Im back!

After some consideration, i decided to overhaul the game UI completely. So, this is going to be a technical release.

The old version had two major shortcomings:

It pretended to be a console application, which for a roguelike is very old school and cool, but also wastes a lot of screen space, and is hard to parse, especially in the menus. And for a game that is supposed to have complex mechanics, good menus are needed (Or the game can just be really good, like DF).

The new UI implementation can do fancy, post 90s things, like half line breaks, sprite graphics and tutorial overlays. I also did a short foray into doing a full sprite tileset, and then learned that i do not have a lot of patience for making pixel art. In the end, i went with doing some helper icons and sprites for the player and some important entities. I'll stick with using Unicode for most of the game world and plain text for most of the menus, also to stay a little closer to the original console game style.

Major Changes

UI Overhaul

Besides usability issues, the old UI was also a performance hog and, as a piece of software, wonky all around. The new version uses libGDX and runs around 10 to 20 times faster by clock cycles, which is very nice for players on laptop or potato computers.