What programming language would be best for creating a roguelike game? [closed]

Question

With the interest of creating a roguelike RPG (such as Nethack, Rogue, and ADOM), which programming language would be most suitable and why?

With the language that you choose, be sure to list any libraries or facets of the language that make it particularly well-suited.

Answer 1

Way back in the day I tried to write Roguelike games using QuickBASIC out of all things (it was 1988.) Not the recommended approach...

There are still some development circles out there. Here's an FAQ on Roguelike Development and also a blog dedicated to the same.

Answer 2

My language of use (I'm trying to create roguelike too) is Python, because:

• It's high level programming language, I don't need to think about memory allocation all the time, etc, but keep my mind on algorithms.
• There's tons of useful libraries for almost everything. Recently I've found TDL/libtcod which can be useful for roguelike development.
• With bindings you can easily use C/C++ libraries or even write few critical functions in C/C++, and use them.
• It's the most readable programming language I've ever seen.
• While programming in Python I've learned to use internal documentation. It's very helpful thing, I just read my code few months later and I still know what it's doing.

Answer 3

That's a very personal choice as always :-)

I wrote my Roguelike game (Tyrant) in Java for the following reasons:

• Very portable (even with graphics)
• Garbage collection / memory management
• Lots of good free / open source libraries available (helpful for algorithms, data structures and manipulating save game files etc.)
• It's a statically typed language - this has performance and robustness benefits which I judged to be worth the additional coding complexity
• I wanted to hone my Java skills more generally for use in other projects

EDIT: For those interested it is open source, all code is available at SourceForge

Answer 4

Well I've made a couple roguelikes in C, spending a fair amount of time at roguebasin, which is a great site for anything related to roguelike development.

As for what language you should use, I don't really see it making a huge difference. I pick C because of the portability, and a lot of libraries work well with it.. But an object oriented language can clean up some things that you may not want to keep track of.

There aren't any languages that I would consider to be specifically greater than the rest for roguelikes. If you're making it graphical, you may prefer something that has that built-in, such as flash / silverlight. But even then there are libraries for any other languages that bring them to about the same degree of difficulty in that regard.

So I'd say take a language you know and like, or that you don't know and want to learn..