// the find
tmewett/BrogueCE
Brogue: Community Edition - a community-lead fork of the much-loved minimalist roguelike game
BrogueCE is the community-maintained fork of Brian Walker's Brogue, a minimalist ASCII/tile roguelike where you descend 26 floors to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor. It's for players and developers who want a clean, carefully balanced roguelike without feature bloat, and for C hackers who want a readable game codebase to learn from or fork.
The codebase is plain C with SDL2 — no engine, no framework, minimal dependencies, easy to build and port (Windows, Mac, Linux, OS/2, web-platform stub all exist). The seed catalog regression tests are a smart approach to catching balance-breaking changes without full playthroughs. Variant support (BulletBrogue, RapidBrogue) is handled via separate Globals files rather than scattered ifdefs, which keeps the core logic clean. CI builds and tests on every PR, which is more discipline than most C game projects bother with.
The core game logic is split across massive files (Globals.c/h, Rogue.h) with heavy global state — reading Combat.c or Monsters.c without context is rough. No unit tests on game logic itself; the regression suite only compares seed catalogs, so behavioral changes that don't alter procedural generation are invisible to CI. Documentation for contributors is thin beyond the wiki, and the wiki is fan-maintained with CE drift warnings. The 'benevolent dictator' governance note in the README signals that design decisions can stall on one person's availability.