gritsenko/buhanka

Road to the East (Doroga na vostok) is a text based survival game where the player leads a small group on a journey across Russia, making choices at each event while managing food, health, morale, and transport. The project is a prototype with two forms: a browser version that serves as the playable demo and design reference, and a planned hardware version meant to run on an ESP32 LilyGO T-Display, a tiny microcontroller with a small screen and two physical buttons. The architecture is built so both versions can share the same data model. Game content, such as story events, choices, scene descriptions, and sprite definitions, lives in JSON files that can be updated independently from the game engine code. The browser version renders pixel art scenes on an HTML canvas, simulates the hardware's two button input, and is sized to match the target screen resolution. A firmware folder contains a PlatformIO project, a tool for embedded software development, for the hardware client. This data driven approach means that updating the story, adding scenes, or tweaking game balance does not require changing any code, only the JSON content files. Sprites are stored as pixel art assets meant to be converted later into formats suitable for the constrained memory of the microcontroller, such as RGB565 or an indexed palette with compression. The README lays out a step by step plan for building the hardware client, starting with a fully offline version that ships all story content baked into the firmware, then adding Wi-Fi content updates without reflashing, and finally saving progress to flash memory so a session can resume after a restart. It also calls for keeping memory use low by loading only the scenes currently needed rather than holding everything decoded at once. You would reach for this project if you are interested in building a narrative game that runs on inexpensive embedded hardware, or if you want to study how a browser based prototype can share its content layer with a future hardware port. The primary language is C++ for the firmware, with the browser prototype built in plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.