Vim Roguelike Challenge
A downloadable game for Windows and Linux
The roguelike you just can't quit!
An old-school ascii-based dungeon crawler mechanically & thematically inspired by the best text editor, vim. Explore dungeons using powerful navigation commands, yank loot, and delete enemies like the enigmatic ed and the dreaded Emacs in your quest to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor and return it to the victory altar.
I don't use windows, so please let me know if the windows build is buggy. It should be fine, though!
Why?
Vim and classic roguelikes have a lot in common - a text based interface, steep learning curve, great potential for mastery, items/commands that combine in powerful ways, and a history of free and open source software. So why not combine the two? Being half-decent at vim makes me feel like a powerful text editing wizard, so I thought it might be fun to try and carry that feeling over to a video game, and the 7 Day Roguelike Challenge presented the perfect opportunity.
Controls
For detailed instructions, please see the documentation.
Basically, I tried my best to implement vim movement in a roguelike context.
Use
hjkl (or arrow keys, if you insist) to move, d+movement to attack, yy to pick up items at your current location, and
"rp to drop the item in register r.
Consult the "cursor movement" section of a vim cheat sheet for a wide range of additional options. Not all commands are implemented, but most are (with some natural modifications to suit gameplay). However, they will generally require an amulet to use. Try out the "vimtutor" starting class to experiment with all available commands.
VimRC is self-documenting in the form of a
:help command. For instance, to learn about controls try :help controls.
License
Just for fun, in addition to the MIT license this project is also available under the vim license (i.e. you may use/distribute it under the terms of either of these licenses, at your discretion). Hopefully this doesn't cause some sort of headache in the future.
About
Made for the 7 Day Roguelike Challenge. Engine architecture largely copied from this tutorial, to which I am deeply indebted.
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Comments
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I know this is ancient by this point, but I've been meaning to check it out for a long time (read: since 2022) and I finally did tonight.
Managed to get to Dungeon 8 and kill Emacs as a chaos wizard, but once I did I wasn't sure what to do since I didn't see a further down staircase or an amulet of Yendor anywhere. Emacs felt like they were meant to be a final boss carrying the amulet, but maybe I missed something.
I mean, other than that you can eat corpses to heal, that would have been useful to have figured out before I had killed Emacs. :D
Anyway, loved the game and concept so much, and I'm not sure what it says about me that I had the most fun as the chaos wizard.
Thanks for playing! This is by far my most niche game, glad at least one other person was able to get the hang of it enough to get past the first couple levels.
ROT13 hint/spoiler for the end game: Gur svany qhatrba unf "uvqqra" ebbzf abg pbaarpgrq ol unyyjnlf, gur nffhzcgvba vf gung ol gur gvzr lbh trg gurer lbh pna gryrcbeg nebhaq oyvaqyl hagvy lbh svaq gur nzhyrg bs Lraqbe. Pna'g erzrzore vs gung'f qhatrba 8 be abg gubhtu, vg'f orra n ybat gvzr fvapr V znqr guvf.
Nu, gung znxrf n ybg bs frafr, ohg tbvat onpx gb gur obggbz sybbe V sbhaq naq rkcybevat jvgu U, Y, 0, naq $, V qba'g frrz gb or noyr gb trg naljurer bhgfvqr bs gur znva nern. V nyfb unir rpubybpngr, juvpu vf fhccbfrq gb yrg zr trg gb flzobyf V pna'g frr jvgu s, ohg gelvat s" naq s> fgvyy qba'g gnxr zr naljurer.
I did notice earlier that at one point I used the o command to try to look at a pile of gold and it deleted it instead; I'm not sure if maybe something similar happened to delete what I was looking for on the last floor I found. I also noticed a fair number of incorrect things in the :help pages, but a few wrinkles are to be expected from a 7DRL game.
All in all, I really enjoyed it even if it took me a hot minute to get the hang of it. :)
If only I was experienced with VIM. I am sure the VIM fans out there love this, I struggled but it was fun to learn and play.
That’s so hard T.T
I really love the concept, but the vim movement keys are a pain when you don’t know them. I code is VsCode with vim keys, but I only use half of it (and not the movement keys).
Maybe having a cheat sheet on the side. At least I had fun with Vimtutor :p
I think a link to your game could easily be showed in the vim manual as a way to learn vim keys :D
Some remarks:
Good job :) Really coherent design around a weird idea.
Thanks for the comments/suggestions!
I was worried that the controls would be a bit annoying to people who aren't used to vim, but I'm not really sure of a way around that since it's kinda part of the core conceit.
Scrolls are used using @[register], same as eating a corpse. I'll add that to :help scroll, thanks for pointing it out!
Making marks visible is also a great idea.
Once you have hlsearch on, you can /landmine to find landmines. Or you could try yanking every square before moving to it, thus picking up any landmines in your path. But even without doing that, you get a warning when you first step on a landmine, and all you need to do is move out of the blast radius in a single move (so e.g. 5l would work), which I think every starting class is capable of by default. That being said, it is definitely a bit too easy to set of a landmine if you're not being careful, and I'm still trying to figure out what to do about that. (Also, if you have a magnet equipped then you automatically set off landmines when landing on them, but that's an unintended consequence of the magnet functionality that I didn't have time to deal with before the deadline.)
Thanks again!
Aaah ok! I didn’t know how to eat corpse either. When I pick up something, it is written
you yank a XXX ("1). And this “1 didn’t do anything. Is it supposed to be @1 ?And I think I did have a magnet equipped ;)
In vim, "1 is how you specify a register to yank into or drop from (i.e. "1yy would yank into register 1 and "1p would put the item in register 1), while @1 is how you execute a macro stored in register 1. I guess you're right that putting @1 in the pickup message would be clearer.