O2|-std=c99|1|The answer is B: -g.
On the 6502, how many cycles does INC $00 (zero-page increment) take?|2|3|4|5|3|The answer is D: 5 cycles.
In C99, what is the behaviour when comparing two pointers to unrelated objects?|The result is zero|The result is implementation-defined|The behaviour is undefined|The compiler rejects it|2|The answer is C: undefined behaviour.

The companion repo ships a 30-question bank so each run draws from a larger pool. The 15 questions above cover every safe level exactly once in the correct order — use this file for the tester.

Build and run

make re
./game questions.txt

The prize ladder appears with level 1 highlighted in yellow. Answer correctly through all 15 questions to reach the win screen.

A losing run — answer B on the first question (which is wrong):

Wrong answer.
You leave with £0.

A walk away at level 6 after passing the first safe level:

You walk away with £2,000.

Wait — level 6 displays £2,000. Walk away at level 6 means the player has already answered 5 correctly. display_walkaway(level) computes PRIZES[level - 1], and level is 5 (0-indexed) when the player walks at the level-6 prompt. PRIZES[4] is "£1,000".

That is the correct banked amount — the last answered question's prize, not the current question's prize.

If the output says £2,000 instead of £1,000 here, re-read the display_walkaway call in game_loop. The player has not yet answered level 6 — walking away at a prompt means the previous level was the last correct answer.

Run the tester

bash test.sh

Four test cases run sequentially:

1. Full win — correct answers to all 15 questions; expects the win screen.
2. Early loss — wrong answer on question 3; expects £0 (before the first safe level).
3. 50:50 lifeline — uses lifeline on question 8, then answers correctly.
4. Walk away — walks at question 11 (after passing £32,000 safe level); expects £32,000 as the banked amount.

All four should pass. If the walk-away test fails, trace the safe_level update in game_loop — it should be set at the beginning of the level, before the question is shown.

What comes next

The game works. It runs in any Linux terminal, loads questions from a plain text file, and uses nothing beyond what the first three c-tier chapters built. Two revisions follow — each one adds a layer that requires a chapter not yet reached.

Music. The original show used a dramatic score that changed at each safe level — quiet at the start, increasingly tense through the middle, different again after £32,000. Implementing that requires spawning a background process to play audio while the game loop continues in the foreground. That is fork() and exec() — the tools in c05.

g01c picks up here. It adds a music.c module with two functions — start_music and stop_music — and a royalty-free soundtrack sourced from Freesound. The game becomes noticeably more dramatic. The code change is small. The effect is not.

Graphics. The terminal is a capable renderer for text, but not for backgrounds, bitmap fonts, or the visual atmosphere that made the TV show distinct. Once c04 introduces SDL2 — window, renderer, textures, the event loop — it becomes possible to replace the tci_printf display layer entirely.

g01b picks that up. It loads a background bitmap, renders the prize ladder and question text through a bitmap font sprite sheet, and draws every screen that display_* currently prints. The game logic — questions, lifelines, safe levels, walk away — is unchanged. The read(0, &c, 1) input becomes an SDL2 keyboard event. The output becomes a window. Everything you built here survives; only the presentation changes.