There are just a ton of advantages to ASCII. I have major problems knowing what's going on with Crawl's tiles. I love me some clear and concise graphics, I feel dense tiles are NOT always superior. Join us next time on Roguelike Radio for a discussion of one of the giants of the genre - Nethack!īeen waiting awhile for this. The iconicism and neutrality of the symbol, letting you imagine whatever hero you like The Symbol in the New York Museum of Modern Art The easy availability of excellent tilesets (such as the monochrome Oryx Roguelike set) making it harder for players to accept ASCII, especially when tiles can have functional advantages like showing weapon held The learning curve with ASCII games, both for new players and people switching between major games The difficulty in getting new players to accept ASCII The chaos of ANSI / Unicode, and the danger of too much noise from extra characters Fonts! Why is there no Comic Sans roguelike?! Darren's recommendation: DroidSansMono Deciding on a restricted colour palette ( ColorSchemeDesigner is a handy tool) Making a clear interface (not always possible with just ASCII, such as no healthbars) Disagreement over whether Brogue is beautiful or ugly The danger of ASCII making it too easy to add new content, thus resulting in junk-filled games (though it can be great if you want a junk-filled game) Simple ASCII tiles have no decoration, no confusion over what are game elements ASCII supporting procedural environments - many #s don't look so bad, but adding tiles requires more detailed decoration The purity of ASCII in game design, and the artistic statement of using ASCII in the representation of the game's elements and mechanics The benefits of console games, such as ssh and accessibility to the blind, but the restrictions of trying to play them on modern systems (especially Windows) Using Necklace of the Eye to improve the visuals of many ASCII games Emulating the console in libtcod or the T-Engine or other graphical systems Conventions across games, such as & meaning different things in Nethack and ADOM

Deciding what scheme you use at the start of game creation can be important. Thinking through character sets, symbol/letter reuse, colour categorisation, rare colours, etc. How the Roman alphabet is something we grow up with and can recognise easily - Chinese or other symbols roguelikes aren't so easily parsed Quickly parsing what's going on across the screen with an ASCII interface

Developer freedom and ease of game design without graphics ASCII as a retro aesthetic, much like pixel art How it used to be viewed as a requirement to be a roguelike, or considered a roguelike element

Dwarf fortress tileset ironhand