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TIGSource ForumsPlayerGamesNew Dwarf Fortress Thread
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Capntastic
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« Reply #60 on: June 06, 2016, 04:43:19 PM »

Toady never planned for the game to become so expansive in scope.  Learn from his mistakes!!
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« Reply #61 on: June 06, 2016, 04:53:54 PM »

don't follow your dreams or you might accidentally make something great
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« Reply #62 on: June 06, 2016, 04:57:51 PM »

Toady never planned for the game to become so expansive in scope.

didnt he say in numerous interviews that go as far back as 2008 (when i started playing) that he wants the game to be the ultimate fantasy simulator? also that roadmap thingy on the bay12 site has existed forever and still has features from way back that aren't implemented yet. the game actually seems rather well planned for a mega project by one person, as evidenced by the fact that he's still making progress on it. not like there's really much else to compare it to of course.

but you probably know more than me.
« Last Edit: June 06, 2016, 05:03:13 PM by Silbereisen » Logged
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« Reply #63 on: June 06, 2016, 05:15:35 PM »

DF launched in 2006 and it was a side project Toady took up to take a break from Armok, which was his first attempt at a general fantasy-world creator game/tool/thing.

It was just gonna be a simple game based around increasing the "Score" of your fortress, etc. 

Then it consumed his life and everyone else's.
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« Reply #64 on: June 06, 2016, 06:23:36 PM »

that's not really the same as "never planned" at all tho, especially seeing as the oldest released version of DF is already called armok 2 and has all the fundamentals of the world gen and etc which would be completely excessive for a simple arcade game in place. he basically just migrated a lot of the stuff he had planned for armok (which as far as i understand he hit a roadblock with) over to DF and turned it into the new and improved version of that game, more or less. i don't get what the problem is tbh.
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« Reply #65 on: June 06, 2016, 07:14:18 PM »

Maybe I have a different view of it but DF in its current state is hugely different than it originated, and I've been along for the ride as Toady spent literal years refactoring and kicking down piles of code to re-establish stuff that he'd never planned for.

I mean, I remember when Toady thought that he'd never be able to really implement z-levels, back when the game was always "cliff, river, chasm, magma".  And then when he spent over a year with no releases only to post the Tragedy Mule video (building a bunch of walls around a mule, a ramp to the top of the walls, and having dwarves fill the enclosure with water, drowning the mule), it was almost a miracle.  Being able to walk, as an adventurer, from a town through a forest into a monster den, without ever going to the overworld screen, seems like a miracle, from where the game started.  All of the things the game used to fake via sleight of hand and magic being removed and replaced with no foolin' stuff is, to me, a miracle.  But each time these miracles happened there were basically year long delays as the entire game had to be gutted and stuffed with new magic.
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« Reply #66 on: June 06, 2016, 07:38:54 PM »

I can't believe that I've only just found out that playing with smaller maps is more fun than the default 4x4. Would anyone be even slightly interested in a succession fort?
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« Reply #67 on: June 07, 2016, 03:39:59 AM »

@Capn: It's true that there were unplanned features added, but to me it was always clear that toady was going to up the complexity in every area of the game, so I can't say any of the features came completely out of left field or took the game into a completely different direction. DF development seems to follow a fairly logical "arc" to me despite the detours. like i said, if that wasn't true i don't think he could have continued making progress on it over 10 years. i mean, there's not really anything else to compare DF to in terms of development history. maybe that game aurora (that i've never played). and given that he's doing a good job. most of my own dev projects were worse organized than DF despite being much smaller scope (which is why they ultimately tanked).

Plus, refactoring is just a fact of game dev past a certain threshold of complexity and obviously a huge and complex game is going to need a ton of refactoring.
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« Reply #68 on: June 07, 2016, 01:44:06 PM »

I have over 100 dwarves and three miners. I need to either figure out how to interact with salespeople or find some metal ore really quickly.
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« Reply #69 on: June 07, 2016, 02:17:17 PM »

(I wrote a big long thing and then walked away to get lunch and Firefox crashed, so apologies for this seeming glib or whatever)

Toady's workflow is bizarre, even to him.  When people make jokes about it being like a dwarf's "strange mood" they aren't wrong.  Toady vanishes for 4 months to work on something and then comes back and the game now has books, beehives, necromancers, and self-animating limbs.  His roadmap has changed about three times in the last decade, and the majority of the broad strokes are things like "I want to see a goblin with a mechanical fist crush a dwarf skull", which means adding in mechanical limb prosthetics, skull crushing combat maneuvers, and procedural bone density.  It's wholly unpredictable, even to him, what direction things will go and he has absolutely no problem stalling progress for a month to make worldgen reflect border wars and trade routes more realistically.  That hyper focus on specific little things is why people like the game.  But I would never think of DF as being a well organized or structured project simply because it manages to grow in size in complexity in huge bursts every year or so.  He doesn't stick to his own plans.  

Like I said originally:  Learn from his mistakes.  Part of DF's charm is its sprawling heaps of systems clicking against one another but if it were anyone even slightly less focused on making their own personal dream game DF would have been abandoned long ago.

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« Reply #70 on: June 07, 2016, 02:35:07 PM »

I think he might have an amazingly large short term memory to be able to hold so many tangents to his project at once. Reading you describe his workflow sounds like what I've always tried to do, except with success lol

Also in other news I'm not fps dead I just had google chrome open for music. I'll just keep my music open on my phone instead.

Edit: a child that went into a fey mood made a ring made of granite and gave it a name what a cute :3
« Last Edit: June 07, 2016, 02:42:11 PM by ProgramGamer » Logged

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« Reply #71 on: June 07, 2016, 02:45:39 PM »

Toady's workflow being basically "a guy in his bedroom making a game with no real attempt to make it appeal to anyone" but somehow hitting a vein of gamer fanaticism is a miracle, and it makes it hilarious to me that he has been approached multiple times by legitimate companies offering to buy him out.
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« Reply #72 on: June 07, 2016, 02:50:01 PM »

Hey, sometimes it works

Edit: I didn't realize that the aforementioned ring was named "Whipwipe"

*dying from the adorableness of that*
« Last Edit: June 07, 2016, 04:04:33 PM by ProgramGamer » Logged

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« Reply #73 on: June 07, 2016, 05:57:43 PM »

Quote
But I would never think of DF as being a well organized or structured project simply because it manages to grow in size in complexity in huge bursts every year or so.  He doesn't stick to his own plans.  

it's impossible to have a game grow over 10 years without having at least some kind of plan about how to run your project. it just becomes impossible to continue working on it at some point. i've been there.

i didn't mean DF is well organized in the sense that AAA development or even commercial indie dev is well organized, it's well organized for a "bedroom dev working on his dream game for years" kinda project. i mean, despite all the crazy simulation stuff, the game has pretty much kept its core city building/life sim mechanics (with optional RPG mode) intact over the course of its development. things like going 3d were big shifts of course, but the game never fundamentally changed direction. it started out as basically a cross between dungeon keeper (flexible zoning, defense focus), settlers (production chains) and the sims (semi-autonomous player characters). and it's still that at its core, no matter how many simulation systems and how much procedural generation were built on top of it and how many mechanics were changed or "refactored".

compare DF with something like cataclysm dark days ahead, which started out as a cool immersive survival roguelike, but grew into a diluted mess of disparate ideas that don't fit together.
« Last Edit: June 07, 2016, 06:03:56 PM by Silbereisen » Logged
Capntastic
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« Reply #74 on: June 07, 2016, 06:08:31 PM »

Ah, alright.  We were seeing different levels of "organized" as the hurdle to beat. 

I just see Toady's meandering wizard approach to be frustrating to huge swathes of the fanbase and a hindrance to the game progressing steadily.  He could've made a much sturdier foundation (and he has said as much).
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« Reply #75 on: June 07, 2016, 06:24:13 PM »

i mean i kinda view the whole thing as a (former) solo game dev myself. a huge part of solo dev is actually keeping up the motivation to push onward. and often you have to be kinda selfish for that. if you focus too much on what "the community" wants over what interests you personally, you'll burn out much faster (unless pleasing other people is your *only* motivation). ofc toady is probably an example of one extreme of not listening to the community at all lol. the opposite would be trying to "crowdsource" your game design which almost always ends in disaster without a strong direction.

i guess my attitude about DF (which i've been playing irregularly for 8 years) is this: i don't feel like the game or its developers owe me anything and i'm just happy that a game like this exists and happy to be along for the ride.
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« Reply #76 on: June 07, 2016, 06:27:25 PM »

Toady does what he wants, more or less.  Sometimes he'll set out to knock out some fan requests (he used to take bounties for them, maybe still does?) but he'll almost always get sidetracked into "welp gotta figure out how tides will affect coastal civs" and three months later we get like, merpeople biomes or whatever.
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« Reply #77 on: June 08, 2016, 06:29:25 AM »

how do we engineer all of society to facilitate more people like this toady guy
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« Reply #78 on: June 11, 2016, 08:59:46 AM »

By giving me gems and gold.


Dwarfmoot tonight.  It should be on Twitch.
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« Reply #79 on: June 11, 2016, 03:15:59 PM »

https://www.twitch.tv/dwarfmoot

Will be chugging along later
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