Roguelikes

Various interesting links related to my long-standing hobby: roguelikes!

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: played this since 2009! One of the most polished roguelikes in constant active development for more than 15 years! It has a lot of variety even by roguelikes standard: species and god combinations can lead to very interesting gameplays. Can be played in browser.
Caves of Qud - relatively new roguelike with a large overworld in addition to usual dungeons: deserts, jungles, quests and quite interesting gameplay based on mutations. Thematically it reminds me of Dune or maybe even Fallout. Also, works of Gene Wolfe has been quoted an influence.
Sil (or a more modern Sil-Q) - a streamlined version of Angband (one of the major roguelikes). I like its combat system, and realistic magic system (implemented as "songs"), based on Tolkien's work -- i.e. no fireballs or other craziness.
Brogue - a quicker and shorter roguelike with an interesting take on ASCII rendering.

/r/roguelikedev - popular subreddit, fully of insightful discussions and advice
RogueBasin - a wiki about roguelike development. It has a nice news section, which allows one to track progress of developed roguelikes. And also it has "Featured roguelikes" category which highlights interesting but less known games.
Blog of Mark R Johnson - author of "Ultima Ratio Regum"
Blog of Josh Ge of "Grid Sage Games", developer of Cogmind
Blog of Bob Nystrom, author of "Game Programming Patterns" and "Crafting Interpreters" books. Has an interesting post about dungeon map generation
"@Play" column by John - a series of articles about classical roguelikes. Note that most of them should be accessed via way web.archive.org, since the magazine in which they were published no longer exists: Wayback Machine link.
ASCII Tilesets and colorscheme browser, also featuring many dungeon map generation algorithms from rot.js library.

"Roguelike tutorial in Rust" -- quite detailed, covers a lot of ground and gets to a nice game at the end! Uses bracket-lib (formerly known as rltk) - Rust library for roguelike development.
Python tutorial with libtcod -- I think this is the most popular one, given that Python is an easy language to pick up. It's also quite well done and is regularly updated. Also, from time to time there are special events on /r/rogueliedev subreddit when people are developing games following that tutorial and share their experience.
"RuggRogue Source Code Guide" -- a book about source code and design decision of RuggRogue - a simple roguelike game, that the author developed following one of the tutorials. It's Rust based.

Last updated 1 year ago