Roguelike Tutorial in Rust
Part 0: Why #
In mid-April of 2014 I was stuck in a hotel room in Manhattan with the stomach flu. In a fever induced stupor, I started reading Steve Klabnik’s Rust for Rubyists. It’s a great primer for the language, and if you haven’t read it, you should stop here and go check it out. It took me about a half-day in my bed-ridden state to get through it.
What do you do when you’re stuck in a hotel room with stomach flu? Read @steveklabnik’s Rust for Rubyists, duh.
— Jared McFarland (@jaredmcfarland) August 11, 2014
_why #
In it, Steve talks about _why’s Dwemthy’s Array. His book doesn’t have a complete implementation of the array (and because progress has been diverted to the official Rust Guide, I don’t think it ever will), but I decided I wanted to make a full version I could actually fight. I wanted my rabbit to get lucky, damnit. It was pretty ugly.
I got bored playing my little game pretty quickly. So I started thinking of ways I could make it more interesting and learn more about Rust along the way.
Game Programming Patterns #
Awhile ago I heard about this project, Game Programming Patterns that seemed really cool. I’ve always wanted to make a game.
So. In my fever-induced stupor, I decided I’d finally learn how to make a game. And learn Rust. And write about everything along the way. Wtf was I thinking.
The Game #
The end goal for this is a multi-level dungeon crawler. Each level will have a boss, which is one of the monsters from Dwemthy’s Array. The PC is a warrior rabbit armed with a little boomerang, a hero’s sword, some lettuce and three bombs.
GitHub Tag 0.0 #
In the GitHub repo is a tag, 0.0, which represents where the code was before I decided to start working on this as a tutorial. I’ll be pulling bits and pieces of it into the final project/tutorial, but I’m sure a lot of things will change. If you just want a hot mess of Rust to lean on to get your project bootstrapped, take a look there.