# Godot roguelike templates: an example, a tutorial, and the part neither one covers

Dungeon generation, field of view and turn order look like the hard part of a roguelike, and a starter project will hand you all three. The hard part is the bestiary and the item list, and there is no starter for that. Flockbay ships a Survivors-like template of its own, free under New from template. Flockbay is free, AI included: free hosted AI every day, or your own Claude, ChatGPT, agent or API key. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, on the official Godot engine.

Source: https://flockbay.com/templates/godot-roguelike-template/ · Updated 2026-10-18

## The Survivors-like template in Flockbay

Weapons fire on their own: dodge, level up and draft upgrades through endless waves, with a boss every two minutes. It is a 2D Godot 4 project in GDScript, open source under the MIT licence, and free like the rest of Flockbay.

Automatic weapons as data resources: homing missiles, bouncing shots, orbiting saws and chain lightning.

An upgrade draft of three cards at every level-up, from a pool of upgrades that stack and unlock each other.

Endless waves that speed up as you level, three enemy types, knockback, damage numbers and camera shake.

A boss that returns every two minutes and scales with you, and two playable characters with their own starting weapons.

## Start a game from Survivors-like

In the Flockbay app, press New from template on Home, pick Survivors-like and press Create. On a first run, answer 2D and then Template, and Continue makes the game. Flockbay downloads the template into a new game folder and opens it in the Godot editor as an ordinary Godot 4 project you own. Tell Flockbay what to change first: it writes a short brief from the template, asks before it builds, and plays each change before you do.

What people usually ask for first: a frost aura that slows nearby enemies; a third character with piercing arrows; a best survival time on the main menu.

## Two projects with two different offers

The Godot Roguelike Example by statico is a finished small game. MIT licensed, 2D and tile based, seen from above. Its description covers procedural dungeon levels, field of view and fog of war, turn processing, monsters with their own behaviour, items and equipment, an inventory screen, combat and a HUD, plus a debug tool for previewing map generation before you commit to it.

The Godot 4 Roguelike Tutorial by Bozar is a different kind of thing. Also MIT and also 2D, it is written as a teaching sequence: dungeon prefabs to build levels from, shadowcasting for the field of view, Dijkstra pathfinding for how the monsters come at you, permanent death, a visible seed, a sidebar of state, and help and debug screens.

The distinction is worth holding on to. An example project shows you a result. A tutorial shows you an order of operations, and the order is often the thing you were actually missing. If you want to end up [understanding your own roguelike](/roguelike-game-maker/), the tutorial is more valuable even though it looks like less.

## Generation is the part that looks hard and is not

Carving rooms and joining them with corridors is a solved problem with well-known recipes, and both projects have it working. What is not solved by having it working is whether the results are worth walking through. A generator that produces valid dungeons and a generator that produces interesting ones are separated by a long stretch of tuning: room sizes, how much dead end you tolerate, whether the player can see far enough ahead to make a choice, how loot and threat are spread across a floor.

The genuinely fiddly pieces are the ones people underestimate. Field of view that is symmetrical and does not flicker, fog of war that remembers what you saw, turn processing where everything acts in a defined order and nothing acts twice. Those are unglamorous, they take longer than expected, and inheriting them working is real value.

Two small things matter more than they sound. A visible seed lets you reproduce the run somebody complained about. [A map preview tool](/blog/ai-procedural-generation-for-games/) lets you look at two hundred dungeons in a minute instead of playing into them one at a time. Both of those exist in these projects, and both will save you days.

## The genre is its content

A roguelike is not its dungeon generator. It is the interactions between the things inside the dungeon. The reason players start a fresh run after dying is that they suspect a different combination might work, and that suspicion only exists if there are enough things to combine. Ten items and six monsters is a demonstration. The depth arrives somewhere past that, and it arrives through combinations rather than through count.

What a starter gives you is [the machinery for making monsters and items](/blog/ai-enemy-generator/), not monsters and items. Deciding that this thing is fast and fragile and hunts in threes, that this weapon is worse in a corridor, that this potion is a trap unless you have already found the other one, is design, and it is most of the work. It is also the enjoyable part, which is easy to forget while you are staring at generation parameters.

Balance here is measured in runs played. Not a session of playing: dozens of runs, mostly losing, noticing which deaths felt fair. There is no shortcut and no starter project shortens it.

## Turn systems do not forgive modification

Every part of a roguelike is written against an assumption about the turn. One action per turn, everything moves after you do, one monster occupies one tile. Those assumptions are invisible right up to the moment you break one. Adding speed, so that a fast monster gets two moves, means the turn loop, the animations, the input handling and the monster behaviour all need to agree about something they previously did not have to think about.

That is the trade of starting from someone else's roguelike. You get [a working turn model](/blog/3-lessons-from-a-real-time-turn-based-game/), and you get their turn model. Changing it means reading enough of the project to know who depends on what, which in a turn-based game is nearly everything.

This is where the tutorial project earns itself. Code written to be read is code you can change. If you do not read GDScript at all, the honest position is that you have a playable roguelike and a locked design, and this is a genre where the design is the whole product.

## The other route

Flockbay approaches it from the other side. It is a desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux with Godot bundled inside. Rather than adopting a stranger's turn model, you describe the run you want, Flockbay asks questions one round at a time and writes a brief, and once you approve it, it writes the GDScript in your project: the generation rules, the turn order, the monsters and the items, all against your design instead of somebody else's. It plays its own runs first, headless or in a window, reading stdout and the debugger. Then you play the runs and say what is wrong, which is the same feedback loop as tuning a template, minus the reading.

Flockbay also ships the Survivors-like, the template at the top of this page, under New from template on Home, and a Godot project you have downloaded opens in it with Open Godot project. The two projects above are public repositories you clone yourself. They are a separate route to the same genre.

Building needs an internet connection, because the chat and asset generation come over the network. Playing the runs does not; the game runs locally on the copy of Godot inside the app. [Flockbay is free, AI included](/answers/what-does-flockbay-cost/): free hosted AI every day, or your Claude or ChatGPT plan, your own agent, or an API key. Flockbay builds from a library of ready-made objects, or with Godot's own shapes.

## Questions

### Is there an official Godot roguelike template?

Not one that ships with the engine. The Godot project maintains a set of demo projects covering other genres, and the roguelike starters people use are community ones. The two that come up most are the Godot Roguelike Example and the Godot 4 Roguelike Tutorial, both MIT licensed.

### Should I take the example project or the tutorial?

The example if you want something playable to modify today. The tutorial if you want to understand the turn loop and the field of view well enough to change them, since a tutorial repository is written to be read in order.

### How much of a roguelike does a starter actually cover?

Generation, field of view, fog of war, turn processing, basic combat and inventory. Not your monsters, your items, or the balance between them, which is where the replay value lives.

### Why is adding one new mechanic so disruptive?

Because everything in a turn-based game agrees on an unstated model of the turn. A monster that moves twice, or occupies two tiles, breaks assumptions in the input handling, the animation and the behaviour code at once. It is not a bug so much as a design that never expected the question.

### Can I open these roguelike projects in Flockbay?

Not from New from template: Flockbay ships its own Survivors-like template there, not these. They are open-source Godot projects you download yourself, and a downloaded Godot project opens in Flockbay with Open Godot project. Flockbay's own path is a brief first: it writes the generator and the systems against your design, and you play the runs.

Download Flockbay free: Flockbay is a free download for Windows, macOS and Linux. You design the run and it writes the code, so the turn model is yours from the start. https://flockbay.com/

Related: [Godot 2D game templates](/templates/godot-2d-game-template/), [Godot RPG templates](/templates/godot-rpg-template/), [Godot metroidvania templates](/templates/godot-metroidvania-template/), [Godot tower defense templates](/templates/godot-tower-defense-template/)