Building Vanilla Roguelike: A Journey Through Algorithms, Architecture, and Passion

What does it take to build a roguelike game from scratch? Not with a game engine, not with external libraries, but with pure Ruby—just you, the language, and a terminal. That’s the challenge I set for myself in April 2020, and over the next five years, this passion project would teach me more about algorithms, game programming patterns, and software architecture than any tutorial ever could. This is the story of Vanilla Roguelike: a journey that started with maze generation algorithms, hit a catastrophic breaking point that nearly ended the project, and ultimately led to a complete architectural transformation. It’s a story about learning through doing, about the value of good architecture, and about how sometimes the most painful moments in development become the most valuable lessons.