Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom (Go port)

Rogue is the original dungeon-crawling adventure game that spawned an entire genre. This branch is a faithful Go port of Rogue 5.4.4: explore procedurally generated dungeons, fight monsters, collect treasure, and attempt to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor.

Original authors: Michael Toy, Ken Arnold, and Glenn Wichman (1980–1983, 1985, 1999).

The port is function-by-function faithful to the classic C sources — same dungeon generation (seed-compatible RNG), same combat math, same item tables, same messages. The C reference implementation lives on the master and modern-rogue branches; ARCHITECTURE.md documents both the original program structure and the design of this port.

Building and running

Requires Go 1.25 or later and a terminal at least 80x24.

go build ./cmd/rogue
./rogue

# Restore a saved game
./rogue ~/rogue.save

# View high scores
./rogue -s

# Test the death screen (demo mode)
./rogue -d

In-game commands

Press ? in game for the full list.

• arrows or h/j/k/l/y/u/b/n — move (shift to run, ctrl to run until adjacent)
• . rest, s search for hidden doors and traps
• i inventory, , pick up, d drop
• q quaff potion, r read scroll, e eat food
• w wield weapon, W wear armor, P/R put on / remove ring
• t throw, z zap a wand, f/F fight
• >/< take the stairs
• S save, Q quit

Environment

# Game options, as in the original
export ROGUEOPTS="name=YourName,terse,jump,fruit=mango"

# Wizard (debug) mode, with a reproducible dungeon
ROGUE_WIZARD=1 SEED=12345 ./rogue

The scoreboard is kept in ~/.rogue.scores. Save files are Go gob snapshots and, as in the original, are deleted when restored.

Code layout

game/        the game engine: one Go file per original C file,
             function-by-function (see ARCHITECTURE.md for the mapping)
term/        tcell-backed terminal, replacing curses
cmd/rogue/   the executable

The engine package is fully headless-testable: go test ./game/ runs scripted game sessions, dungeon-generation golden checks, and an RNG compatibility test against the original C generator.

License

BSD-style; see LICENSE.TXT.

Copyright (C) 1980-1983, 1985, 1999 Michael Toy, Ken Arnold and Glenn Wichman. All rights reserved.