Greetings all! I've been a bit of a lurker in the RL community for a long time now, but wanted to jump in really quick and let people know that I've built out a little tool for building JavaScript roguelikes:
https://github.com/jakofranko/hobgoblinjsHobgoblin is a little command tool that will generate a framework for building roguelikes. It uses ROT.js pretty heavily (if you haven't used ROT.js, you should, it's awesome) for things like scheduling, dungeon generation, FOV etc., but also provides an actual architecture for a game. I just got done documenting the heck out of it last night and now I think it's ready to share.
Feedback is welcome! Please report any bugs or feature requests on GitHub. I've included ways you can contribute to Hobgoblin in the README, if you're interested.
Why Hobgoblin? After going through lots of tutorials and creating a few of my own games, I realized that I kept using the same basic architecture, and then changing the guts based on my specific mechanic requirements. When building my own games, I found that the basic building blocks were good enough to reuse, and so I thought I would take the tedium out of re-writing them, or simply copying/pasting my own projects from directory to directory. My hope though is that others will contribute their own innovations via additional examples, so that developers can pick and choose what works for them or be inspired by the ideas of other developers. The less time spent on building the nuts and bolts, the more time can be spent thinking about design and mechanics, which is what roguelikes are all about
No, I meant, why did you call it Hobgoblin? When I first played the original Rogue, a Hobgoblin was the first monster that killed me. I think that's when the whole idea of permadeath, PCG, item usage etc. (all the things we love about this genre) clicked for me. It was kind of my aha moment. I'm hoping that this little tool will be that aha moment for current, or new, or wannabe roguelike developers (I am not hoping that it will kill you though).
Cheers!
