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Build Your Own RPG Dungeon Crawler in Python

A Complete Roguelike Tutorial

This book is 100% completeLast updated on 2026-06-28

Stop playing other people's dungeons. Build your own RPG roguelike in Python and hand it to a friend who had no idea you could do that.

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About

About

About the Book

Remember the first time a giant rat killed you in a dungeon you never saw coming?

There's a reason roguelikes have survived forty years of gaming trends, outlasted entire console generations, and inspired some of the biggest indie hits of the last decade. Procedural dungeons that never repeat. Monsters that hunt you. Loot worth dying for. And permadeath that makes every single decision matter.

Now you can build one yourself, from scratch, in Python.

The Python RogueLike takes you from a blank screen to a fully playable roguelike in nine focused chapters. No game engine required. No assets to buy. Just Python, your terminal, and a dungeon that tries to kill you in a different way every single time you run it.

You will build a procedurally generated map that is never the same twice, monsters with genuine AI that hunt you through the corridors, a turn-based combat system with real stakes, loot that changes how you play, multi-level dungeons that get nastier the deeper you go, and permadeath that finally gives your decisions some teeth.

Along the way you will actually understand every line of code, because this book explains the reasoning behind each decision, not just the syntax.

Whether you played Moria on a beige box in 1983 or you just want to ship something you can hand to a friend and say "I built this," this is the book that gets you there.

The dungeon is waiting. How deep can you go?

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Author

About the Author

Mike Gold

I have been developing software for over 20 years and worked as a consultant in the banking, manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and military industries. I am a former Microsoft MVP and have a background in Electrical Engineering. I've contributed over 200 articles on .NET/C# technology and have lately been working fullstack with .NET Core and ReactJS

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Contents

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Welcome to the Dungeon

  1. What Makes a Roguelike a Roguelike
  2. What This Book Will Do For You
  3. Who This Book Is For

Chapter 2: The Map

  1. Thinking in Grids
  2. Defining Your Tiles
  3. Rendering to the Terminal
  4. Carving Out a Test Room
  5. A Note on Prettier Rendering

Chapter 3: Digging the Dungeon

  1. The Strategy: Rooms First, Corridors Second
  2. Representing a Room
  3. Placing Rooms Randomly
  4. Connecting Rooms With Corridors
  5. Putting It All Together

Chapter 4: Your Hero

  1. Building the Player
  2. Movement and Collision
  3. Reading Keyboard Input
  4. The Game Loop
  5. Showing the Player on the Map

Chapter 5: Monsters with a Pulse

  1. Building the Monster Class
  2. Spawning Monsters in Rooms
  3. Giving Monsters a Brain, Sort Of
  4. Wiring Monsters Into the Game Loop

Chapter 6: Combat and Consequences

  1. The Basics of an Attack
  2. Triggering Combat From Movement
  3. Letting Monsters Fight Back
  4. Permadeath, Done Right

Chapter 7: Loot and Progression

  1. Building an Item Class
  2. Defining Item Templates
  3. Scattering Items Through the Dungeon
  4. Picking Items Up
  5. A Quick Inventory, the Honest Version

Chapter 8: Going Deeper

  1. Adding Stairs Down
  2. Tracking Dungeon Depth
  3. Generating a New Floor
  4. Scaling Monsters With Depth
  5. Handling the Descent

Chapter 9: Gold and Experience

  1. Adding Gold and Experience to the Player
  2. Dropping Gold From Monsters
  3. Awarding Gold and XP on a Kill
  4. Monster Attack Update
  5. Leveling Up
  6. Updating the Status Line
  7. Updating the Death Screen
  8. What the Death Screen Looks Like Now

Chapter 10: Polish and Ship It

  1. Clearing the Screen Between Turns
  2. Instant Keypress Detection
  3. A Message Queue
  4. Add Color With Colorama
  5. Randomly Generated Dungeon Names
  6. Varying Death Messages
  7. A Proper Title Screen
  8. Sharing It

Appendix: Going Further

  1. Appendix A: Getting the Source Code
  2. Appendix B: Glossary
  3. Appendix C: Installing Python and Running Your Game
  4. Installing the Required Packages
  5. Running the Game
  6. Appendix D: Extending Dungeon Items
  7. Appendix E: Hosting on Hugging Face Spaces
  8. Appendix F: Where to Go From Here

Other Books by Mike Gold

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