Roguerrants

Roguerrants is a game engine for interrupted real-time 2.5D (parallaxed top-down) roguelike games. It is written in Squeak Smalltalk.

Since this is a long-term project I am making the code available just as it currently is, warts included - this is a work in progress.

To run Roguerrants, you will need to install Squeak (version 6.0) on your system. It is an open source Smalltalk implementation. Just start the VM and select the image file you got from here.

For an example game (still a very simple prototype, though), see Tavern of Adventures.

There is a lot of demos and documentation in the image. The code is open source (MIT licence), but it is hugely complex and very unlikely to be workable by someone else than me at the moment. The long-term idea is to develop a simple declarative API, but we are not there yet.

Roguerrants has a few unique takes on the roguelike principles:

• free motion, the grid is organic and procedurally generated
• the game flow blends real-time and turn-based in seamless ways
• no tileset, all graphics are procedurally generated
• the 2.5D is effective: collision, navigation and visibility take heights and shapes into account
• actors interact with their environment via a sort of (non-realistic) physics system
• original combat and magic systems, based on geometry - placement is key
• world maps are partitioned via a hierarchy of convex polygonal areas
• biomes are first-class objects (well everything is, this is Smalltalk after all)
• deep and rich tools for procedural musical composition (powered by muO)
• original architecture for actor behaviors allowing for very high-level design
• most objects can act as autonomous agents, including places and maps
• the scenario is modular and can be procedurally generated; there is a game master component
• quests are narrative units that can drive the generation of the game world
• the game can reason about its own structure and modify itself on the fly
• each actor has a mind that is a full-fledged Prolog interpreter (ok, this one is overkill)

Did I mention that everything is procedurally generated?