This morning marks the beginning of Autumn Lisp Game Jam 2024, which I wanted to use as a chance to challenge myself with making a rogue-like game. I’ve spent this week exploring options, read the amazing tutorial on creating roguelikes in Common Lisp with the tcod library, but eventually decided to stick with my old stack — liballegro, cl-fast-ecs and nuklear for the GUI.

I’ve picked a beautiful monospace font and this cool 12x12 tileset with a huge variety of tiles and a pleasing style that suits the fantasy rogue-like genre well.

This morning I’ve been trying to figure out the format to store individual tile identification, for example, how to know that the sprite at offset (100, 100) is the player character, and the onee at (200, 200) is a wall tile. I’ve ended up deciding again to stick with familiar tools by using Tiled tileset files with custom properties 😅

Then I started to implement the player character; here’s short video with me trying to debug it:

Almost immediately I’ve hit a roadblock on how to handle turn-based movement and different character speeds. I started digging around on RogueBasin and came across the amazing book “Exploring Roguelike Games “by John Harris. Chapter 65 is about the very topic of movement, and it’s now my bedtime reading 😊