Utterly Mad

I updated my post. Honestly, you'd likely take to it much quicker than I would.

The other engine I played with was TOME, but found it needlessly big for my projects.

If you do end up getting going with something, let me know. It would be nice to have someone to share code with and bounce ideas off of.

Feel free to completely use that code if you want to. It's super basic as presented, but I might dropbox the later version an assorted do-dads if I ever finish it. If you really want to start from scratch, start with the basic loop sections to open the console window, then the walls and dungeon generator, and go from there. That's how I did it at least.

As a note, you can implement non-mouse looking through the same way you do gun targeting (I don't remember if that's in that version and didn't look), and you can also make it look like Brogue (or was it Angband? I don't know, I played alot of RLs to get ideas for how to do things) rather than ASCII using the existing code by removing the wall and floor symbols and simply using colors.

You can also make a real-time game out of it by.... huh, I don't remember (like I say, it's been months. I left notes in there some place on how to do this I think), but I really didn't test that much beyond implementing speed mechanics much later than this version (I was on to 0.5something before giving up). So it will probably be a hilariously fast moving suicide spawn game unless you limit the FPS to like 10 or something.

I don't remember how to make a tileset work, but since this basically uses a sprite-esque system, it likely wouldn't be hard.