Also rule of thumb: Avoid using pure white or pure black for text. Even if you intend black on white or white on black, nudge them both toward gray just a bit.
That’s what I did anyways just so I don’t burn my eyes out, good to know that is an accepted practice.
tempted to make a whole entry with the Papyrus font…
“Hello, font police? There’s been a Papyrus threat.”
Absolutely, and I think the maze is where I gave up on my last playthrough. I agree, there’s a lot to like about the game (especially the music— I had it on CD and I’d often listen to it as a music CD), but I think I’d find the tedious bits less tedious if they were better meshed with actual story.
It’s been many years, but I still remember most of the path through that maze. Weird, the things that stick with you.
I used to put painfully bright colors on all my pages when I was younger, and everyone hated them. Then I discovered that I’m color blind.
So now I stick to black and white, or get someone else to approve my color palettes before I use them.
During (a long tangent from) the unit on fonts, I told my students this semester that any time they’re tempted to use Papyrus, they should try Hightower instead. It tends to fulfill the same aesthetic purpose while being much more beautiful and readable!
on fonts, fooling around Libreoffice for idea for feelies for my major WIP, I stumbled on two fonts whose looked exactly as the alphabetic equivalent of the “sharp angular script” and the “flowing, quenya-like script” described in the story, so i proudly show the signatures of my PC and two NPC:
3firme.pdf (15.6 KB)
no panic, please: these fonts will NOT repeat NOT be used in the actual story and feelies 
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
I agree with a lot of the hates mentioned so far, but 2 things I don’t like is added sound and pictures. Your interpretation of what you are presenting is nothing like my imagination and immersion. I can turn off the sound/music but I am at a loss as to how to cull the pictures. Save them for point and click stories.
I am at a loss as to how to cull the pictures.
Most adblock extensions are also able to block pictures, for UBlock there is an option to block pictures larger than X Kb, you can set that to 0 and all pictures are blocked.
One game I played had chapter opening pictures and a map, I liked that. Especially maps should be a standard in any media that has a fictional world.
That may work for playing online. I mostly play offline via Gargoyle.
Ask for a Gargoyle feature to hide images? Not displaying images shouldn’t be hard to implement.
Both hugor and qtads allow blocking the displaying of images.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
For visual novels, it is technically feasible but in most cases requires a conscious developer decision to execute cleanly. Now that I know there are people who’d probably prefer to play my game without the pictures, this is something I can add to the list of “tweaks that can accommodate multiple ways to play without causing too much hassle”.
For accessibility images should always have a description for screenreaders, but I understand that you don’t account for blind people in visual novels…
Gargoyle already supports the disabling of graphics via the graphics config option.
However, while testing, I discovered a bug in which the use of graphics windows causes a crash with graphics disabled. Attempting to use graphics inside of text buffer windows is fine. So whether a game works is hit or miss depending on its usage of graphics.
It’ll be fixed in the next release, or if that winds up being too far out, I’ll do a point release.
I like Hightower. It’s giving “document printed on a moveable type printing press”
Not including indications of progress. Some games tend to keep going with no indication when they will end. Even for games I’m enjoying I like to know where I am in it, and have good places to stop.
Somewhat related are inaccurate estimates of how long it takes to play the game. I’m not sure what the solution here is besides providing much more information about the game, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a simple metric.
I kinda wish itch.io had better options that just
Cause what’s a few hours? 2? or 12?
Same for the IFDB, it would be nice to be able to indicate how long it took you to complete the game.