漢字狩り (kanji-gari) — working title

A very small, very short roguelike inspired by Brogue, built for reading on an e-ink screen instead of a terminal.

The pitch

• No terminal glyphs. Every tile, monster, and item is drawn as a square kanji — never hiragana or katakana, since a single kana character has no real standalone meaning and would undercut the point — rendered from a real CJK font, not a fixed-width terminal cell. Glyphs are chosen with real meanings and, where reasonable, real JLPT levels (favoring N5/N4 for anything seen constantly, like terrain), so picking up genuine kanji recognition along the way is part of the fun.
• Monochrome, e-ink first. White background, black glyphs, grayscale/dithering only where it earns its keep (fog of war, damage state, etc). Built and tuned for a jailbroken Kindle, developed on a Linux desktop (NixOS) first.
• Touch/mouse only. No keyboard. Swipe (or click-drag) to move, click to interact or inspect depending on how close you are to the thing you clicked.
• Much shorter than Brogue. A run is: 3 jungle levels → a cave entrance → a random mix of underground dungeon and library levels (at most 5 of them) → one final level with a portal. Reaching the portal wins.
• A hidden score, revealed once. Unlike Brogue's visible gold count, this game never shows you a score during play. It's quietly tallying how many monsters you kill, how many you talk your way past by fleeing successfully, and how many items you find or use — and only shows you the total on the win/death screen.

Status

Planning stage. This repository currently contains design and architecture documents only — no game code yet. The plan below is written to be handed off to another LLM (referred to during planning as "Qwen") to implement, phase by phase, with a manual testing gate at the end of every phase.

Where to look

Doc	What's in it
docs/GAME_DESIGN.md	The game loop, controls, level flow, scoring, and the all-kanji glyph legend system (with a JLPT-level guideline). Read this first — it's the part that must not drift during implementation.
docs/ARCHITECTURE.md	Tech stack, crate layout, the shared tile-grid engine, the two renderer/input backends (desktop + Kindle), and the NixOS dev environment.
docs/ROADMAP.md	Phase-by-phase build plan from empty repo to a playable desktop MVP, then on to the Kindle port. Every phase ends with an explicit, human-run test gate.

Target platforms

1. Development / MVP: Linux desktop (NixOS), square window, mouse input standing in for touch.
2. Shipping target: jailbroken Kindle (e-ink), touchscreen input, screen scaled to 1264×1680 (the plan starts square and grows into this rectangle deliberately — see ARCHITECTURE.md).

Non-goals (for this MVP)

• No keyboard support, ever — this is a touch-first game.
• No color — grayscale/dithering only.
• No procedurally-infinite dungeon; runs are intentionally short (roughly a dozen levels, bounded).
• No real-money or persistent meta-progression systems.