Hehe, welcome! I'm currently mostly picking out stats that reflect newer features, extremes, or things that that more players have expressed an interest in of late, so it changes over time, though I do plan to continue doing so--no reason to stop now!
And thanks for the praise, glad to have more people who can appreciate the work that's gone into everything
Not sure if you've read about it before, but I wrote a good bit about the
tileset design and how it was meant to be ASCII-ish.
For the record I like DCSS tiles, too, and also rather dislike ToME's tiles
(though this isn't an uncommon opinion...)
(a page out of The Book of Brogue, I reckon)
People do tend to draw a connection there, but to be honest I really dislike Brogue's use of color. It makes the map very difficult to parse (for me, at least), whereas I prefer a higher black-to-color ratio, and static environments. I developed the particle engine and effects with
X@COM in 2011, back before I'd heard of Brogue, so never had any influences from there (almost all my influences come from outside the genre, although my early project did start out in libtcod, which Brogue also uses, and that library tends to emphasize free use of color since it supports all 24 bits). I later tried to play it to see what everyone raves about, but never got further than a few floors across a couple runs because the color really messes with my eyes xD
