I mean that is is a story, as well as a game, and I realise it's hard to deliver something that does both without compromising your goals for one or the other.

However, you can adjust the difficulty of games to suit the person playing, that's a solved problem. There are all kinds of ways to do that.

I don't know if I can continue this argument. I go "this game is too hard", you go "pfft, too hard for you, maybe.", I go, "yes, that's what I meant." There's not really more to it than that.

It's a messy issue because it isn't just a story game, of course. But yeah. There is certainly some significant group of people who would potentially enjoy the game - and still can, of course - but who will never finish it, and that kind of sucks.

I think it is a major design flaw, to make a story game that people can't finish. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that cave story is too hard a game for most of the people I'd want to recommend it to - it's too hard for me, anyway - and I'm a fan of cave story.

I once heard of a racing sim called Road Rage Rampage that was so broken it ravaged the lives of all those who played it. Would that count?

Tilesets make for nice screenshots, but I don't use them because you lose some of the information conveyed in ASCII. A jet door in ascii shows as black, a chalk one as white. In tiles they're all the same. This carries over to stones and ore found in the ground often, and to lose stone in your fortress.

I've messed with making dwarfort graphics, and that's not normal, the stone colour thing. I'm guessing the character set you were using had too much grey, which would dampen your colours a bit.


http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/images/0/00/Df_tock10_1.PNG

On a clean white character set, the recolouring should work fine.

The main issue with dwarf fortress graphics is that most of the stuff in the game is drawn from one image, the character set. Only creatures can get custom tiles.

Problem is, lots of the characters get used for more than one object. Here are some examples: (there's heaps of them, though)
 -the 'uncut gem' tile is also the 'turtle' tile
 -the 'fish' tile is also the 'meat' tile
 -all the refuse tiles are the same, so 'bone' and 'hunk of flesh' are the same tile
 -and, of course, 'goblin fortress' is the same as 'cupboard'
 -even the 'chairs' aren't chairs half the time.
 -there's a list of what tiles are used for what on the wiki at: http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Tilesets

On top of this, text characters are used as graphics tiles: the 'pillars' at the end of polished walls are upper-case O's. So even the letterforms neet to be designed to suit with their other roles, there's not really a lot you can do to alter the font.

Now, if you're making a character set, you can work around all of these issues, by being vague in shaping things, or lots of artists just draw a chair or a fish anyway. But there's no easy way of telling what tradeoffs the artist decided to make when they were designing the thing, what's going to show up in the wrong place, short of trying it for a while ingame.

So get a good character set. What counts as good depends on your tastes, and what you're willing to put up with. (so mine is the best, obviously. )

The list of user character sets is here: http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/List_of_user_character_sets

The other main problem, in my opinion, is that most people prettying up the graphics tend to use 16*16 tiles, because that's what most creature tiles require. This size makes for the most readable creature sets, but everything else looks a bit off. The screenshots for 16*16 will usually crop out all the menus, and most of the character-set graphics - they'll focus on walls and doors and furniture - because monospace text doesn't really work at that size, and using square tiles exacerbates the problem - The base tileset uses 10*12 pixel tiles, and the more you shift away from that, the more stuff looks off.

So there's no escaping the matrix, really, because the game is designed to work with it. That doesn't mean that you can't make the most of it, though, and a good character set will make it a nice-looking matrix - so try a bunch of character sets and figure out what suits you.

The most important thing you should do, and the easiest thing you can do, is to switch out the palette. This improves the graphics more than any other change you could make. Anything that softens the colours is good. Importantly, use a 'brown' that is actually a shade of brown. The best palette I ever used is the one in the screenshot, above, which is something close to this:

[BLACK_R:30]
[BLACK_G:20]
[BLACK_B:10]
[BLUE_R:10]
[BLUE_G:60]
[BLUE_B:100]
[GREEN_R:30]
[GREEN_G:100]
[GREEN_B:40]
[CYAN_R:20]
[CYAN_G:70]
[CYAN_B:70]
[RED_R:110]
[RED_G:40]
[RED_B:20]
[MAGENTA_R:80]
[MAGENTA_G:30]
[MAGENTA_B:100]
[BROWN_R:80]
[BROWN_G:50]
[BROWN_B:30]
[LGRAY_R:85]
[LGRAY_G:100]
[LGRAY_B:70]
[DGRAY_R:70]
[DGRAY_G:70]
[DGRAY_B:50]
[LBLUE_R:40]
[LBLUE_G:110]
[LBLUE_B:240]
[LGREEN_R:110]
[LGREEN_G:170]
[LGREEN_B:50]
[LCYAN_R:40]
[LCYAN_G:130]
[LCYAN_B:140]
[LRED_R:220]
[LRED_G:60]
[LRED_B:50]
[LMAGENTA_R:125]
[LMAGENTA_G:40]
[LMAGENTA_B:130]
[YELLOW_R:250]
[YELLOW_G:180]
[YELLOW_B:10]
[WHITE_R:220]
[WHITE_G:220]
[WHITE_B:220]

But if anyone else has a cool palette, I want to see it.

I do not believe that, as tocky put it, "religion is harmful to society". Religion is not harmful to society. People are harmful to society.

I said organised religion is harmful to society. I draw a distinction there, not wholly unlike the one you're drawing between religion and people. That is, I don't care at all what people base their values on. People should be allowed to live however they want to live, so long as that's legal and practical. I don't like faith-based institutions that sway public opinion and legislature. I'm claiming that those are harmful, because you can't argue with reason against people who argue with faith. Those people are playing a whole different game.

(I'm a shut-in, I'm insulated from pretty much everybody.)

I'm guessing that what you're describing is true because belief in astrology doesn't, on the surface, have the same weight as does the belief that the US government is hiding it's involvement in an event which caused the deaths of a couple thousand US citizens. That's the kind of stuff that people get edgy about, whereas astrology seems kind of benigh for the most part.

Okay, I don't think that anyone who believes in those theories is crazy - I think it's a crazy thing to believe, that the evidence itself isn't there. Lots of otherwise sane people believe in crazy stuff, and I'm really not bringing their sanity into question. I'm kind of insulated from people who carry those beliefs, but I didn't say what I said before to offend anyone.

I don't subscribe to the 9/11 conspiracy theories, I think that they are all kinds of crazy nonsense - but this movie really gets to me, because I strongly believe that organised religion is harmful to society, and the part of this movie that concerns religion describes my outlook and beliefs pretty closely; it makes the arguments and points that I'd make, and it makes them probably better than I would. But the rest of the film is at odds with the things I would think are true, and it makes me feel like the sort of stuff I'm passionate about legitimises irrational belief - which sucks, because that's the same stuff I was against in the first place.

It's super nice, but to look at it, I'm not really clear on whether the pink stuff or the blue stuff is walkable surface. Is the blue stuff in the foreground?

That was my reaction, too. I saw "Re: Pixel's RPG Project..." and was like, what? Pixel's doing an RPG? Sweet. And now sadness.

Death has three lives? Can death die in this game?

Don't worry too much about what names other people are using - I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one looking forward to playing as many morbidly obese games as possible.

Canadian Submarine Lord

The Secret Weapon of the Whale Heroes

Sexy Magic Spies

Ultraviolent Nuclear Dance Party

Ninja Animal Takedown

Musical Tricycle Maxx

Wonderous Puppy Collection

Christian Godzilla Mayhem

The Castle of the Army Returns

Quite a lot like Dizzy, yeah. More emphasis on chaining stuff in the right order to solve puzzles, and puzzles where you need to be careful about not losing ideas when you pick up new ones.

A game where every character has an ideas stack that can contain only, say, three ideas at a time. A character can learn new stuff, but that'll knock old stuff off the other end of the stack.

An 'idea' might be a technique, or it could be data, like a password or something. Puzzles'd involve stuff like tricking npcs into learning things to manipulate their behavior, or getting to a place without forgetting what you're supposed to do when you get there.