Hacker News Reader

I made a web browser playable Rogue-like about 7 years ago.

It was the first incarnation of my Dead By Zombie game. Python and a completely homegrown engine. I later decided the hack novelty of it didn't outweigh the negatives of the inferior latency and increased complexity. So I dropped support for the web UI and rewrote it to have a conventional curses-based UI for play in a terminal. No regrets.

View on HN

Curses is cool - no bones. But javascript is becoming significant for roguelikes. There's a library called rot.js that is far easier to get started with than the other significant frameworks. They've recently made it work in node.js as well (for the console). Hence, you can easily get a single codebase presenting to both web and terminal.

There's also libtcod[0], a library to help creating roguelikes. There are bindings in a lot of languages (Common Lisp, Nimrod, Lua, Go, D...) and it's a real pleasure to use! I used to work on a Python roguelike, and I can't recommend this lib enough.

[0] http://roguecentral.org/doryen/libtcod/

Frustration. I wasn't able to get libtcod to build. Tried to get prep'd for 7drl a few months back on debian (previous stable) and when that failed, a clean install of windows 7. I've also had trouble with race conditions with keypresses and the python version, although that was a few years back. I like the libtcod philosophy of it being a library approach (contrast with t-engine, which is more of a sandbox model).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com