Cellar Door Games has released the source code for one of indie gaming’s most beloved titles, Rogue Legacy. In the “pursuit of sharing knowledge,” anybody can access the code and learn from it, whether they’re an aspiring or experienced developer or just a fan of the game that wants to know how it ticks. From Dead Cells to Slay The Spire, Hades and FTL: Faster Than Light, some of the greatest games of the last 15 years are roguelikes, and this is a vital opportunity to discover how they work under the hood.
Rogue Legacy’s source code has been made available to anyone thanks to the game’s developer, working alongside Ethan Lee, a Linux porter and FNA dev. Lee will support the project in the long term, as he did with a similar project for the iconic puzzle platformer VVVVVV.
Rogue Legacy was initially released more than a decade ago, in 2013. We fondly remember the game as one of the indie titles from that golden age of smaller games, when the likes of Limbo, Braid, Super Meat Boy, and Fez seemed destined to take over the gaming world. Alongside its sequel, Rogue Legacy 2, we still consider it one of the best roguelikes you can play today. And players agree – of the 15,422 player reviews posted for Rogue Legacy, a huge 92% are positive.
The most ingenious mechanic in the game is its characters. Each one is a descendant of the same family line. With every death, you pick a new family member to play as, all of whom have different classes, abilities, and weaknesses.
This code isn’t free for users in the same way you might think of a game with a license being made available at no cost. Instead, Rogue Legacy’s source code minus all assets is what you can access from the GitHub repository for free. If you want those assets and to work within the code using them, you’ll need to own a copy of the game.
That might sound a little confusing. However, making the source code for any game available for free with all of its assets would allow anyone to download that entire game for free and play it. All developers deserve to be paid for their work, so requiring a full game license solves the issue of Cellar Door Games effectively giving its game away at no cost. This transparency should also, hopefully, make it less likely that someone will take the game’s code and publish their own listing for it on Steam.
Now that Rogue Legacy’s code is freely available for anyone to access so they can see how it all works it will undoubtedly be a fantastic learning tool for anyone getting into game development. You can play the game, see the mechanics and systems working before your eyes, and then analyze the code to understand exactly how all of those processes work.
If you’re a big roguelike fan, you might also want to try the best Metroidvania games available now, or maybe the best indie games ever made.
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