npvz

Plants vs. Zombies in your terminal — ncurses-based, emoji-rendered, chiptune-powered.

Features

• 5×9 grid, 5 waves of zombies
• Plants: 🌻 🫛 🪨 🍒 🧊 with sun economy
• Zombies: 🧟 🪖 🪣 — Conehead and Buckethead have separate armor HP before you can damage the body
• Lawn mowers 🚜 as last-resort row defense
• Shovel 🪏 to remove placed plants
• Projectiles rendered as · (middle dot)
• VFX: hit flash, death flash, 💥 cherry bomb explosion
• Chiptune SFX synthesized at launch — sine, square, sawtooth, noise waveforms played via afplay

Controls

Key	Action
Arrow keys / WASD / HJKL	Move cursor
1–5	Select plant
0	Toggle shovel
Enter / Space	Place plant or dig
P	Pause / unpause
Q	Quit
R	Restart (end screen)

Build

make
./npvz

Requirements

• macOS (uses system ncurses and afplay for audio)
• C11 compiler (cc / clang)

No external dependencies.

Install

make install          # installs to /usr/local/bin
make install PREFIX=~/.local  # custom prefix

License

Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE.