[Omnirizon]

well, the sphere should be entirely functional as the unit image. however, its existence doesn't rule out the possibility of sprites in the future; in that sense it is a placeholder. at any rate, nothing about the way it is implemented makes it a necessity; it is literally about 15 lines of code. but as people have said and i know from my own (failed) attempts, making sprites is really freaking hard.

also, i want the images to reflect the size of the units. simple circles do that well enough. I guess any sprite could do that too; it isn't anything to transform the scale of an image after all.

since this is a roguelike, there's always more focus on the mechanics than the graphics. that's what it's all about after all... just think about 95% of big name titles, they have tons of lens flare but no innovative game systems that add mechanics without cluttering up the interface. it takes a small Asian nation to make even simple graphics for modern games, and after that's done no one takes time to flesh out good systems (or the game systems are too intimately tied to the graphics and there's really no option to even develop them...). People demand all surface and no depth, and that's what they get. Reviewers like Yahtzee and his Zero Punctuation make a career out of that fact.