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[quietlyconfident]

Hello: I enjoy playing the game & reading the boards, have paid to support development and will do so in the future, thanks to all involved.

Like many other players, I would be interested in getting DF updates faster.  I read about how Bay12 turned down a big licensing deal to maintain control, that is the right move.  However, I wonder if there is another solution that would be win-win for everyone involved: Bay12 makes some more money and retains control, players get more dwarf fortress faster - crowdfunding.

Here are two ways that it might work:

General / Dev Based

• A crowdfunding page is setup (kickstarter / indiegogo / etc.) with set of specific goals.  The goals will be some multiple of the yearly salary for a competent developer in Bay12's neighborhood, plus some extra for overhead (taxes, insurance, etc), and a little extra on top of that for some bay12 profit.  Just to make up a number, lets call the goals multiples of $100,000.  This number could be accurate or way off, no knowledge of the economics is assumed.
• Fans / Players / etc can donate to the crowdfunding goals.  No money is taken until the goal is reached.  However, when it does, Bay12 gets all the cash at once, and could then hire a developer with a one year contract to speed things up.
• With another dev working full-time on the project, things would probably move a lot quicker, and everyone wins!
• The improvement here is two fold.  With an "I'll chip in if everyone else does too" system like this, more people might be willing to pay more, because it will seem more official, and everyone will feel like they're on equal footing.  Also, even if the level of funding were a little bit higher now, it is uncertain month-to-month.  If it came in big globs, then more planning-for-the-future could be done (e.g. the sort of planning necessary to hire an additional developer).
• Maybe even, the first "goal" (which could sort of repeat every year) would be to pay existing salaries (e.g. the creators).

Project / Feature Based

• Like the General program described above, but each crowdfunding "goal" would be a feature.
• Thus, people would pay to support specific features, where the features are pre-vetted and approved by Bay12.  With this pre-approval, things Bay12 doesn't want (e.g. 3d graphics) would never make it to the feature page.
• However, features that Bay12 DOES want in the game, people can pay to support them and also get them to come out faster.  For example, modders might pay for specific modding interfaces (e.g. a Python API to the main window display).  Or, people who love Adventure Mode might pay for additional features in that section.
• Each feature would come with a price tag and a delivery date, e.g. 2/3/4/5 months from reaching the funding goal.
• No guarantees, but good estimates all 'round.
• These projects/features could then be either developed in-house by Bay12, or subcontracted to a select, pre-vetted, known & trusted group of contract developers.  This would provide the same sort of speed-up benefit as the general / dev based system, but with less overhead.

[Crinkles]

Toady works on whatever feature has currently caught his fancy--that's why things go into such loving detail, and how he is able to sustain the development process. If he wanted to pay other people to develop the game for him, I'm sure he would've proposed that by now, it's not like there's a shortage of people who would be willing to pay if shorter development time could be guaranteed.

[Ribs]

It's been suggested before and Toady spoke against it, more or less. To put it in simple terms: the developers are confortable with the way things are going right now, and think their current income is sufficient. More than that, they are very careful about what they're doing and try to avoid the sort of things that you would think that would make for a speedier, better game development like hiring other people.

Nevermind crowdfunding, even if you donated them one million dollars they would probably stick to what they're doing right now. Not that you shouldn't donate - they do it fulltime and need the money to survive, and they are glad that you're showing your appreciation. But it's just that commiting to deadlines and such promisses do not go well with the spirit that DF development has shown so far.

[quietlyconfident]

Toady works on whatever feature has currently caught his fancy--that's why things go into such loving detail, and how he is able to sustain the development process. If he wanted to pay other people to develop the game for him, I'm sure he would've proposed that by now, it's not like there's a shortage of people who would be willing to pay if shorter development time could be guaranteed.

Thanks for the response!  I'm glad to hear that there is no shortage of people who would be willing to pay more, it means that there is at least the possibility of increasing the pace of development, which I think many players want!

If I may respectfully push back on an assumption embedded in your reply:

• As to the particular features / level of detail, and Toady's control of the development process, I'm totally on board and not proposing any changes.  Current creators should maintain complete creative control, e.g. absolute dictators for life.
• However, there is no connection between those things and the particular person who types the code into the computer.  At present, with fewer programmers, the creators design feature X, then spend a week coding feature X, dealing with compiler errors, memory leaks, end-of-array access issues, & so on.
• Imagine if Toady could design feature X, have a conversation with a programmer on precisely how he wants it to work, and then go on to designing / working on feature Y, . . . 
• In other words, with more programmers, the creators could spend more time doing what they are clearly and uniquely amazing at - designing and directing the progress of a super cool game; and less time doing what is a fungible and commoditized skill that lots of people are also good at - coding.

Separately, I'm less willing to read the tea leaves on the creators' intentions.  Perhaps they didn't think of it precisely like this.  Or perhaps they did think of it precisely like this six months ago, were not interested then, and discarded the idea; but now they might be interested.  Perhaps they were OK with the pace in April when people paid $5597, but are less so in August when people paid $2964.  Perhaps Toady would really like to get a new computer / car / house and so is more open to alternative funding arrangements.

People are people and they change their minds about things.

[quietlyconfident]

It's been suggested before and Toady spoke against it, more or less. To put it in simple terms: the developers are confortable with the way things are going right now, and think their current income is sufficient. More than that, they are very careful about what they're doing and try to avoid the sort of things that you would think that would make for a speedier, better game development like hiring other people.

Nevermind crowdfunding, even if you donated them one million dollars they would probably stick to what they're doing right now. Not that you shouldn't donate - they do it fulltime and need the money to survive, and they are glad that you're showing your appreciation. But it's just that commiting to deadlines and such promisses do not go well with the spirit that DF development has shown so far.

Thanks also for your response.  I searched the forums for discussions of crowdfunding and couldn't find any in-depth discussions of it or proposed plans. 

Even if everything you said is or was a correct assessment of the creators' feelings at some point in the past; that doesn't mean they currently think that way, or will at any point in the future.  These are not immutable truths that we need to decipher from stone tablets - these guys could get up out of bed tomorrow and decide "Yesterday I really enjoyed the part of my day that I spent thinking about how nobles should react when you put them in a cage; and I got sort of bored when I had to write a thread safe array iterator method.  I'd rather just do the fun stuff from now on. . ."  If that day comes, I'd rather that the community had a plan, so that we could compete with the inevitable offer from a game development studio.

Likewise, the creators time and attention span are not inexhaustible resources.  Sometimes you think coding is fun for a long time, and then you realize that it hasn't been fun for a while and you just can't stand working on a project anymore because you have worked yourself into a corner and you hate the project now, or would have to spend 4 months re-coding a bit that you wrote before and it just wouldn't be fun.  Maybe the creators might be up for an organizational change that would keep them going for another few years, but feel like they couldn't switch funding models because everyone on the message boards would cite a 5 year old post or a one-liner they tossed off in a newspaper interview against them and call them hypocrites.  Even if they don't take us up on it, why not propose some ideas for them to think over?

In other words, I think that this idea deserves a discussion on its own merits, absent some sort of unambiguous message from the creators along the lines of: "We don't ever want to have more than the current dev team working on it, we are never open to other funding arrangements, more money would not motivate us at all, maintaining complete creative and directorial control is insufficient: we must personally write every line of code, please never bring it up again, and get off my lawn."

[Ribs]

Well, here's the thing...

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/195148/dwarf_fortress_in_2013.php?page=2

There you have the developers (all two of them) talking about it, just a few months ago. They've been pretty consistent about their opinions over the years. They're not all that motivated by the kind of efficiency you seem to be suggesting, and seem to be happy with the way things are going. But if things do go south, apparently, they are willing to consider the crowdfunding path. Or for any other reason, sure, it's their business, it just seems unlikely to me seeing how Toady and Threetoe talk about their own game and what they want and not want to do with it over the years.

I just don't see much of a point talking about it. Even if they do decide to take a different stance on development and funding their project in the near future (which seems unlikely to me), it seems even more unlikely that we'll have any say in it. 

[quietlyconfident]

Well, here's the thing...

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/195148/dwarf_fortress_in_2013.php?page=2

There you have the developers (all two of them) talking about it, just a few months ago. They've been pretty consistent about their opinions over the years. They're not all that motivated by the kind of efficiency you seem to be suggesting, and seem to be happy with the way things are going. But if things do go south, apparently, they are willing to consider the crowdfunding path. Or for any other reason, sure, it's their business, it just seems unlikely to me seeing how Toady and Threetoe talk about their own game and what they want and not want to do with it over the years.

I just don't see much of a point talking about it. Even if they do decide to take a different stance on development and funding their project in the near future (which seems unlikely to me), it seems even more unlikely that we'll have any say in it.

Thanks for your response and the link to the article. 

I believe that you think you know how the developers think and are motivated.  Respectfully, I am not convinced.  I don't see anything in the cited article that supports any of the assertions you made about the developers motivations.  Nowhere in there do the developers say that they would be against crowdfunding, efficiency, against increasing development, or against bringing more resources to bear on their project.  They do mention crowd-funding, in the context of saying that if support for DF died out they could start a new project and trade on their reputations to do a Kickstarter, but they wouldn't need to look for jobs.

However, they do say:

"I don't know enough about it, and it's the kind of thing that, from the years of inertia, we don't have these business instincts that kick in and say, 'Yes, we need to get on that.' So it's sort of the thing where, if enough people bug us because they want Steam to track their user hours or whatever... if our current fan base wants it on there, it'd be more of the kind of thing we'd be interested in, rather than increasing our audience."

And in fact, I think that this right here is (at least one) reason to talk about this.  If we (the current fan base) want something (e.g. MORE dwarf fortress, faster development, etc.) and we organize it and get people on board and bug the developers about it, then perhaps it would be more the kind of thing they are interested in.  And this was my motivation in starting this discussion - to see whether the fans / etc. would want it. 

If the fans want it, maybe we can put it together and say "Hey Bay12 , we're ready to pull the trigger on this indiegogo or kickstarter or whatever, we think we can put $200-300k in your pockets and you don't give anything away, or make any legal commitments, or lose one iota of control over the project, or get mixed up with some publisher's branding, etc - we just want you to bring on another dev or two so that the game comes along faster, are you guys up for it?" 

Maybe that will get them interested.

[hermes]

I think you need to read that or other articles again.  Toady has said repeatedly he doesn't want to get involved in managing other people etc.  You might not agree with that, but this isn't some snap decision, DF has been in development for a looong time and Toady and Threetoe have had a long time to think about this.

Making concessions to fans for features is completely different from changing a development practice that has worked for years.

Take a look at the cataclysm DDA kickstarter... Different circumstances sure, but management and reliability are huge issues that constantly arise in these kinds on endeavours, and have done so before in DF.  Would you really want Toady to stop programming and start puppeteering programmers?  You need to more fully consider the real world implications of what you're talking about.

[Ribs]

I think you need to read that or other articles again.  Toady has said repeatedly he doesn't want to get involved in managing other people etc.  You might not agree with that, but this isn't some snap decision, DF has been in development for a looong time and Toady and Threetoe have had a long time to think about this.

Making concessions to fans for features is completely different from changing a development practice that has worked for years.

Take a look at the cataclysm DDA kickstarter... Different circumstances sure, but management and reliability are huge issues that constantly arise in these kinds on endeavours, and have done so before in DF.  Would you really want Toady to stop programming and start puppeteering programmers?  You need to more fully consider the real world implications of what you're talking about.

That's kind of what I mean. It's not like I think I have this deep insight into the developers' mind, I'm just stating what they have conveyed to people consistently throughout the years. I tried to dig up the interview where Toady said that he, and I'm paraphrasing here, "wouldn't know what to do if someone were to give him a big sum of money. Probably hide it under a big rock or something". I couldn't find it, but you get the idea. The type of development you're suggesting is simply not the kind of development the guy does, and you'll have to wait until he changes his mind or try to convince him otherwise. You're wasting your ideas with this approach... and you'll probably get similar responses from most veteran posters.

I suggest that you try to ask the same question (try to simplify it a bit) on the "Future of the Fortress" thread
(http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=100851.0) You'll get a lot of feedback from both him and the fans.

Or email him directly at toadyone@bay12games.com. He actually answers, but it could take a while.

[quietlyconfident]

I think you need to read that or other articles again.  Toady has said repeatedly he doesn't want to get involved in managing other people etc.  You might not agree with that, but this isn't some snap decision, DF has been in development for a looong time and Toady and Threetoe have had a long time to think about this.

Thanks for responding.

I believe that you think this is true, but without some evidence I am not convinced.  I googled around a bit, and searched the past 2 years worth of Toady's posts for discussions of managing people, and found nothing other than people who aren't Toady describing what he wants or doesn't want in managing the project. The one thing I did find was Toady saying in DF Talk #10 that a particular development task (adding glyphs I think) is difficult when you don't have an employee that you can employ for several years, or that will stick with the project.  One of the things that makes people stick with projects is having some guaranteed funding to pay them.  If the funding numbers that are posted are accurate (and I have no reason to believe that they aren't) then at least one reason he isn't bringing on paid programming help is that the revenue won't permit it.

But, even if you are right, none of this stuff is really interesting or relevant to the topic I was trying to discuss with the post: a) wouldn't it be cool if development happened faster; b) here are two ways that development could happen faster; c) What are people's thoughts on those mechanisms?

So far (before the 2nd half of your post) all the responses have basically been that it is sacrilegious to suggest something new and/or that Toady hasn't previously blessed, which just doesn't make for a very interesting discussion.  In the 2nd half of your post though, you actually gave some thoughts on the mechanism (e.g. that it would be bad), which I appreciate and will respond to in kind!

Making concessions to fans for features is completely different from changing a development practice that has worked for years.

Cool.  So, I think that it is necessary to take into account that the project is always growing, and ask whether the support structure is also growing.  A development methodology that works for years while a project is in its early stages is not necessarily one that will work later when the codebase is 2x or 3x or 4x the size it used to be.  Though I understand your point that there is something to be said for not changing what is working; there is certainly always room to examine what is being done and ask if improvements can be made?  I don't think anyone is claiming that this is the best of all possible development processes.

Take a look at the cataclysm DDA kickstarter... Different circumstances sure, but management and reliability are huge issues that constantly arise in these kinds on endeavours, and have done so before in DF.  Would you really want Toady to stop programming and start puppeteering programmers?  You need to more fully consider the real world implications of what you're talking about.

To respond to your points here in reverse order: I agree, and likewise I believe that there are some important real world considerations that the community might want to think about in terms of possibly stepping up support.  One of them is, for those who would like to see the game get more polished (fewer bugs, better interface, etc.) how quickly is that likely to happen?  Maybe this isn't important for some players who don't mind bugs and don't need menus with consistent UI grammar.  And, to be clear, I like the game as is.  But that is a different thing from saying it can't be improved. 

Another is, these guys are getting written up in the New York Times, and flying to Iceland, and getting feted and courted by big studios and so on.  Making $3k - $5k per month is going to get old after a while.  Perhaps the community could just think a little bit about some ways to incentivize them to stick with DF. 

Perhaps without a serious discussion and proposal re: crowdfunding, Bay12 think that the current level of support is the best that the community can do.  But what if a better deal comes along?  I know I know, they said they wouldn't.  But there is a lot of money at stake, and these guys are regular people, and it is crazy to rule out the possibility.  If the community could get its act together and put together some sort of serious crowd-funding / community funding proposal, maybe they wouldn't need to go outside the community for support.

And (in my humble opinion), Yes, I definitely would want Toady to stop programming (as much) . . . IF, as a result, he spent more time game-designing, and the things he designs made their way into released versions of the game quicker.  Maybe that means, Toady designs something and then roughs out a feature, but leaves it to other programmers to work the bugs out, do all the menus, etc.  Maybe that means, Toady does all the first pass programming and the new guy just fixes bugs.  There are a lot of ways to integrate new members into a team. 

Basically, I think it is a win for the players-of-the-game anytime hours that Toady is currently spending doing non-unique work (e.g. fixing bugs, transforming designs into code, etc.) get turned into hours that Toady spends doing something that is unique and special coming from him (e.g. designing a new cool combat thing, or whatever - something creative).

As to management and so on, sure, those are issues in any organization.  I don't think it is reasonable though to think that the answer to management issues is to not manage people.  Certainly it is an option, and it appears to have gotten them to where they are now.  But once again, is it unreasonable to think about improvements?  Is the current state sustainable?

[quietlyconfident]

. . .
The type of development you're suggesting is simply not the kind of development the guy does, and you'll have to wait until he changes his mind or try to convince him otherwise. You're wasting your ideas with this approach... and you'll probably get similar responses from most veteran posters.

I suggest that you try to ask the same question (try to simplify it a bit) on the "Future of the Fortress" thread
(http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=100851.0) You'll get a lot of feedback from both him and the fans.

Or email him directly at toadyone@bay12games.com. He actually answers, but it could take a while.

Thanks again for responding. 

So I know people are trying to be helpful, but I think there is just some fundamental confusion about what I was trying to discuss.  I'll take the blame for that: since several people seem to be confused it was probably my post that did the confusing.

I'm not trying to figure out what sort of development Toady does now, or what he has previously said he wants to do.  I agree that if I wanted that information, I could ask the veteran posters and/or read the FAQ and figure it out.

What I was trying to discuss is more along the lines of:

• Do people want development to go faster?
• Here are some potential mechanisms, what do you think about them?  Improvements?  Want to suggest something totally different?
• (later) Could we get people behind it?

To get the answers to these sorts of questions, I don't think that veteran posters have any special access to truth more than anyone else.

I agree with you that the things I was suggesting are not the things that are being done now, and that for that to change, Toady would have to change his mind or be convinced to do so.  My thought is, if we (the community of all the people who play the game, not necessarily the community of people on this forum, of which I am obviously a very very new poster, and not ) could get behind some sort of crowdfunding effort, get organized, and make it big, maybe we could get started on changing his mind.

[Mopsy]

Not-so-quietly confident.

[quietlyconfident]

Not-so-quietly confident.

 

[quietlyconfident]

I would just like to point out that you are assuming that the code could be worked on by others. If I recall correctly, when Toady released the source code to Liberal Crime Squad, it was a single file. As in, the entire game was coded as a single file, with minimal comments to boot. Now obviously the code for Dwarf Fortress proper won't be a single file in and of itself, but... when a person develops a game where the code is to strictly be looked at by himself, a lot of things end up really ambiguous. If Toady opened up DF to others to help, he would spend the first several months trying to explain it, or letting others figure it out. The net result is a significant stall on progress.

Thanks for your response.

This is a totally valid point.  It is certainly possible that the code as currently organized would require an investment in organization / maintenance before forward progress would be made by a larger team.  It is also possible (more likely, certain) that, in adding a person to the team, that person would require a few weeks or even a couple of months of getting up to speed before more "forward progress" can be made.

The question is, once that investment was made, how much faster would development progress?  One way to think about it is, what is the payoff timeline for the investment in the new guy. 

Just making something up here, lets say you could combine the "code maintenance" and the "training" by having the new guy learn about the code by reorganizing it.  Creative input not required, just making the code do the same thing but be organized differently.  Sometimes this is referred to as refactoring.  So lets say the new guy and Toady are programmers of equal strength.  The new guy spends two months refactoring some portion of the code, and Toady (again, hypothetically) spends 100% of his time tutoring him on the code.  Once that is completed, that code is more efficiently organized, and the new guy knows all about it, so all of the sudden development can go 1.9x as fast as before.  Perhaps not 2x as fast, because he'll have to ask Toady a bunch of questions about how he wants this or that feature to work once the bugs are fixed.  If things worked out like this, the break even point would be 4 months.  In other words, for months 1-4, less forward progress has been made than if the new guy had never shown up. But in month 5, everything is caught up and now development proceeds twice as fast as before.

Or maybe even (this is purely hypothetical, as I don't have any knowledge of the relative strengths of the dev team purely as programmers as distinguished from game designers) this new guy is not a creative genius at all and couldn't dream up a good tantrum spiral to save his life, but he is a total rock star programmer, and he can code the loops / recursive functions / array dot product methods / classes with multiple inheritance / etc. faster than Toady can.  So maybe there is a chance that, once the new guy gets up to speed, development goes 3x or 4x as fast as now, because Toady can stay in "game design" mode all of the time, his brain spewing out elf towns and cliff climbing rules and whatnot, and the new guy stays in programming mode all the time.

So of course, the numbers I made up here are, well, made up.  But they are probably in the right order of magnitude.  At any rate, if this is a long term project, it pays to think about long term strategies.

[quietlyconfident]

Now, as for crowdfunding... The issue with things such as Kickstarter is that there is a promise that this will be completed. Dwarf Fortress has no release date, or even deadlines. Hell, there's also the chance that Toady will outright stop developing it at one point (though I couldn't imagine why), which would be bad enough to those who play it now. If it was after a Kickstarter, it would only be worse. Also, you have to realize that the only reason Toady does this for a living is because he is able to. The original prospect here wasn't to sit around and code day-in, day-out and live off of donations.

Thanks again for your update.

So generally, I'm not necessarily advocating Kickstarter specifically, or any other crowdfunding platform.  I mean, DF is already currently crowdfunded on its own "platform."  But even so, Kickstarter / Indiegogo / etc. are possibilities to make it better.  I think they are good possibilities... If there had been a really cool looking crowdfunding page up and running when DF was in the NY Times, they might have raised $100k or more just from random people reading the website who like MOMA.

But also I must respectfully, gently, disagree with your premise re: Kickstarter.  It is true that Kickstarter/Indiegogo want a "deliverable."  But that deliverable can just be a new version of the game.  No deadline is required.  And, there is generally no specific legal obligation to produce anything incurred with Kickstarter.  So a crowdfunding project could be as simple as, "Raise $300k to build version XYZ of Dwarf Fortress.  The plan is to hire a new developer, fix bugs, release it when it is ready."  Then, the next year, another Kickstarter could be run to build version XYZ+1.

As to your other points, I'm not totally sure I understand.  I think you're saying something like, people would be disappointed if Toady stopped developing, and so if more people were in the community, the total sum of disappointment would be greater?  Well, yeah, I think that is right, as far as it goes.  But I think the argument proves too much.  By that logic, people shouldn't watch new shows, because if they cancel the shows, they'll be disappointed.  It is sort of a death spiral.

However, it is true that, at least two reasons that Toady (or any other ordinary human being) would quit working on DF is that a) he got so bogged down in non-creative programming minutiae and bug fixing that it wasn't fun anymore, and b) he wasn't making enough money at it anymore.  So if we (the community) can possibly alleviate those potential problems, and get something we want in return (more dwarf fortress!), lets explore it?