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Tag Archives: Accessibility

Adjustable Difficulty

Roguelikes are notoriously difficult. In this way they’re really no different from games of old, across numerous genres, which many players were far from guaranteed of completing. It’s only today that roguelikes have become more uniquely associated with difficulty because the market around them has changed so much! There will always be an additional layer […]

Posted in Design | Also tagged , , | 10 Responses

Tutorials and Help: Easing Players into the Game

With a generally lower barrier to add content compared to other games, roguelikes have a tendency to be packed with features and mechanics, and while that doesn’t characterize every roguelike out there (notably 7DRLs and other quick hobby projects), there is an important need to help new players overcome the initial barriers to learning a […]

Posted in Design | Also tagged , , , | 7 Responses

An Alternative UI?

Normally when I publish a new article, the focus is on explaining the results of some new feature/mechanic/design. Today’s post is a little different because it’s about an important feature that has not yet been implemented, nor have I come to a decision on how best to handle it. I’m using this post as a […]

Posted in GUI | Also tagged , , , , | 16 Responses

Readable Text Fonts for Roguelikes

There’s a reason “terminal” fonts are a standard for traditional roguelikes even today. Certainly tradition plays a part, but even more importantly, they’re designed to be highly readable. Last year while still in pre-alpha Cogmind received a huge influx of font bitmaps to support different resolutions, in some cases with multiple variants at a given […]

Posted in Dev Series: Fonts | Also tagged , , | 8 Responses

Fonts in Roguelikes

The first aspect of a traditional roguelike viewers tend to notice is the color palette, but when it comes down to actually playing a game which requires interpreting large amounts of text, color takes a backseat to the importance of the font. Characters/glyphs form not only words and sentences, they even represent the map and […]

Posted in Design, Dev Series: Fonts | Also tagged , , , , | 8 Responses