WagonCrawl

WagonCrawl is an ASCII wagon-journey roguelite about surviving a dangerous procedural world.

Guide a wagon across hostile terrain, manage a struggling party, ration dwindling supplies, and decide which roads, settlements, ruins, and encounters are worth the risk. Every mile costs something. Every stop might help, hurt, or change the world around you.

Current Demo Features

• Explore a procedural ASCII overworld of roads, rivers, settlements, ruins, dungeons, and landmarks.
• Manage food, water, morale, wagon condition, cargo, gold, time, and weather.
• Lead a party of distinct characters with classes, health, inventory, and conditions.
• Camp on the road and explore sites through branching interactions.
• Make choices involving costs, rewards, skill rolls, risks, and lasting consequences.
• Encounter roaming NPCs, hostile creatures, and boss monsters directly on the map.
• Play definition-driven travel events with multiple outcomes and follow-up branches.
• Watch settlements develop through wealth, crime, order, fear, trade, monster pressure, and local activity.
• Influence settlements through travelers, guards, merchants, monsters, and other world actors.
• Inspect faction, wealth, crime, order, fear, trade, monster pressure, actor presence, and conflict overlays.
• Examine NPCs and monsters for faction, origin, description, mission, encounter role, and remaining lifetime.
• Watch the ASCII map react with discovery effects, spawns, hit flashes, shock rings, tracers, collapses, kills, and drifting smoke.
• Travel through dynamic weather and changing day/night lighting.
• Save and load multiple runs, continue from the title screen, and review completed run history.
• Customize audio, narration, controls, accessibility, weather, image presentation, and other settings.
• Expand the activity log for a closer look at recent events and outcomes.

Controls

• WASD or arrow keys: Move
• C: Camp when available
• `: Enter or leave map inspection mode
• WASD in inspection mode: Pan the map
• 1–0 and - in inspection mode: Select information overlays
• F in inspection mode: Cycle map layers
• O: Open options
• Site and event choices use the keys shown on screen
• Mouse support can be enabled in Options

Optional Local AI

WagonCrawl runs without any AI tools.

Optional local narration, text-to-speech, and generated image presentation can be enabled when companion tools are configured. The current development setup has been tested with Llama 3.2 3B and Stable Diffusion.

Text-to-speech and closed captions are included as accessibility and presentation features.

Demo Notes

WagonCrawl is an active work in progress centered on overworld travel, survival, settlement simulation, and interaction systems. Balance, content density, presentation, and parts of the interface are still evolving.

— Roll4d4