Well I really love the color and profession stuff, it makes it easy to see it on my named dwarves without peeking in everyone's description.
I like the colors and professions too. It's fairly easy to do them if you use a base body for all of the dwarves. You just need to create a shading overlay for the clothing and then apply it in right colours for all of them. I did this with my goblins and in short time you can have all your dwarves/goblins differentiated by profession colours. This of course makes most of the dwarves look fairly similar but just the clothing colours and other profession related gear makes already wonders. Also Some gear needs a bit adjusting to the base body positions. On the other hand I kinda like that all of them look fairly uniform.
Because I made those goblins earlier I have a lot of useful material already done (not all was used in goblins) that can be applied to the dwarves and it's fairly fast to make them now. I did yesterday 25 professions, with colours and gear, in few hours. You can also double that amount because I made both sexes, although I'm not 100% happy with the female base sprite yet.
Yeah he is not short enough. Otherwise he's cool.
They look quite tall when compared to human sprites for example but size in Stonesense is quite abstract anyways when you compared dwarves to cats and elephants, they are all the same size. Also I'm not overly fond of overstunted dwarves that look like Cartman with beard. I might consider making it a tiny bit (pixel or two) shorter but that also eats those couple of pixel of height that could be used for additional details.
I kinda like the looks of dwarves in the picture below. I have to try clothing that makes their legs look less pants like and thus shorter. (I even made the hats they have!)
And you don't HAVE to make all the color stuff and the professions, that's just another option
Yes you (and by you I mean me) have to
although, the color stuff is pretty easy to do. take a look at gobbos.xml to get an idea how to do it. (It's the one with the fewest actual sprites)
I tried taking look at the colour_Dwarves.xml earlier and actually tried with no success for some reason. I'll have to try it again during weekend as it would be great to get those colours automatically. Although I'm not sure whether some colours or any will work with the sprites I have now but it's not that much work to actually separate those skin and hair layers when you have good base models. Then it's just a bit of cut&paste and recoloring to apply them.
I might need to ask some specifics about it from you when I've given some testing on it. Especially on how the shading is done and how the layers work etc.