Roguelike Devlog

For a while now I have dabbled in game development. My day to day work involves building web applications and event systems mostly using PHP and Vue.js and so I haven't the systems experience that comes with building desktop applications in languages like C#, Python and Rust.

Over the past few years the folks over at /r/roguelikedev have been hosting an eight week long event where members of the community go through the Complete Roguelike Tutorial and build their own game.

The tutorial focuses on using libtcod with Python and is in my opinion very well written. Teaching is difficult and writing good tutorials is even more so and yet within a few hours I had a working yet basic Roguelike game ready for me to expand upon.

Having completed the tutorial and deciding that Python was maybe one step outside my comfort zone too far I opened a new Golang project to see how much I could get ported into that language. Having no prior experience of game development in either Python or Golang wasn't going to hold me back.

I have in the past used the faiface/pixel library to tinker with game development ideas however for this project I felt that may be too complicated and instead opted to use the gen2brain/raylib-go Go bindings for the Raylib game engine.

Raylib reminds me a lot of the simplicity found in the p5.js project and getting set up was quite easy thanks to the extensive list of examples they provide.

The available Go bindings for libcotd are a good three to five years out of date so I decided that as I was only using libcotd for FOV and font image to tiles; that it should be fairly easy to write something native in Go especially if doing so from the libcotd source.

So here I begin, an adventure in building a game in a language I am learning. This is going to be fun.

---

🕹️