The C Roguelike Tutorial - Part 0: The Setup

Intro

This tutorial will teach you the basics of how to make a classic retro roguelike game entirely in C using the Ncurses library. By the end of the tutorial you will have built a simple ASCII roguelike that will feature procedurally generated dungeons, increasing enemy difficulty, leveling up, equipment, spells, and a final boss at level 10 to give you a sense of closure.

I was inspired to make this tutorial by the Coding a Rogue/Nethack RPG in C Youtube series, which is a great 26-video tutorial which taught me the basics of how to use Ncurses and gave me ideas to build a small roguelike in C. I even adapted some of the algorithms shown in that series for this tutorial. If you are more engaged by video tutorials, you should definitely check that one out, though keep in mind that it seems to be incomplete as the videos end when the author was starting to implement equipment. But if you prefer reading then stick around for my tutorial series where we are going to program a game with a lot more features.

Requirements

The tutorial assumes a basic knowledge of C or similar languages. If you've never programmed before you might be able to follow along with the code, but it will be difficult for you to actually understand what you're doing. If that is the case I would recommend choosing a book from The Definitive C Book Guide over at StackOverflow to read up on the basics of C programming. I will be explaining some of the logic and decisions behind the code presented, but I won't go into the very basics of coding in C.

In order to follow along with the code you will need to have a C compiler such as GCC(Linux) or MinGW(Windows), and the ncurses library. Let's take a brief look at those now.

C Compiler and Ncurses

- Linux

If you are working on a Linux machine chances are you already have GCC installed, which is the GNU Compiler Collection. Use the following command in your terminal to verify it:

$ gcc --version

If you get something like bash: gcc: command not found, you will have to install it yourself. If you are using Ubuntu or one of its derivatives the following commands will install GCC and a few other necessary programs:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install build-essential

After this, try again the first command to verify that you have gcc installed.

Now that gcc is installed, use the following command to install ncurses:

$ sudo apt install libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev

Now you should be setup with GCC and Ncurses. At the bottom of the chapter we'll go through a small program to verify that everything's working properly.

- Windows

Ncurses is a Unix/Linux-based library meant for use in unix-like terminals, but for Windows you can use the alternative PDcurses, which is the Public Domain curses port.

Windows doesn't come preinstalled with a C compiler so you will have to install your own. I suggest installing MinGW, which is the Windows port of GCC, as it has a simple installer that allows you to install the PDcurses library at the same time. The easiest way to do it is by downloading the MinGW installer from SourceForge.

Choose the default folder location for the installation. In the installation manager you will reach a step where you can choose which packages to install; mark the boxes on all of the options from the 'Basic Setup' tab, there should be seven of them. Then go to the 'All Packages' tab and mark all of the following for installation:

• mingw32-libncurses (dll)
• mingw32-libncurses (dev)
• mingw32-libpdcurses (dll)
• mingw32-libpdcurses (dev)

After these are selected go to 'Installation'-> 'Apply Changes' and click Apply to continue with the installation.

Once the installation is finished you need to add the path to MinGW\bin to your PATH environment variable. In the Windows start bar search for Edit environment variables for your account. Edit the PATH variable and click on 'New' to add a new path. If you installed it in the default location, the folder path should be C:\MinGW\bin.

You should now have MinGW installed in your system. To verify it, open the Windows Command Prompt and type:

$ gcc --version

- MacOS

Unfortunately I don't have a Mac system to try this on, so I can only provide what I've read online without personal validation of its effectiveness. From what I've read, you should be able to use Homebrew to install both GCC and Ncurses on Mac:

$ brew install gcc
$ brew install ncurses

Hope that works for you or at least gets you started. This is the only mention I will do in this tutorial about how to do things in MacOS. I think you can still follow along with most of what I do here since MacOS is a UNIX-family OS and its command line works fairly similar to the Linux command line.

Testing GCC and Ncurses

In order to verify that everything is working we'll make a short program to validate our setup. Create a folder where you want to start your project and open a new file in your editor of choice. Call the file main.c and put the following code in it:

#include <ncurses.h>

int main(void)
{
  initscr();
  endwin();

  return 0;
}

If you are using Windows, you will have to replace the first line to include the curses.h file instead of the ncurses.h file, like so:

-#include <ncurses.h>
+#include <curses.h>

This change and a similarly small replacement in our makefile will be the only differences in the code for Windows. Apart from this minor change in the include statement, everything else in the code will be the same on any machine.

I will explain initscr() and endwin() in the next part of this tutorial. For now, simply compile the file to verify that the compiler is able to include the header correctly.

On Linux

$ gcc main.c -lncurses

On Windows

$ gcc main.c -lpdcurses

If you do not get any error messages you should now have either an a.out file in Linux or an a.exe file in Windows. The -lncurses and -lpdcurses options used above ask the compiler to link the ncurses or the pdcurses libraries respectively. You can try running the program, which will close immediately after starting.

Other Resources

If you want to learn more about Ncurses you can click here or check out this Programming How-To If you ever need help with anything roguelike related you can go to the Roguelike Dev Subreddit which is a very welcoming community exclusively for roguelike developers!

Now you're all set to start coding! See you on Part 1!