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

• [x] Intro

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

• [x] Creating a Character

  • [x] The Title Screen
  • [x] Messages
  • [x] Roles
  • [x] Races
  • [x] Genders
  • [x] Alignments
  • [x] 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.