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Comment by cheezymoogle | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty tangential, but I don't understand why there isn't a roguelike framework available for Emacs. It seems like the perfect roguelike platform for playtesting and hacking on and would on-board a lot of new people into the Emacsen ecology without any real difficulty. The standard roguelike library libtocd has bindings for every other language--why not elisp?

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There is dungeon-mode [0]. (I spotted this over on r/emacs [1], and it's on the FSF directory [2])

[0] https://github.com/dungeon-mode/game

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/jar7tz/dungeonmode_f...

[2] https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Dungeon-mode

Well, it's not Elisp, but:

https://github.com/Ruin0x11/OpenNefia

It's an engine rewrite of an old roguelike I used to play in Lua. I'm trying to experiment with making a game where the engine is similar in flexibility to Emacs.

It has an Emacs frontend, and I designed it with the zealotry of an Emacs user, meaning it has advice, hooks, interactive evaluation and runtime module hotloading. You can run anything the engine can run from a REPL (and cause all the state to become broken easily).

To be clear, it's not a general-purpose roguelike engine, but it proves that with enough effort such an iterative developer experience of modding a game can be achieved.

Hm, there's nethack-mode, but that's not what you mean, is it? You want a framework for building roguelikes, not for playing a particular one?

I've wondered the same thing! In particular, the highly polished and powerful interfaces of some roguelikes (DCSS comes to mind) strongly remind me of Emacs. It seems like the scriptability and power of Emacs interfaces is a natural fit for roguelikes.

That's funny. I've wondered that too, and from the other replies it seems you and I aren't the only ones. I half-assumed it existed and was just called something-incomprehensible-mode so I never heard of it.

I used to play Nethack within Emacs using nethack-el. It was really useful being able to bind a shortcut to something that could copy the map and append it to a text file with a note. :)

I was thinking about this a couple weeks ago as well.

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