Planned Release Date: 2027

About This Game

Swaggerfall is a first-person open world fantasy RPG that plays in the terminal. The graphics are ascii based and limited to what the command line offers (luckily this includes background colors for text glyphs).

Despite the retro look and procedural generation à la Daggerfall, the game draws a lot of inspiration from modern games like Skyrim (UX) and Expedition 33 (turn based combat with quick time events). I also want to mention SanctuaryRPG: Black Edition as an excellent ASCII RPG, which has planted the seed for this style in my head, over 10 years ago.

You only need a handful of keys to control the game. The E key alone has dozens of meanings based on the current context. TAB brings up an action menu that lets you enter all screens the game has to offer, and also lists their keybinds (if you're more the piano type).

Every action grants xp: Sprinting, Jumping, Climbing, Mining, Smelting, Cooking... even Eating. Fighting enemies will not only grant xp in the skills you use, but will also teach you more about the enemy race, which makes combat easier and opens up more interactions (e.g. if you fought enough of an enemy type, you can tell them to leave you alone).

Become a parcour master. The game has modern features like coyote time to make sure you never fall from a building prematurely when you meant to jump. Becoming more proficient at jumping, you get more and more ledge grab tolerance. So even if your jump comes in two pixels short from a roof, you'll grab onto it and continue your run.

Be the source of rumors. As you act in the world, rumors spread through the world at a fixed speed. "Did you hear about the stranger who slayed an army of minotaurs? Some say it was just a group of catgirls."

Explore the infinite world. The world is infinite, created on the fly by mathematical formulas. The story takes places within a 20x20 km area, but you can go out much further if you want to.

Written in Rust & Ratatui. Ratatui is an amazing terminal library that lets me create sleek UIs in high level code that gets translated and compiled into various backends, including Windows/Linux terminals and a web export.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

The game engine is written with substantial AI assistance.

Some dialogues and quest texts are AI generated, and are successively replaced by human-written dialogue. Every piece of flavor text has a label that states the author (human or ai).

The 3D character models are currently generated with AI, and then transformed through a custom pipeline to work with the text-based graphics and CPU rendering. It is possible to replace them with manually crafted models.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

Some of the character models wear skimpy clothing, like short skirts or corsets. There is a flirting mechanic (with consent) and family friendly descriptions of hookups.