Should Noxico go graphical? If so, in what way?

• 25 of 43 responses say that it should be kept as it is now. That is, Unicode text in truecolor on a nonstandard console size. With 58% of the votes, this is the clearly winning opinion. Still, I’d like to get back to you all on that later.
• Three say that it should be 16-color ASCII like it was way back when I started.
• Eight say it should be graphical with low-detail sprites, and seven say it should be highly detailed.

Audio?

• 29 responses agree that Roguelikes shouldn’t need music. What I’d neglected to say originally (because it’d been a thing since forever) was that not installing Music.mix, hiding the FMOD DLL, and/or setting the volume to zero completely disables the music anyway if you don’t want it. Still, at 67% this opinion wins and I have to do nothing.
• Six of you think dynamic music is a good idea, despite having all of the same problems the other options have.
• On sound effects, 27 of responses, 63%, think sound doesn’t need to be in either. 11, 26%, think minor MegaZeux-style sounds would be good. If I forego music, maybe getting sound effects without FMOD would be a nice challenge on the side…

Sex systems

• 38 responses, 88%, think the new sex system should be continued on. That’s great, thanks guys.

Now, the interesting part: world map generation.

Noxico used to generate a complete world map and place towns and dungeon entrances on it. This took a fair amount of time and involved a lot of useless wandering through the wilderness to get from town A to town B. So I removed all that and added Expectations, where each town and surroundings would be generated on demand and you get from A to B through a travel screen that simply listed all known locations. If you pick a location that doesn’t exist yet, it’s expected to be visited at some time, and generated according to those expectations.

• 20 of 43 responses, 47%, say that time and file size aren’t an issue.
• 16, 37%, say Travel Mode is sufficient.
• Five agree with the 20, but with the request to speed up the initial generation.

So I pulled an old copy of the game from source control and reimplemented the old world generator, adjusted to match all these interesting changes since then. For example, there are fewer biomes and instead of a grid, boards now connect as graphs.

And then there’s this guy, who is willing to help make it better and hopefully faster.

So that’s it for the survey. Thank you for your opinions. I’ll get back to you all about that graphics thing later.