While I have been browsing the RoguelikeDev subreddit for a few years now, I’ve always been more of a lurker than an active member of the community. I’ve decided this time it would be different.

I find roguelikes extremely interesting. I enjoy crunchy games, I enjoy complicated mechanics, and I love learning. Roguelikes are usually perfect for this by their very nature. Complexity for the sake of complexity is bad and yadda yadda, yes, and I like to turn off my brain after work as much as the next person, but sometimes you just want to bite down on some juicy system and I think they provide that in spades.

I’ve also always been fascinated with the idea of creating my own roguelike. The RoguelikeDev community has two yearly events that I’m aware of: 7DRL, a 7 day game jam, and ‘RoguelikeDev Does The Complete Roguelike Tutorial’, an event where the aim is, like the name suggests, to complete the tutorial to get a basic roguelike started. In fact, there’s several versions of the tutorials, some more complete than others, depending on the language and framework you prefer to use.

This year I felt particularly inspired to be part of it, so I decided to give it a shot myself.

The Basic Premise (aka I Yap About Roguelikes)

The tutorial has you go through the motions of creating a very old school roguelike–you move around on a map made of square rooms and corridors connecting them, you bump into monsters, you go down to the next floor. Rinse, repeat. This is great to get you started if you haven’t done anything of the sort before! But I decided to challenge myself, and try out something different.

The main concept for my project is pretty simple, and something I’ve been thinking about for a while. All roguelikes I’ve seen have you play as a single character, despite orginally being based on TTRPGs, which usually have a party of multiple people. How would a roguelike play, if you could control more than one character? I’m not sure I’ve seen this idea explored before. Usually, if you have companions, you have limited control over them.

With that as the main focus, I started thinking about the game at large. I tried to imagine what exploration would be like, and how a combat encounter would play out. However, they both seemed like they would be pretty uninteresting. Exploration would probably be more annoying than anything else if you had to micromanage 4 characters at the same time just to go from point A to point B. I could see some occasions where it might turn out to be compelling, for example by having the rogue scout ahead in stealth and have the party follow behind, or separate them in order to solve a puzzle, or approach a situation from a different angle. But would this be interesting enough to overlook the boring part?

Combat is a bit trickier. Generally speaking, I dislike the roguelike approach to combat. It often revolves around placing yourself in a way that you can funnel enemies through a single tile, then bumping against them. I find the interesting parts of combat to be not the combat itself, but the decisions that lead to (and derive from) it. Should I fight this enemy or run? Should I pop this potion? Should I retreat and lick my wounds, or try to finish them off? And… would this work in a world where you have multiple characters? Would this lead to more engaging gameplay if you can just funnel enemies through a corridor, but this time you can also shoot them from afar and circle behind them for a flank? Not to mention this would increase the time it takes for a single turn from the press of a button to multiple buttons (and trying to remember where every character is in relation to the enemies).

It stands to reason that the enemies should also be able to do something like the player, otherwise there would be a significant imbalance between the two. This means that they would probably have to be spawned as packs of enemies rather than individual ones. They’d probably need to have different specializations as well, just like you can have a fighter, a wizard, and a ranger in a party. And also… they’d have to be smarter than just “path towards the player”. If enemies never react to flanking, then flanking just becomes the most obvious tactic to employ every single time. And that’s not a decision, so it turns back around to being boring. I know some roguelikes have enemies smarter than that, but frankly it seems both pretty hard to implement and overkill for what is meant to be a “get a basic roguelike going” kinda deal.

Now, it seems like everything I’ve talked about for the past few paragraphs would make me go “actually, having a whole party seems to bring a lot of issues! I should try something different”. And yes, part of me did think that, but it also enlightened some characteristics we would need to have for the concept to work:

• Exploration should be limited. Having to press ‘up’ on 4 characters to have them all move north one tile is a no-go.
• Enemies should be unique. Just like the player can have characters that do different things, enemies should be able to do different things as well. An encounter where you’re facing 4 orc brutes who just charge at the closest character and bump into it is not interesting.
• The encounter itself should be engaging. This is more of a personal goal. I know there’s people who do enjoy traditional roguelike combat, but I think it’d be a waste to be the combat just bumping into enemies after discussing the previous point. My favorite roguelike is Tales of Maj’Eyal. I’m not planning on having that many abilities per character, but every turn should force you to make a decision on what you want to do.

Let’s Design a Roguelike, Then

I believe I’ve found an elegant way to fulfill those conditions, while avoiding the risks I’ve mentioned in the previous paragraph. The solution is to simply get rid of the dungeon aspect wholesale.

The basic premise remains the same: you control a party of characters. However, you are now in an arena. And you’re facing another party of characters. Each character has a class, which defines the abilities you have access to. After beating the enemy party, you can upgrade your abilities and learn new ones, then you’re thrown into another arena match.

This concept is particularly intriguing to me. The core is pretty simple, and should be possible to do in a limited time (well, the ability part scares me because that seems to be something deceptively simple to implement). I am also fascinated by the idea of having more utility-focused abilities than what might be relevant in a dungeon. For example, a wizard could summon an earthen wall to block line of sight from the enemy ranger. The ranger could then use their eagle companion to get vision and decide where to reposition. This would also be very scalable if I decided to keep working on this past what the tutorial requires.

For the moment to moment gameplay, I’m envisioning every character having a number of action slots per round. For example, you could move and swing your sword, or move twice, or swing your sword and cast cone of cold. Maybe stronger abilities could require multiple slots.

As i’m writing this, the idea seems to be turning more into a tactics game than a roguelike. At what point does it actually stop being a roguelike? I don’t think it particularly matters. I’m not really a purist of the genre and I think it’s more important that I work on something that seems fun to do, rather than something that would be more correct. I’ll probably just use the tutorial as a rough guideline of what should be done by what point.

To C or not to C?

I usually take projects like these as a way to learn something new about the language I’m using. I already went through the tutorial by myself a couple years ago on Python, so I knew from the start that’s not what I would be using. I’ve considered both Odin and Zig as possible candidates. I’ve used both of them for the first time in recent projects and, while I wasn’t amazed, I know people really like them. Maybe it would be the perfect chance to find out more why that is. However, what dissuaded me is that there’s no native bindings for libtcod or similar out of the box, so it would add another layer of stuff to do on top of… you know… actually making the game. I wanted a more ready-to-go solution.

I then considered C++. I’m not an engineer, but I do use some C++ here and there in my day job. I was also interested in checking out some of the more modern features. Yeah, C++ is not really a comfortable language, but I do have some experience with it already. Then I remembered how much of a pain setting up the environment for a C++ project is, and how frustrating it is to track down some mysterious compiler error sometimes, and changed my mind. I’ll use C++ for a ‘for fun’ project someday, but not now.

So with that gone, I turned my head towards Rust. People love Rust. And people love telling you they love Rust. I’ve tried it myself a couple times, but always found it a bit clunky. “Maybe it’s because I didn’t have enough experience!” I told myself. After all, the last time I touched it was a couple years ago. I started looking into it, and the more I read about it the more it seemed like it would be the best option for what I was trying to do. Then I read about the borrow checker. I think Rust can work for bigger team projects, where you have engineers dedicated exclusively towards making sure they’re writing good code. However, I don’t want to deal with that, especially on a project like this. I’m not trying to write good code, I’m trying to get a game running. I would trade code cleanliness for comfort in a heartbeat.

All those options exhausted, I finally looked at C#. I’ve had friends tell me C# is the most comfortable language for a while now. I myself have looked into it several times, first to use Unity back when I was in high school, then when I found out about Blazor a few years ago. The whole environment seems very painless. The community is huge. It’s cross platform. There’s a library called SadConsole specifically for building roguelikes. It just works. So I went for this option. I’m very curious to see how I’ll feel about it by the end of the project.

The Implementation

Believe it or not, we’re finally at the part where stuff is actually happening on my computer. The week before the challenge started (it’s not really a challenge, but i’m not sure how else to refer to it) I made sure to go through the tutorial on the SadConsole website. It’s incomplete, but it does have all I needed to get started: how to render stuff, and how to process keyboard input.

At the start of the week, I created a new project. The name I’ve settled on for now is Sigmarch. It sounds fantasy enough, it sounds tactical enough, and I think the -march part works well to evoke the idea of ‘multiple units’.

C# does seem as comfy to use as advertised. SadConsole, similarly, is also pretty intuitive.

The basic project is set up very similarly to what the website recommends: I spin up a Screen, which holds a Surface, on top of which I render the World. Now, the first difference I have to deal with is that I want to control more than one character. What’s the best way to do that?

My approach was to just give Actors a Faction whenever they’re created, then add all Actors of the same faction to a Queue. The first actor in the queue is popped out, and stuff can be done to it. Once the actor is done, we pop the next actor, and so on. This keeps going until the Queue is empty, at which point it gets repopulated. This seems reasonable enough to me. I’ve also gotten to use LINQ, a query system that exists in C#:

foreach (var actor in Actors.Where(actor => actor.Faction == Faction.Ally))
{
    ActivatableAllies.Enqueue(actor);
}

It’s also interesting to me that C# is quite a bit more high level than I’m used to, which leads to the previous function being somewhat confusing to me. I assume what’s happening is that ActivatableAllies now owns a reference to the actor which is also in Actors, but this seems a bit alien to me since I’m used to having to pass references explicitely.

The only other noteworthy thing I did was to make movement be reliant on the mouse position, since I’m expecting characters to be able to move multiple tiles in a single turn.

This is what I have so far: four units that can move across the map, and a line to show which path they’d take (there’s no actual pathfinding yet though).

If you want, you can check out the full repo at this link