Bay 12 Games Forum

Put me down for £30 (thats pounds)

My two pence.

From a very meta viewpoint, I would like to take a look at description of the Dwarf fortress:

Dwarf Fortress is a single-player fantasy game. You can control a dwarven outpost or an adventurer in a randomly generated, persistent world.

The key word for me in that description is game, Dwarf Fortress does not currently sell itself as a simulator (if you can have such a thing in a fantasy setting) but presents the product as a game, most games offer a target, a framework of rules in which to achieve them and allow you to pursue the target within as narrow or broad and range of functionality as the game designer allows.

I think innate within any game design is a final goal or at least a set of milestones, it can be in the form of points, or a happy ending screen or indeed a sense of "wholeness" such as you might get when you could continue building more in RollerCoaster Tycoon but you feel your park is complete.

The point I am trying to make is that games by their nature play better when they present goals, otherwise to my mind it’s a simulator or something else. For clarity I do also believe it’s possible for a game not to have an end whilst still offering goals (Elite anyone?)

To that end I do sincerely believe DF will "play" better once it has evolved to a point that the games designer has injected goals into the game with his knowledge of the product that the player does not have, this can be the making or breaking of a game and I fully believe Toady will get it spot on.

In the interim the only option the player has is to generate goals, but I think the slightly derogatory tone this thread has towards the first post is a worrying sign of non critical appraisal, we all want DF to be amazing as possible because in many ways it’s a work of art and should be appreciated by as many as possible, but that process requires listening with an open mind about new player feedback and not criticising simply because the view giving is different from the established playerbase.

So I was reading another post in which a chap says that he came back to DF recently and was suprised by the lack of challenge and after a little thought I realised the man made a good point, I also realised DF itself can be anything thing from mind bogglingy simple to teeth wrenchingly difficult but new and perhaps veteran users of the game have no real way of knowing which they are going to get before embarking.

Currently I tend to look at some factors such as spookeyness of an area, does it have tree's and so on, but that does not always turn out to be the deciding factor in making an easy or hard game, sometimes its just luck therefore my suggestion....

Why not include a rating system for each biome that shows at a glance how difficult an area might be, now I know the spirit of DF is very much one of exploration and chance so I would not ask the system to be very verbose, in its most simple form maybe just "hard / easy" indicator or perhaps a simple 5 star rating with 1 being a walkover and 5 being supermonkeyninja hard.

In no particular order:

Timed Assult: An option for siege of attack events to be triggered at time X, this is to help people who get bored in the end game to try and establish a fortress that can combat a known attack within a certain time period. I would very humbly suggest this would not be too complex to add code wise but would provide a much more robust gaming experience for veterens or people who like a challenge.

Ice: A way to melt it for water (if none exists yet)

Cots: For children to sleep in, ability to assign cots to child sleeping area (would help me design snatch proof nurseries)

Manure: Dropped from animals at random as a way to feed farm land.

My two pee's worth, when working on a popular NWN world, this was the very RNG that we began with, we wrote our own because this did indeed cause repeatable high / low runs.

I find the above post disturbing.

I just did.
And you should too.

Reading through Toady's development posts I would say he is in a tough place right now, a beer and some pizza is going to help with the 2AM grinds.

Dont make excuses for yourself, every little helps even if its "just" $10, send it over and sort out your karma.

We all gotta eat right?