Shaka, when the walls fell

Temba, his arms wide.

tl;dr

I messed around again with tyle, my Python-CLI roguelike-like. Now it has godlike destruction and creation.

The beast at Tanagra

Before now, you could install tyle¹, type tyle into your terminal to generate a tile-grid with a player, surrounded by floor (.) and wall (#) tiles, as well as ‘fog of war’ (?) beyond a certain distance.

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Move (WASD+Enter): 

What next? I wanted to start thinking about enemies, but I did this with r.oguelike already and wanted to try something different first.

I’m old enough to remember when Minecraft was first cool. What is Minecraft? Break block make block.

We can mimic this in two dimensions pretty easily.

Jinza, when the truth was uncovered

In tyle, the underlying map is a TileGrid-class object, which is just a list of lists of Tile-class objects. These tiles currently take one of two values: they’re traversable floor (.) or untraversable wall (#).

What if you could just… remove the obstruction?

Well now you can. For example:

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Facing: right
Move [wasd], [b]reak, [p]lace, [q]uit: 

We’re facing right and the adjacent tile is a wall. Inputting b will break the wall.

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Facing: right
Move [wasd], [b]reak, [p]lace, [q]uit: 

What’s actually happening is that the tile adjacent to the player’s direction is being replaced with a floor tile in the TileGrid.

To help the player, I’ve added to the UI a reminder of which way the player is facing, decided by the last direction of travel.

In tile.py, we can interpret an input of b to mean ‘update the Tile in the specified location’:

if move == "b":
    row_change, col_change = direction_changes[self.direction]
    target_row = self.player.row + row_change
    target_col = self.player.col + col_change
    
    if not (
        0 <= target_row < self.n_rows and 0 <= target_col < self.n_cols
    ):
        return True

    target_tile = self.tiles[target_row][target_col]
    
    if target_tile.symbol == self.tileset["wall"]:
        self.tiles[target_row][target_col] = Tile(
            self.tileset["floor"], True
        )
    
    return True

In short: if the player submits b, then replace the tile in the direction they’re facing with a floor tile. This gives the illusion that the wall has been destroyed.

Sokath, his eyes uncovered

Naturally, we can do this in reverse. Instead of breaking a wall block, we can build one.

Pressing p will place a wall tile in the direction we’re facing (right in this example).

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Facing: right
Move [wasd], [b]reak, [p]lace, [q]uit: 

This requires a small change to the code, allowing for a wall Tile to be added to the TileGrid rather than removed:

if move in ["b", "p"]:
    row_change, col_change = direction_changes[self.direction]
    target_row = self.player.row + row_change
    target_col = self.player.col + col_change
    
    if not (
        0 <= target_row < self.n_rows and 0 <= target_col < self.n_cols
    ):
        return True

    target_tile = self.tiles[target_row][target_col]
    
    if move == "b":
        if target_tile.symbol == self.tileset["wall"]:
            self.tiles[target_row][target_col] = Tile(
                self.tileset["floor"], True
            )
    
    if move == "p":
        if target_tile.symbol == self.tileset["floor"]:
            self.tiles[target_row][target_col] = Tile(
                self.tileset["wall"], False
            )
    
    return True

Jerna, before the dawn

At the moment, destruction and creation are infinite (within the confines of the tilegrid). You can break and build as many wall blocks as you like. Such omnipotence.

In future I want to add this to an inventory system. Break one wall? Now you can make one wall. No more, no less.

Perfectly balanced.

Environment

Session info

Last rendered:2026-03-14 23:04:44 GMT

[project]
name = "2026-03-08-tyle-fog"
version = "0.1.0"
requires-python = ">=3.12"
dependencies = []

Footnotes

1. You could install the development version like uv tool install git+https://github.com/matt-dray/tyle.git. But don’t install things from people you don’t trust.