The original rogue used graphics. This was back in the era of terminals and home computers and graphics could be quite limited. So there’s a tradition of using text. However if you do a google image search for rogue game like I did here, you can see that while many of them are text there are a couple that are graphics.

So the question is do you use graphics or text?

Text has the advantage that its just there. All you have to do is choose the appropriate character.

Plus if you use Unicode (always a bit of a pain in C but doable) then you have access to hundreds of thousands of different characters. Like this one:

👾. Which is actually these

👾

👾

More information about this one from here.

Graphics on the other hand can be a lot more colourful but you have to get them drawn, or acquire them from somewhere like kenney.nl. So not an easy one to decide. If I had the resources I’d use graphics, but I’ll keep to the tradition of using Text.

A tip. When you have a question like “What characters are used in rogue” just try it. There is so much information on the web that there’s a good chance that someone will have done it. I’m finding this more and more and sure enough, I found this on Reddit. How would you have ever found that out before the web existed?