Bay 12 Games Forum

I really liked the article. The author really seemed to get Dwarf Fortress and his portrait of Tarn and Zach was neither fawning nor insulting but clear-eyed and humane. He certainly seems to have gotten to know them, and it's a nice insight into a Legendary game designer.

Should be simple enough, just lock two dwarfs people in the same room, drop in food and booze once a month, and watch them grind their social skills to legendary!

I will never think of power leveling or grinding in the same way again. Damn you!

From the Spoony One's review of Quest of the Avatar:

Quote from: ......... on May 28, 2011, 08:06:50 pm

had some time to play on friday

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

and etc

I love this stuff so much.  The weird conflation of Thing and ASCII-Symbol-for-Thing, of the scraps of illusionism and cut-up expressionism, is very "Through the Looking Glass"-ish.  Very unique!

I agree. I have seen less interesting stuff in museums.

Speaking of less interesting stuff, here is my latest thingamajig:



It will be on the cover of WatchDwarves, the upcoming graphic novel*.

*not really.

I'm no mega-projector but I do do some things to make my forts interesting. From a visual aethetics point of view I like to give the fort's rooms some kind of shape not entirely related to function: for instance, giving the entrance hall a big oval room at the end of it. It gives a sense of grandeur quite apart from the stark utilitarianism of a bunch of rectangular spaces for dwarves to do things in. Like this:



As time passed I found the rock surrounding the oval was a convenient area to put offices of nobles in. 1 tile would serve as a diagonal passage into a rectangular room, with the interior walls engraved without changing the appearance of the main room.

Another thing I like to do is put interesting shapes to use in some way. This screenshot depicts a magma death chamber flanked by two long hallways. It was originally intended to be just plain hallways zig-zagging, but then I realized I could do more:



To make them I took a screenshot and measured the proportions of the actual "statue" character from the game itself and designated an equivalent area to be mined out (e.g. a 3x2 pixel box is translated into a 12x8 tile area to be mined out in-game).

Large-scale goblin traps are of course particularly engrossing.

Further consideration for aesthetic structure building is to think of something that would look cool and just start building it. In the natural course of events something memorable will happen on or near it. I built this bridge over a very wide river/waterfall, complete with a "gatehouse" on one end of it, and it became the site of a terrible battle:



After the battle a couple of dwarves were surrounded by macegoblins on the side with the gatehouse and literally beaten for months.

Finally, as a somewhat non-visual aesthetic consideration, I like to plan my forts with a visit by an adventurer in mind. I like to set up interestingly shaped burial areas for all the dwarves, memorialize every dwarf and place the memorials next to their coffins, and pay special attention to documenting the fort's history in some way. Here's an example of this, post fort-destruction:



It's not visible in this image because it's a reclaim, but I also entombed dead goblins in the wall in the entrance area where the "mosaic" is (made of fireclay and orthoclase). The differently colored patched of wall mark where each space was carved out, a goblin's skeleton was dumped, and the space re-sealed. In front of each was a memorial to the goblin it contained. I find this memorialization of a fort's history to be the most meaningful exercise of all, and it certainly takes time and attention. As a part of this memorialization I also like to mint at least one set of coins every year when possible, as well as place statues in meaningful places depending on their subject.

How many people just randomly look around for an embark because its in a "cool" area and don't even care whats in the ground?

That's what I usually do. Usually I try to find a place that would be interesting for an adventurer to visit, then build with an interesting adventurer experience in mind. Some of my longest running forts don't even have iron.

so that a werecow would make the correct haunting moos.

A haunting moo floats out of the darkness around you!

I so want this to happen.

Well, with plenty of idle dwarves and the process done correctly, the next step for me in troubleshooting this particular task is checking all of my garbage dump zones. For various reasons the dwarves don't necessarily always seem to choose the closest dump zone to the item being dumped.

It would be interesting to see Yahtzee review it, since he's a game designer and DF is very interesting from that standpoint. Probably his written pieces would be better for that, though: a spiel about a 9 year old game in alpha would probably just be confusing to most of the people who watch his videos. He's written about his own game development before, so it would make sense for him to do it in an article.

"Hey this game wiped my hard drive/eats my save file, causes all my characters o stand and cry" "Oh, it's in alpha/beta". No, no, no, no, no. From what I hear, the man has made 30 million dollars on this thing. Tarn's never charged me for a thing, I don't mind calling dwarf fortress unfinished. Notch has made more than many of us will ever see in our entire lives- hiding behind an "oh it's beta" stops working when you're charging people for things that doesn't hold up well from a moral stand point.

It does when you know the state it's in when you buy it. Would you rather he bring development to a crawl, which is what making every release stable would require? The fact that lots of people have bought it entails no additional obligation on Notch's part: they all bought it under the exact same terms. That Notch is now rich and that Notch is charging for access to the beta are irrelevant.