AzureNights

A moddable terminal JRPG engine in Go — emoji overworld, turn-based combat, a Lineage-2-style class tree, a faction triangle, quests, and a living day/night world.

This is a portfolio project: the point is the engine and its architecture, and the game is the demo that exercises it. It's a moddable engine with a playable demo, not a content-rich game.

Goals — a pure, I/O-free domain (time and randomness injected); a strict inward dependency arrow; content as data (JSON + go:embed), so a new class, enemy, map, or quest is a data change validated at load, not new code; one engine behind multiple front ends; tests under -race with gofmt/vet gates and reproducible release builds. Non-goals — deep balanced gameplay and a graphical client. Combat and progression exist to drive the systems; the TUI is just one adapter.

Quickstart

go run ./cmd/rpg          # play
make test                 # full suite, race detector on
make balance              # headless balance report through the real engine
docker run --rm -it azurenights
go install github.com/uinjad/AzureNights2/cmd/rpg@latest

Controls: arrows/WASD to move, enter to act in battle, c for the character menu (advancement, gear, quests), ctrl+s to save, q to quit.

Architecture

Hexagonal (ports & adapters). The dependency arrow points inward: adapters depend on the app, the app on content and the domain, the domain on nothing but the standard library.

flowchart TD
    CMD["cmd/rpg · cmd/balance<br/>(composition roots)"]
    TUI["internal/tui<br/>Bubble Tea adapter"]
    STORAGE["internal/storage<br/>FileRepo adapter"]
    APP["internal/app<br/>use-cases + ports"]
    CONTENT["internal/content<br/>JSON + go:embed"]
    DOMAIN["internal/domain<br/>pure game logic, no I/O"]

    CMD --> TUI & STORAGE & APP & CONTENT
    TUI --> APP
    STORAGE --> APP
    APP --> CONTENT & DOMAIN
    CONTENT --> DOMAIN

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Design highlights worth a look:

• Deterministic by injection — the combat engine takes an RNG and the world clock takes a roll function; production passes rand, tests pass a stub and assert exact outcomes.
• One engine, two front ends — cmd/balance runs thousands of duels through the same combat.Battle the game uses and prints win-rate tables. An HTTP adapter could sit beside the TUI over the same ports without touching game logic.
• Validation at load — malformed content (a dangling skill, an unknown enemy, a portal to nowhere) fails at startup with a clear error, not mid-game.
• CQRS-lite view-models —