If you can design the game without inventory management, I think you end up with a much more approachable game. It's not a fun mechanic and forces lots of complicated interactions that take the player out of what feels important to the game. Lots of roguelikes use inventory management as a key game mechanic forcing you to decide what is most important to you. I think your comment about inventory is under-emphasized. For all of the supposed benefits of ASCII it's rather strange how every other genre of games in the entire universe switched to using actual pictures of things the second the technology became available. I think there's a slightly separate question as to how you get non-roguelikers to even look at your game in the first place and I'll be buggered if I know the answer to that one, but I rather suspect that ASCII doesn't really help there. If you can get a player there they will probably be able to overcome whatever UI atrocity you're trying to inflict on them, but I think most of us devs (being totally used to it) underestimate how difficult that can be for new players. So, I think for roguelikes you need to get into a headspace that is wedged somewhere in-between-and slightly-off-to-one-side-of those required for 'normal' realtime and turn-based games. Certainly there are other genres which use turns, but usually in a very different way - the discrete time steps are much larger, for example - and so use game mechanics and a control paradigm which are actually pretty different. That being: the fact that roguelikes are turn-based, which is pretty much unique to the genre for single-player, single-character dungeon-crawler games. However I think that both (and indeed, grid movement in general) are really just symptoms of the major thing which I suspect throws off new roguelike players. Regarding 4-way vs 8-way: personally I much prefer the 'feel' of 4-way movement but I think that 8-way movement is one way (though not the only way) of adding greater tactical depth. *Not even this analogy, that's the beauty of it.First of all I'd like to thank Darren for unintentionally providing me with the mental image of Buckminster Fuller as the star of 80's sci-fi show Buck Fuller in the 25th Century, which made me spit coffee accross my desk. DF hack is handy: some of it's stuff is a bit cheat-like, other bits are just automating tedium: I'm particularly fond of the command to select a tile or some ore or another and designate the whole seam for mining. Contains a few tilesets, DF, DT, and some other tools like DF hack. Nothing makes sense*, the cat gets annoyed, you lose a lot, and everyone thinks you're insane.Īs to tilesets (and indeed, acquiring Dwarf Therapist), you want the Lazy Noob Pack. Playing without access to the wiki is akin to playing a normal game by shouting orders to your cat. Secondly, the wiki isn't your friend: the wiki is your only hope. Being able to see all your dorf's moods and assigned jobs at a glance is very handy: finding idle dwarves without it is a real pain. I'm just used to it now.įirstly, get Dwarf Therapist. I'll say outright: this is not because I am a Real Gamer. I'm one of the very few people I know of who plays DF with the default tileset: for a long while, I didn't even use Dwarf Therapist. If this is a case of 'Well, DF isn't for you' then I guess I lump it until they get the UI fixed or somebody makes a front-end for it.īut given the current state of the game, is there any way around the UI or a recommended graphic tile set to make it less a barrier to entry? I want to be able to access all the awesome complexity and cruel difficulty, but it's buried under a UI that's such a big turnoff, that it makes my lips curl back from my teeth in a monkey grimace.
/cdn2.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/35284858/26867.0.png "dwarf fortress newb pack graphics")
A decent graphical icon set would help too, because I hate the ASCII, but I could lump the ASCII if the UI wasn't so arcane. I just want to right click on stuff and get context menus. I have too much going on for a learning curve like that just to start playing the game.
#Dwarf fortress newb pack graphics how to#
Two hours later, and I still have no idea what I'm looking and or how to make stuff happen.īottom line, taking a week to learn the fuckawful UI isn't realistically going to happen. I just need to know what the hell I'm looking at, and how to make stuff happen. I don't need 3D graphics or any nonsense like that. The UI poisons my brain like a punji stick through the eye socket. I dig (har har) fantasy uber architecture.Īfter hearing about it, reading Boatmurdered twice, and looking at the fan community, I decided to give it a try. I love complicated sims filled with unexpected emergent behaviors.
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