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[Dacke]

Kittenz3 walks over to the table where Broccoli, Penis and Santa Claus are already sitting.

[agersant]

*with proper supervision

[Dacke]

Heh, yeah. But if you want Middle-earth style dwarf names you have to put pretty heavy restrictions on people. Even neutral names like "Dacke" or "Agersant" could be bad fits, so you'd probably have to rework them. But I guess it's doable, if you get creative ("Dágin" and "Agerhar"?).

[BleakProspects]

That's actually currently one of the rewards. Other rewards include naming companies and continents, and creating default company logos ... "within taste"

Speaking of which, last night I was making a random text generator, and using it to the effect of creating a company-making screen. Needless to say, it has some ... interesting results.

[Kurt]

Add "Human" and "Passage" to the nouns for the name. Or "Human" with "Dwarven". For reasons.

[mushbuh]

dirtburgh

[BleakProspects]

I made a dead simple in-game texture pack loader today:



Interestingly, I discovered our texture packs are still almost totally compatible with vanilla minecraft texture packs. Here's what it looks like with the default minecraft texture pack naively loaded in from the game (all I had to do was drag a .png into a folder and load it up in the game's interface). I was also pleased to discover by accident that our engine already natively supports transparent block textures.



The system I wrote actually generalizes to all the assets in the game, but I need to do some work to make an interface to customize them all. Ideally, players will be able to change any asset we use to their liking.

[BleakProspects]

A lovely new moon sprite (and a new way of drawing sky elements!)

[Kurt]

[jonbro]

this is looking so good. Good luck with the kickstarter when you get to it.

[BleakProspects]

Tiny island, deep hole:



Another cutoff mountain top:

[gimymblert]

Hey that cut off view is fantastic, I was wondering how to represent things into a volume, never occurred to me that just the blacker visual would more than enough, it look natural, we get it, it just works!

[Landshark RAWR]

do you think we could get a side cross-section view at some point?

[Kurt]

STOP POSTING SUCH NICE SCREENSHOTS

[Quarry]

Is this going to be the 3D casual DF clone everyone failed with?

[BleakProspects]

do you think we could get a side cross-section view at some point?

I tried this already, and it needs a little work to look good. The sprites are more or less drawn from a top-down view and look strange from the side. Also, the camera controls currently move around like a traditional RTS (Starcraft, C&C etc.) and will need to switch axes if you go to side view. Finally, rooms in fortresses are built by dragging rectangles on the floor. From a side view, this is difficult to do.

[BleakProspects]

Just had a long brainstorming session with our artist about gameplay and GUI ideas. Now pumped to start developing some better gameplay bits to make things a little more coherent. Here are some basic points:

The Balloon
The whole game runs on a clock of the balloon coming and going to and from your colony. Since there is travel time for the balloon to get to your distant land, you don't really control when corporate HQ sends balloons to and from your colony. What you *do* have control over is what goes on the balloon.

So, before the balloon comes, a timer will appear ("Next shipment coming in X minutes"). If you click on the timer, you will be brought to the "shipment screen." The shipment screen looks like this:

On the left are all the items in all of your stockpiles, and all of the Dwarves in your colony, arrayed into slots. Each slot can hold something like 32 of a resource, or one or two dwarves. When you build new stockpiles, you will get more resource slots. New bedrooms will give you more dwarf slots.

In the center is a small number of slots representing what's on the balloon.

On the right are all of the things the company is willing to send from HQ, again in slots.

When the balloon is "Arriving" for the next shipment, you drag items from Corporate HQ to the balloon, and your stockpiles are greyed out. You may only drag as much stuff as will fit in the balloon and which you can afford to purchase with your dollars. Conversely, when the balloon is "Departing", you drag stuff from your stockpiles into the balloon. This will give you an estimate for how much money you will make from the stuff you drag to the balloon.

When the balloon arrives, it will spit out all of the stuff you ordered, and you will lose the money you agreed to pay for the items with. A new notification will appear saying "The next shipment is DEPARTING in x minutes." If you click on this notification, you will be taken to the shipment screen again. When the timer runs out, dwarves will take the stuff out of your stockpiles and put them on the balloon. You will then get the money from selling your stuff and the balloon will leave.

So again:
1. Balloon is arriving in X minutes!
2. Drag stuff from HQ to the balloon.
3. Balloon arrives. Get stuff, lose money.
4. Balloon is departing in X minutes!
5. Drag stuff from stockpiles to the balloon.
6. Ballon Leaves. Get money, lose stuff.
7. Goto 1.

Pay Day
Every couple of days, a "pay day" will occur. Dwarves will take money from the treasury as their wage. If you run out of money, you can't pay Dwarves, and they will be less likely to work!

Business Cycles
Every now and then, a "Business Cycle" will begin. This does a couple of things. First, Corporate HQ will announce new demands: "By the next business cycle ship us X units of Y commodity".  Second, depending on how well you did with the previous demands, your stock will either rise or fall. If your stock falls too low, the company folds and you lose.

Stocks and Mergers
You will be competing with a bunch of other randomly generated companies. Their stocks will randomly rise and fall. If your stock becomes much greater than a competing company at the end of a business cycle, Corporate HQ may decide to perform a "merger" with the company. When your company merges with another, you will experience new kinds of demands the next business cycle, but will also be able to buy new things from HQ. Ultimately, you will become the only Dwarf Corp in the world!

Tabs and Controls
The main controls will consist of a series of tabs at the bottom right of the screen (sort of like the Sims or Dungeon Keeper). Each tab represents a category of "actions" or "orders". When you click on a tab, an array of icons appears under the tab representing the actions you can take. Clicking on an action brings you into that mode, and you can order the Dwarves using it. Example categories include "Exploit" which has things like mining, chopping wood, fishing and hunting, "Manage" which has things like Dwarven Resources (for examining dwarves and upgrading them), and "Build" (which has means of crafting mechanisms and building rooms).

[oyog]

Pay Day
Every couple of days, a "pay day" will occur.

[BleakProspects]

Hehehe, too obvious a reference?

[OneMoreGo]

Wow this looks really amazing.