Rogged

Turn-based roguelike dungeon crawler, built in C99 and with a dash of Zig to serve as a learning opportunity. Rogged is basically a classic roguelike where you descend through floors of a procedurally generated dungeon, fighting enemies, managing inventory, and trying to reach the bottom alive.

A non-exhaustive list of its (current) features:

• Turn-based combat with damage variance, critical hits, dodge, and block mechanics
• Damage classes (Slash, Impact, Pierce, Fire, and Poison)
• Status effects (Poison, Bleed, Stun, Weaken, and Burn)
• Various enemy classes (Goblin, Skeleton, Orc) with distinct resistance profiles
• Procedural dungeon generation with rooms and corridors, seeded per floor
• Inventory and equipment system (weapons, armor, potions)
• Procedural audio via raylib
• ASCII-inspired tile rendering, with HP bars and floating damage text

Controls:

Key	Action
WASD / Arrows	Move or attack
G	Pick up item
I	Open inventory
U	Use a potion
E	Equip item from inventory
D	Drop item
Y / N	Confirm / decline descending stairs
R	Restart (on game over)
Q	Quit

Build Instructions

Rogged is built with C99 and Zig. Besides raylib and pkg-config you will need a C compiler and basic Zig tooling. For now, we use C99 and Zig 0.15.2. Those might change in the future.

Additionally you will need clang-format and just for the developer workflow if you plan to contribute.

Using Nix (Recommended)

The recommended developer tooling is Nix. This provides a pure, reproducible devshell across all machines.

# Enter the development shell
$ nix develop

# Build and run
$ just dev

Manual Build

# Full build
$ zig build

# Build and run
$ zig build run

# or
$ just dev

Task Runner Commands

There's a Justfile designed to make common tasks somewhat easier. For now, they are as follows:

just build       # zig build
just dev         # zig build run
just clean       # remove zig-out/ and .zig-cache/
just fmt         # format all C and Zig source files
just fmt-check   # check formatting

If the project gets more complicated, new tasks might be added.

Future Plans

The game is currently playable end-to-end but it lacks serious polish to claim its place as a fun roguelike. Some of the features I'd like to introduce, in no particular order, are as follows:

• Save / Load system - Persist and restore game state between sessions
• More enemy variety - Additional enemy types with unique abilities
• More item variety - Rings, wands, scrolls, and cursed items
• Multiple floors beyond 5 - Endless or configurable depth
• Test suite - Unit tests for combat math, dungeon generation, and RNG
• Field of view - Fog of war and line-of-sight mechanics
• Level transitions - Upward stairs and floor teleportation
• Achievements / death log - Track runs and causes of death with a leaderboard
• UI polish - Better message log history, item descriptions, death screen

In addition, it might be interesting to allow customizing the "world state" by as scripting API. Though, that is for much later.

Attributions

This project draws a fair bit of inspiration from Shattered Pixel Dungeon. While the mechanics are generally different, and commit to remain as such, I cannot deny the amount of inspiration & ideas Shattered Pixel Dungeon has given me. It's a GPL licensed project, and no code was borrowed. Still, some resemblance may occur.

Additionally, huge thanks to Raylib for how easy it made graphics and audio. This was perhaps my best experience in developing a graphical application, and CERTAINLY the most ergonomic when it comes to writing a game.

I got rogged :/