LambdaHack

This is an alpha release of LambdaHack, a [Haskell] 1 game engine library for [roguelike] 2 games of arbitrary theme, size and complexity, packaged together with a small example dungeon crawler. When completed, the engine will let you specify content to be procedurally generated, define the AI behaviour on top of the generic content-independent rules and compile a ready-to-play game binary, using either the supplied or a custom-made main loop. Several frontends are available (GTK is the default) and many other generic engine components are easily overridden, but the fundamental source of flexibility lies in the strict and type-safe separation of code and content. Long-term goals for LambdaHack include support for tactical squad combat, in-game content creation, auto-balancing and persistent content modification based on player behaviour.

The engine comes with a sample code for a little dungeon crawler, called LambdaHack and described in PLAYING.md. The engine and the example game are bundled together in a single [Hackage] 3 package. You are welcome to create your own game by modifying the sample game and the engine code, but please consider eventually splitting your changes into a separate Hackage package that depends on the upstream library, to help us exchange ideas and share improvements to the common code.

Games known to use the LambdaHack library:

• Allure of the Stars, a near-future Sci-Fi game in early development, see http://hackage.haskell.org/package/Allure

Compilation and installation

The library is best compiled and installed via Cabal, which also takes care of all dependencies. The latest official version of the library can be downloaded automatically by Cabal from [Hackage] 3 as follows

cabal install LambdaHack

For a newer snapshot, download source from a development branch at [github] 5 and run Cabal from the main directory

cabal install

For the example game, the best frontend (keyboard support and colours) is gtk. To compile with one of the terminal frontends, use Cabal flags, e.g,

cabal install -fvty

To use a crude bot for testing the game, you have to compile with the standard input/output frontend, as follows

cabal install -fstd

and run the bot, for instance storing the output in a log

DumbBot 42 20000000 | LambdaHack > /tmp/log

You may wish to tweak the game configuration file for the bot, e.g., by helping it play longer, as in the supplied config.rules.bot.

Compatibility notes

The current code was tested with GHC 7.6.1, but probably works with GHC > 7.2. A [few tweaks] 6 are needed to compile with 7.0.

If you are using the curses or vty frontends, numerical keypad may not work correctly depending on the versions of curses, terminfo and terminal emulators. Selecting heroes via number keys or SHIFT-keypad keys is disabled with curses, because CTRL-keypad for running does not work there, so the numbers produced by the keypad have to be used. With vty on xterm, CTRL-direction keys seem to work OK, but on rxvt they do not. Vi keys (ykuhlbjn) should work everywhere regardless. Gtk works fine, too.

Further information

For more information, visit the [wiki] 4 and see the files PLAYING.md, CREDITS and LICENSE.

Have fun!