After seeing this awesome ASCII art: https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/717221-you-shall-not-pass I decided to add hand written maps to Dungeon Mercenary, i.e. maps that you can write yourself in a text editor; using a simple text format. It wasn’t too much work on the map loading side, as it was easier than automatically generating a map; but it was a bit of work on the UI side, because I had tied the size of UI elements (the text panel at the top, the status panel at the bottom) to the size of the map (without realizing it). So if you were writing a 8x16map, all the UI was getting really small.

Enough chitchat, here’s what I mean. You write this map in favorite your text editor:

You put it in the correct folder of Dungeon Mercenary, and get this:

This example doesn’t show it, but you can place monsters in the text map (not items though). I’ll soon publish the complete format, hoping the community can provide me a theme map (a cathedral ?) that I’ll include in Dungeon Mercenary default dungeon.