Hi.
I was wondering about this. For those of you who don't know, "rogue-like" games are a kind of game that feature randomly-generated levels and other content, are a kind of RPG, are turn-based, feature "permanent death" (no save games, or saves only work as indefinite game pauses and not reversion steps), and usually have simple graphics, sometimes even just "text-based graphics" (using symbols like "#" for walls). Now, I was wondering: how would one go about making the "rendering" system for such a game, so as to be able to support both text-based graphics and also being abstracted right so as to relatively easily drop in a render system to render tile-based graphics? Note that these two may use both hugely different low-level libraries and APIs (e.g. terminal output for text mode, SDL or similar for tile mode), and also the data that need rendering are different (you render text characters in text mode, sprites in tile mode).
What would you suggest? I was using C++ to write the program. It also needs the ability to put up a "dialog box" (perhaps drawn in with text characters, or with simple graphics in graphical mode) that can have options/lists, e.g. the stuff you're carrying in your pack, magic spells, etc. .