Stack Overflow

A solo, turn-based roguelite card-puzzle game built with raylib in C. Play traditional cards onto a 3x3 "Memory Grid" to trigger scoring alignments, all while keeping the grid's total value under the Stack Limit — go over, and it's a FATAL ERROR: Stack Overflow crash.

The whole game leans into a dark "code editor" aesthetic: monospace HUD, terminal-styled crash messages, and a shop full of programming-flavored upgrades (Wildcard, Buffer Reload, Garbage Collector, Segfault Handler...).

Gameplay

• A standard 52-card deck is shuffled each round; the 3x3 grid starts filled with 9 cards, and your hand holds 4.
• Play a card from your hand onto a free (unlocked) cell of the grid.
• Face cards trigger special effects when placed:
  • Ace — flexes between 1 and 11 to help you stay under the limit.
  • Jack — swap two cards on the grid.
  • Queen — absorb the value of adjacent cards and lock the cell.
  • King — optionally flip row/column detection to read diagonals as lines.
• Matching 3 cards in a row, column, or diagonal (same suit, straight, three-of-a-kind, or straight flush) scores points and clears/refills those cells.
• After each move, the grid's total value is checked against the round's Stack Limit — exceed it and the run ends.
• Clear each round's score objective to advance, earn gold, and spend it in the shop between rounds on one-shot Scripts and permanent Modules.

Controls

• Left click — select/place a card, confirm menu choices
• Right click — cancel a special-power selection (Jack/Queen/King targeting)
• H — toggle help / tutorial
• Y / N — respond to King's flip prompt
• R — restart after a crash
• Esc — back out of menus/popups
• F11 or Alt+Enter — toggle fullscreen

Building

Requires a C11 compiler and raylib. On Linux, pkg-config is used to locate raylib automatically (falls back to -lraylib -lGL -lm -lpthread -ldl -lrt -lX11 if pkg-config can't find it). Windows builds are cross-compiled with x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc against the raylib SDK vendored under lib/raylib-win64/.

make # build native Linux binary -> bin/stack_overflow
make windows # cross-compile Windows binary -> bin/stack_overflow.exe
make run # build (if needed) and launch
make BUILD=release # optimized build (default is debug, -O0 -g)
make clean # remove build outputs
make re # clean + rebuild

Run the game from the repository root (make run, or ./bin/stack_overflow) so it can find the assets/ directory via its relative paths.

Project layout

src/ Game source (C11)
assets/ Sprites, fonts, and audio (see assets/CREDITS.md for licensing)
lib/raylib-win64/ Vendored raylib SDK for Windows cross-compilation
save/ Local save/progress data (tutorial completion flag, etc.)
Specifications_Stack_Overflow.pdf Original design document (cahier des charges)

Credits

Card, UI, and audio assets are credited in assets/CREDITS.md (mostly Kenney.nl, CC0).