Re:What they don't tell you about being a game developer
by lukeschlather on Friday November 23, 2012 @11:11AM
(#4822638)
There's plenty of permissively-licensed tilesets out there. Dwarf Fortress really had some trouble because it was built on ASCII until a fan was kind enough to write a graphics library : https://github.com/Baughn/Dwarf-Fortress--libgraphics- . Writing an ASCII rendering engine was probably more work for a lesser product than going with a library to begin with would have been.
Also, Dwarf Fortress isn't done yet. It quite possibly ends with beautiful procedurally generated graphics (though I can't imagine that would happen with Tarn keeping it a solo operation.)
Re:What they don't tell you about being a game developer
by pindi on Friday November 23, 2012 @02:25PM
(#4823322)
Not quite: Dwarf Fortress has always used OpenGL (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=28841.0) to render tiles that just happen to be ASCII characters onto the screen. The fan effort was to port it to SDL, making it much more efficient.
Game studios that employ armies of developers usually have tons of artists and spend ridiculous amount of time on graphics and assets. That's why a massively complex game like dwarffortress are never created. So there's tons of niches for complex games with ASCII graphics. (Sorry, pixel arts also takes ton of time)
As everyone else already said, control your scope or otherwise you never finish the game. Dwarffortress got where it is today by simply not aiming for great 3D graphics.