The last reports from the Rogue C# expedition ended abruptly in 2023 after some notes about dubious experiments with scrolls and potions.
There are some other potions that are a little more involved in their effects and might require more coding but I’ll detail those as I come to them.
Nothing has been heard since this last, brief, report and it’s possible that our explorer might have gotten a little careless while testing some of the more exotic items – caution has always been advisable with anything found in these dark passages. It’s also possible that, like many others, he got a bit overconfident while exploring the depths of these caverns or became lost in one of the many twisting mazes filled with dead-ends, traps and the occasional hungry predator.
Three years later, many levels of the dungeon remain unexplored as the Amulet of Yendor remains down there, somewhere, waiting to be found along with the stores of gold and other treasures. Once again, we approach the entrance to the dungeon, equipped with advanced tools and even a couple of A.I. assistants that have evolved since the last expedition. Whatever the previous explorer’s fate, we also have his complete notes, wrestled away from one of the creatures during a brief foray into the dungeon earlier this year. Hopefully, they will serve as a guide.
The dungeon, its mysteries and its inhabitants await ….
This post is part of a series on creating a roguelike game in C#. For the latest chapters and more information, please visit the Official Project Page on AndrewComeau.com. The current code for this project is also available on Github.
When I started this project in 2023, I used the word epic to describe it on Reddit and someone warned me about the dangers of that word. An epic project can become overwhelming in its detail, especially for one person while writing documentation at the same time. The original Rogue took at least a couple of years to develop by two developers with help from others. Even with that finished game to use as a model, it’s a large and interesting project. It still demands completion, though, and I’ve had enough time away from it.
Completion is actually the wrong word because this series is just as much about demonstrating the C# language and solving the challenges that come with a large software project as it is about the game itself. The challenge now is to rescue that stalled project and carry it forward again wherever it might go from here while still finding the best ways to do that with C#. It’s hard to really say when a game like this is really “finished” but we can review what’s been done and what remains and bring the project to something that is worthy of being called Version 1.0.
The first step is to rediscover the project itself and take a fresh look at the requirements and the code that’s been written from them. Three years is a long time and that time brings a fresh perspective. In the upcoming posts, I’ll be looking at where the project is at this point and some of the design choices that brought it here.
While reviewing the project for continuation, I ran into the question of which version of Microsoft Visual Studio I was going to use. The project was originally developed in Visual Studio 2022 a few years ago but Visual Studio 2026 Community is now available.
Then I noticed the memory recommendations. I don’t have a 64 GB machine and don’t plan on getting one but there didn’t seem to be much point in carrying a C# project forward if I couldn’t support the current version so I decided to see how concrete those requirements were by installing Visual Studio 2026 on both my 8 GB Lenovo Idea Pad 5 and my Kamrui 16 GB mini PC to see how it would work.
You can see how VS 2026 performed in my newest video on YouTube.
The previous chapters are now available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle format! You can find this offline edition on LeanPub.com and Amazon.com.
This offline edition includes all the previous chapters in one file for convenient offline reading. The downloadable edition also contains a detailed Table of Contents and each chapter is linked back to the original articles for access to more resources and future updates.
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