For a long time now I've been mulling something over. There are many contemporary games that have a curses-style interface, but lots either use purpose-made tiles or a traditional EASCII character set. This seems a bit strange to me considering that Unicode specifies over 140,000 characters to work with and support for it is now widespread. For a solo dev or a tiny team, lots of time could be saved on visuals by using a free font with extensive Unicode coverage for graphics and the game could still look very interesting—I would think. But I didn't have a proof of concept, until it occurred to me that DF would make a rich and convenient test bed.
This is a sort of reimagining of the default tileset. It draws from a variety of places, including Meirotic hieroglyphs, the Apple II's MouseText, and musical and alchemical symbols. I've tried to keep the rough look of the characters close enough to their old-school IBM equivalents as to be recognizable to those accustomed to the default tiles, but fresh enough to feel like a new set of clothes for the game. Many of the tiles I ended up modifying somewhat from their representations in the font, sometimes rather a lot, but I always tried to hold onto an iconographic quality when doing so. I've made an effort to ensure that each tile works well (at least to me) in all its different uses; for instance, the right-facing ballista arrowhead looks somewhat different from the left-facing one so it can also be a good manta ray (aside from providing simple variety).
Samples:
The Latin alphanumeric characters are from
Recursive Mono Semibold and everything else at least started with
Noto Sans. Both are released under the
SIL Open Font License. As for this tileset, I'm releasing it under the
Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license. Here's the
SVG file, if you want to do your own thing with it. It has
Inkscape-specific annotations, so you'll get the best support if you use that program.
Enjoy!!
Author
Topic: Silverypuzzle — a curses "Unicode remix" (Read 11119 times)