Welcome to the revival of RoguelikeDev’s FAQ Friday, now on the Fediverse!

The purpose for this event is for traditional roguelike developers to discuss design philosophy and share their technical insights and methods as well as field questions related to the topic.


Development Tools

Last week we already covered languages and libraries, but before we move into discussing details like programming and design there is another important "meta" element of roguelike development to cover: Tools.

Any type of game development will involve using multiple types of software. Beyond the compiler, at the very least you'll have a text editor, and possibly an IDE. On top of those you could have any number of other tools depending on your features, assets, workflow, etc.

Using the right tools is crucial to staying productive and efficiently creating something as complex as a game. Sometimes you even have to build your own custom tool for a specific task, because using what's available just isn't efficient enough.

What kind of publicly available tools do you use to develop your roguelike(s)? What for? Have you built any of your own tools? And if so, what do they do?

Don't forget to mention anything that you use in a particularly interesting or unusual way!


Original FAQ's on Reddit

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[–] 1 point 3 hours ago

Nice to see FAQ Fridays getting revived here, thanks for your efforts! Back then, I started participating around the #20s of the revisited ones, so I never answered this one.

I don't use many tools actually, so it's kind of a short answer: basically just vim for writing code, git for versioning, and a Tcl/Tk script named drawtile for drawing monochromatic 16x24 tiles. If counting more secondary tools, I'd mention ripgrep and fzf, which I use occasionally.

BTW, I did miss the first friday of the revival, but I might comment there later.

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