// the find
garkimasera/rusted-ruins
Extensible open world rogue like game with pixel art. Players can explore the wilderness and ruins.
A Rust roguelike with an open-world structure, pixel art, and a pak file modding system. It's a solo indie project aimed at players who want a Nethack-style game with crafting, agriculture, and open-ended goals rather than a single objective. Still pre-1.0 and visibly incomplete.
The workspace crate layout is well-organized — game logic, rules, map generation, and scripting are properly separated rather than dumped in one crate. The pak file system for assets and content is a smart design: content creators don't need to touch Rust, just define objects in pak format. The scripting layer (Python-based event/dialogue scripts) gives modders a real escape hatch without exposing the full game engine. Localization is handled via Fluent (.ftl files) from the start, with English and Japanese both present — not an afterthought.
Last pushed April 2023 — development appears stalled and the README still describes it as 'very early.' The save file and pak binary formats are explicitly unstable before 1.0, meaning any mod or save you make now will likely break. Allies, factions, economy, and the main quest are all listed as planned but not implemented — the core gameplay loop is thin. The SDL2 dependency means non-trivial build setup on Windows (no bundled libs), and the map editor uses GTK via Glade, so you're managing two separate native GUI toolkits.