First and foremost, get very comfortable with the Curses module. That is my favorite text module and gives you colors, a grid of characters to work with rather than a line-by-line output mechanism, and a few other nice treats. Time::HiRes will help with building smooth animations. Term::ReadKey will let you use keyboard input without waiting for them to hit return and requiring interactive prompts. It's been too long since a great text-based RPG has come out - good luck!