How I Reimplemented LÖVE2D in Rust to Play Balatro in a Terminal

A few weeks ago, I wondered: what would it take to run a full commercial game in a terminal? Not a text-based approximation — the actual game, with real graphics, shaders, and UI. The answer turned out to be ~9,800 lines of Rust. — The idea Balatro is built on LÖVE2D, a Lua game framework. The game’s logic is entirely in Lua; LÖVE2D provides the graphics, audio, and input APIs. My idea: reimplement those APIs in Rust, but instead of rendering to a GPU-backed window, render to a terminal. — Architecture The project has three crates: love-terminal: The binary — CLI parsing, terminal setup, game loop. love-api: The core — implements ˷80 LÖVE2D API functions. graphics.rs alone is 3,400+ lines covering a full software rasterizer: anti-aliased rectangles, ellipses, polygons, thick lines, sprite rendering with bilinear filtering, TTF text via fontdue, transform stack, canvas system, stencil buffer, and blend modes. sprite-to-text: The renderer — takes the RGBA pixel buffer and converts it to