wozsoftware / badlydrawrogue

Roguelike Engine Using the functional side of C#

BadlyDrawRogue

Roguelike Engine Using the functional side of C# https://wozsoftware.wordpress.com/

The name Badly Drawn Rogue comes from the fact that I am no artist so the graphics for the game will be hand drawn… badly.

I have always loved roguelikes and have dabbled with engines in the past, each time exploring different techniques of implementation. Over the past couple of years I have become a real fan of functional programming and immutability so I decided it was time to revisit a roguelike engine using these techniques. The aim is to create a simple game backed by a very flexible engine that will allow creation of far more complex games down the line.

I have not yet chosen the render techniques I will use. The main application is currently an old WinForms project but as the engine lives in a separate project this will be switched out when I decide on the UI.

The following is a quick overview of the core concepts

• The object Entity is used to represent most items in the game: tiles, items, actors etc.
• Entity is an immutable object composed of a type, numeric attributes, boolean flags and child entities. This structure gives great flexibility to define objects without the need for complex object graphs.
• My immutable objects are closer in concept to F# records than OO objects, most of the functionality is via queries and helper methods.
• Heavy use is made of linq and monadic comprehension, because of this you will find very few loops in the code.
• The Maybe monad is provided by the Functional.Maybe library.
• Error comprehension is provided by my own Error monad.
• Immutable collections are provided by the Microsoft.Bcl.Collections library.

Until now I have been feeling out the core concepts of the engine and I wanted the flexibility of clay like code. This has meant the code is sparse on UnitTest as they add drag. Now I have passed this stage I will start to rectify the test situation before I push on too much further.