Crypt of Sokoban (2025)

a McRogueFace Demo @ 7DRL 2025

• Push Rocks
• Hold Down Buttons
• Go Through Doors
• Avoid or Destroy Creatures
• Find The Loot!

-- TBD: Demo trailer embed --

McRogueFace Engine

I'm the developer of McRogueFace Engine ( https://github.com/jmccardle/McRogueFace ) and the best reward you can give me is a github star.

This game engine is for my sons, my students, and my inner child. I started by auditing Dave Churchill's COMP4300 course and snowballed into embedding Python. The core principles of McRogueFace are:

• Zip up the McRogueFace folder with your scripts and assets, and anyone else can run your game.
• Every game is it's own minimal development environment: edit scripts/game.py and you are now a game developer.
• Frames are renderable completely in C++: if there are no events or callbacks in Python, then the interpreter won't be used at all.
• The engine draws rectangles (frames), text (captions), images (sprites and entities) and grids (2D arrays). Keyboard and mouse input call your Python code; the rest is up to you.

McRogueFace is pre-alpha, but this jam game was made with only minor C++ changes to fix critical bugs.

Sources Disclosure

This submission builds on my own code which was open source as of April, 2024.

Many thanks to everyone's favorite Kenney for elevating my game from programmer art. I am a humble code janitor and if Crypt of Sokoban is beautiful, it's due to Kenney's art.

Crypt of Sokoban (2024) was my 2024 entry to 7DRL. I spent over half of the 168-hour period fixing segfault-like issues and submitted incomplete. That submission consisted of little more than a rock-pushing function test, but I was far from done with the concept. I assert that Crypt of Sokoban was substantially transformed by the >1000 lines of new Python code that provide procedural generation, tileset coordination, the menu system, new and improved entity behaviors, and multi-level gameplay.

I streamed almost 13 hours of development: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLocvuO0AgFX4uay3Dx6Z_sykkhnAseid9

I estimate the streamed portion is about 40% of the work I did on the game. Over 168 hours, there's still sleep, and chores, and family - I don't think I made it to 40 hours of development time. Though if you count time thinking about it, I'm probably a bit over that mark.

updates

Fixed a breaking distribution bug on Windows. I can't figure out how rpath works for Windows, some computers seem willing to look in scripts/ for the Python files, others expect them to be in the same folder as mcrogueface.exe. It's an engine bug. So I just put the python files in both directories for now