Hello again!

We've continued on with our two threads of fortress mode work for the villains release. Concerning villains themselves, the infiltrators now roam about the fort using appropriate secret identities. This is something the vampires used previously, but because fort vampires were always dwarves, they could just assume another name and otherwise use the same profession and skills they had in life. Since our infiltrators can be humans or elves or goblins, or any of the animal people, and they can also have jobs that don't typically travel, they need to come up with a more plausible identity. They do this by scanning the sites near your fortress for matching population types, and pick professions that those sites use. So a villain might send a corrupt human justiciar to your fortress under cover as a visiting astronomer, if you have a library and there is a human civilization that values scholarship nearby. The infiltrator then seeks out dwarves to corrupt, using flattery, intimidation, promises of revenge, etc. Next up we'll see what these treacherous dwarves have in store for you.

The other thread of work was finishing the temple additions by adding priests and religious petitions. When an organized religion has enough representatives in the fortress, they can petition you to build an appropriate temple space for them and to appoint a priest, and then make a second petition later to appoint a high priest over a larger temple complex.

Reminder: we're working on villains and investigations to finish off the material we were working on for the last DF Classic release before we transition fully over to work on Steam (the artists are already way ahead of me.) Since we completed villains in history generation, we're now focusing on adding these elements to the play modes.

- Tarn

Hello!

In order to circumscribe our last classic release, where development has been running a little over a year now, we've started up on fortress mode work! Adventure mode work is still in progress, but we have enough there from the investigations and in particular the criminal organization evidence/display framework that we can make the fortress mode justice system function.

The broad strokes for fort mode are as follows: the schemers of the world, attracted by your wealth (measured by exports or known artifacts), or due to your meddling on raids, will be able to turn their attention to your fortress by sending agents under cover identities to try to turn your dwarves against you. This might be for simple theft at first, but can lead to sabotage, assassination or kidnappings, and ultimately, to the toppling of your government. You'll be able to use witness reports and other evidence to counter this threat (as with the current vampire investigations), with new interrogation powers to make the process more engaging. Successful investigations will allow you to track down responsible villains in the wider world, but it'll also lead to vengeful actions on their part. If you use the arrest power in a ridiculous fashion, you'll see your fort turn against you, whether there's a villain there or not.

So far, we've got the first infiltrators at the fortress doorstep, and we'll be getting our first traitors soon! We'll also be bringing some other fort features into line with our history generation work: this time, we've allowed your temples to be dedicated to the new organized religions which exist in the world now.

Reminder: we're working on villains and investigations to finish off the material we were working on for the last DF Classic release before we transition fully over to work on Steam (the artists are already way ahead of me.) Since we completed villains in history generation, we're now focusing on adding these elements to the play modes. Adventure mode is underway, and work on fortress mode has now begun.

- Tarn

Hi again!

We've been continuing our work on investigations and interrogation. The main task for this time around was to set up a framework for transient conversation states and conversation tone/tactics, so that interrogations aren't just a rote process of asking questions and gathering evidence. For example, if your character decides to approach an interrogation by intimidating the subject, you now select that skill to pair with your question. The subject can attempt to resist, based on how afraid they are of you, and how well they understand social interactions. If you succeed, the intimidation decreases the composure of the subject; failure to intimidate increases it. Regardless of success or failure, an intimidated subject will dislike talking to you and want to leave. But if their composure is broken, they'll answer your question. Other conversation tactics like persuasion work differently, and some tactics like 'pacify' can affect attitude without asking a question at all, if you find the interrogation slipping away from you. The questions and tactics also affect the long-term relationship variables mentioned last time, like trust, respect and fear, as well as your various reputation levels with the subject.

If you are a good judge of character, you'll get a more refined/correct preview of your chances to succeed with a given question+tone pairing, similar to how combat aiming works. In this way, player characters that swap in some social skills and attributes to balance or replace their fighting skills will have a significant advantage here. We might not clear the bar this time, but the aspiration is that these interactions will grow to be as interesting as regular combat. It's a tall order, but at least we have a richer set of player decisions to work with now, and something that's starting to feel like a contested investigation, which is the main goal for this stage of development.

Reminder: we're working on villains and investigations to finish off the material we were working on for the last DF Classic release before we transition fully over to work on Steam (the artists are already way ahead of me.) This is the third of four stages of that release. We completed villains in history generation, and moved those elements into the world during play. Now we're focusing on adventure mode before we tackle fortress mode in the final stage.

- Tarn

Hello!

The work on investigations is now underway. We're starting with the interrogation or interview of suspected villains and criminals, because no matter how the rest of our work on evidence shakes out, you'll eventually be confronting your targets, and we want that core fact to guide the rest of what we implement here.

The first pass was just plopping my debugging character, the Manifestation, into the center of the most mobbed-up tavern in town and having friendly chats with the denizens, who are all to happy to tell me everything they know, responding even to vague desperate questions like "Who do you work for?!" and "What are you scheming?!". The plan as we go now is to make them more resistant to these queries. We've had skills like "intimidation", "persuasion", "lying" etc. in the game for years, but they've only mattered in other contexts, most of which were not that important. Now they'll get a chance to shine. Bribes, reputation, presented evidence and the new relationship variables 'loyalty', 'trust/distrust', 'fear', 'love/hate', and 'respect' are all in the mix. Given how the game world is, a fighter-style character will be able to resort to fisticuffs and ask questions afterward (the non-lethal combat and yielding systems will be used here), but this will be much more likely to make the villains higher up in the network eager to retaliate. If you use softer interrogation techniques, a villain's lieutenant might not even know they've given you the information you are seeking, or might not think anything of it.

Once we're done in adventure mode, this interrogation process will also make its way over to fort mode, though you won't control the process line by line. The evidence obtained by your sheriff, captain of the guard, or other interrogator or investigator will be placed in the Justice screen, where you'll be able to make decisions about what to do next about whatever trouble is brewing.

Reminder: we're working on villains and investigations to finish off the material we were working on for the last DF Classic release before we transition fully over to work on Steam (the artists are already way ahead of me.) This is the third of four stages of that release. We completed villains in history generation, and moved those elements into the world during play. Now we're focusing on adventure mode before we tackle fortress mode in the final stage.

- Tarn

Hello!

We've been cleaning up the villainous network issues I mentioned in my last news post. In order to connect the networks more fully, we mostly focused on criminal organizations operating in cities. They can now compete with each other, subordinate each other and skim off of each other's profits, and fully fuse into single larger gangs. They can also establish new branches in other cities to give the networks some additional geographic spread, which should help to make investigations more interesting.

With those new additions as a backdrop, we allowed position-holding villains (who might be, for instance, nobles, priests, or bookkeepers) to contact the criminal organizations through intermediaries. Once in contact, they can contract out their assassination, sabotage, theft and kidnapping plots. This creates additional links for our investigations, and also opens up opportunities for the criminal leaders to exploit the link the other way, through blackmail and so forth.

So, overall, the evidence and investigation situation is looking a more healthy now. This is the reason we focus on the single-character/party-based adventure mode once we get through with history generation, since it operates like a microscope on features as we bring them into play. Everything we improve here will also impact how fortresses interact with and investigate villains.

Reminder: we're working on villains and investigations to finish off the material we were working on for the last DF Classic release before we transition fully over to work on Steam (the artists are already way ahead of me.) This is the third of four stages of that release. We completed villains in history generation, and moved those elements into the world during play. Now we're focusing on adventure mode before we tackle fortress mode in the final stage.

- Tarn

Hey everyone!

As we mentioned in the last update, Tarn and Zach have been busy attending an academic conference and PAX West this past week. So no new progress reports, but we DO have recordings of the two panels they were on!

Interview with Tarn Adams and Zach Adams, the co-creators of Dwarf Fortress, and Victoria Tran of Kitfox Games, about the commercial release of DF, its past and its future - all structured around a live game of Dwarf Fortress.


How do you design for chaos? Join designers from Dwarf Fortress, Destiny 2, Into the Breach, Industries of Titan, King of Dragon Pass, and Six Ages in discussing how to handle system-driven design. Whether it’s a world that’s procedurally generated or creating rules of asymmetrical multiplayer, deep systems make design, playtesting, and the whole game dev process more interesting—but also full of surprises…

Recording starts at the 2 hour mark: Watch it here



It was also just great meeting a ton of you at PAX! We had so many people telling the brothers the stories of their forts and asking for pictures, it filled my heart with warm fuzzy feels. Thanks for all the support!

Aaaand in exciting news (for Kitfox!) (but maybe for you??) -- we released our game Fit For A King today!



Marry everything, execute everything, and humiliate your rivals with your wealth and excess or die trying in this ultimate Henry VIII simulator! If you're a fan of Ultima or bankrupting your country, this is the game for you. Tarn mentioned it was "the funniest game I've played in a long time" so uhhh heck thanks Tarn! You can buy it NOW here.

That's it for now. Updates will resume as usual after this. :)

See ya!

Victoria

Hello again!

The first step in adventure mode villainous interactions and investigations was to prepare the information screen that displays organizations, plots and actors (such as agents and mob lieutenants and embezzling bookkeepers.) As we start to place witnesses and other evidence in the game, the organization graphs and plots will fill out and allow you to plan your next move, whether you're trying to stop villains in the name of justice or just trying to mess with the competition. It's kind of like those scenes where somebody is placing photographs and tying them together with red string, but the game will do all the annoying bits for you.

Initially, rather than restricting based on evidence, we just displayed everything to get a better feel for what's out there. The 200 year old world I generated had two thousand actors and five hundred organizations. Many of these organizations were just one person bossing another one around for years, but there were several that had more than twenty members and spread out over multiple sites on the map, from cities to goblin pits to abandoned monasteries, with the path from lowest-level associate up to the boss being five layers deep.

Once we could see what's been going on in history generation more clearly, some problems came to our attention, of course. For instance, there were too many of the groups and critters that were disconnected and inactive, trying one caper and then just sitting around for three decades satisfied with themselves, and a few 'organizations' with just one member, surrounded by (literally) dead connections, which the game should have recognized as defunct. We'll need to address those before moving on.

It'll be great to finally get player-led investigations and player villainy up and running!

The next few weeks are going to be a bit busy with PAX (as mentioned in the last news item), and also FDG, a digital game studies conference I'll be at through the end of August, but we'll be back to DF work on September 3rd.

- Tarn

----


Hellllo!

I promised to keep you updated if any of Tarn's panels would end up being livestreamed, and it looks like the System Design one will be! You'll be able to watch this LIVE on Twitch here. (Times are in PST.)



Hope to see some of you around PAX. :)

- Victoria