Your Own Roguelike

Are you into old games? Really old games? How about a dungeon-crawling game originally developed in 1980?

That game is Rogue. In Rogue you play a simple @ sign making your way through a procedurally generated dungeon made up of ASCII characters. Monsters are represented by capital letters. Death is frequent and permanent.

I never played the original Rogue, but I did spend some time playing other roguelike games such as NetHack and Angband. Even if you’ve never heard of those, I’ll bet you have heard of a more modern, mostly roguelike game called Diablo. I don’t even want to know how much time I spent playing that series of games.

In addition to playing games, I also still dabble in game development. One day I thought “Maybe I could make my own roguelike…”. That lead me to Roguelike Tutorials. Every summer the RoguelikeDev community on Reddit goes through the tutorial over the course of several weeks.

This tutorial uses Python and the TCOD library to develop a text-based, ASCII-art game. I’m a big fan of Python so this is great. But, there other game engines available that would let you develop something a little more modern.

Enter Godot, a free, open-source game engine. I’ve made a few half-hearted attempts to learn and use Godot over the past few years, but my never really stuck with it. I’ve had this link to the excellent Yet Another Roguelike Tutorial by SelinaDev open in a tab in Safari for at least 6 months.

And that’s the reason for this post. I leave interesting sites open in a tab for ages sometimes. I should probably use some kind of “read it later” site like Pocket to keep track of these sites, but for whatever reason I never really liked using any of those services.

If I find something so interesting that I leave it open in a tab, I’ll post about it here. After all what is a blog other than a series of posts about things that I find interesting?

Getting Started With D&D

Halfway through my 5th grade year, my family moved over 100 miles away from the small town where I was born to the Dallas / Fort Worth area. This was before the internet or any other cheap long distance communication. As an already nerdy kid, this was fairly traumatic for me.

One day, while bored in math class, I started drawing a dungeon on the graph paper we were supposed to be using for plotting points. Another kid noticed what I was doing and asked if I played D&D. I answered “yes” and made a friend. Even better, that kid bought a few of my maps with his lunch money.

These days, thanks in part to its appearance on shows like Stranger Things, lots of people are curious about Dungeons & Dragons. This, combined with the fairly recent release of the Fifth Edition rules means there’s no better time to get started playing Dungeons & Dragons.

The Starter Set

If you’re interested in playing, I recommend buying the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set. Other than a few friends and some snacks, this box has everything you need.

For about $20 you get 5 pre-generated characters, a set of 6 dice, a 32-page rulebook, and a 64-page adventure. The included adventure, Lost Minds of Phandelver, is perfect for a new Dungeon Master.

Playing a few hours a week, the starter adventure usually takes 6-8 weeks to get through. At this point, you and your friends should be eager for more.

Beyond the Starter Set

Players wanting more options for making characters should buy the Player’s Handbook for about $30. This large, hard-cover book contains all of the rules and many more options for building characters.

The Dungeon Master will want to pick up the Monster Manual which details hundreds of monsters for the game. The Dungeon Master’s Guide contains more guidance for running adventures and rules around creating your own adventures and campaigns.

If you’d rather not build your own adventures, there are many campaign books. The latest release is Tomb of Annihilation, which takes place in the jungle region of Chult. Other popular choices are Storm King’s Thunder, which has the players face off against giants and Curse of Strahd, a gothic themed adventure which pits the players against the vampire Strahd.

Dungeons & Dragons is played by people around the world. You’ll find a thriving community on your social network of choice. There are Facebook groups, several popular subreddits, various groups live-streaming on Twitch, and many D&D personalities on Twitter. Hopefully this is the beginning of a lifetime of enjoyment in role playing games.