Write Yourself a Roguelike

You are about to embark on a journey. This journey will be plagued with orcs, gnomes, algorithms, data structures, and kittens. You, valiant developer, will be writing a Roguelike.

Outline

• Intro

  • What is a Roguelike?
  • What is NetHack?
  • Tooling
  • Why Write This Book?

• Creating a Character

  • The Title Screen
  • Messages
  • Roles
  • Races
  • Genders
  • Alignments
  • Generating Abilities

• Creating the Dungeon

  • Generating random rooms
  • Generating Doors and Corridors
  • Moving around
  • Creating Stairwells
  • Vision and Lighting
  • Color

• Inventory

  • Items
  • Burden
  • Money and Shops
  • Food and Hunger
  • Unidentified Items

• Combat

  • Random Monsters
  • Combat
  • Magic

• Wrapping up

  • Saving and Loading
  • Increasing Difficulty
  • What to do next

• Possible Future Chapters

  • Searching, hidden doors and corridors
  • Questlines
  • Alternate Dungeon types
  • Blessings and Curses
  • Pets
  • Zoos

Building

There is a build tool included with this project that will allow you to compile the contents of the book directory into an EPUB-formatted e-book. First, to ensure that you’ve got the necessary dependencies for the compilation process, change to the project directory and run:

$ bundle install

We then need to have Pandoc installed.

Now, anytime you’d like to compile the book you can simply run the compile script:

$ exe/compile

Doing so will write a file entitled write-yourself-a-roguelike.epub to the release directory, overwriting any existing file with the same name.