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

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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

Hi!

Continuing on from the shrines and evil areas from the last news post, the main goal this time was to get through the rest of the map work I needed to do.  I didn't quite finish off the improved necromancer towers, but the rest is done!  Merchant counting houses, guildhalls, mercenary and bandit forts, and monasteries.  In fortress mode, these places can be visited by your squads and are also the sources of various travelers and trouble.  In adventure mode, you can visit them directly.

This sets us up to begin our in-play interactions with villainous plots.  This is the last major push we'll need to get through with this Classic release, so that we can begin adding graphics to the game and get it on Steam!  First, we'll be allowing the player adventurers to be villains.  For years, the adventurer has had traveling companions.  Now you'll be able to intimidate, order, nag and cajole them into doing horrible things for you.  This'll be the final look I need at the systems before I begin adventure mode investigations, and then fortress mode counterintelligence.

Speaking of horrible things, in preparation for the necromancer towers we added a few new critters last week.  Procedurally generated creatures have always been a big part of the game, whether forgotten beasts deep under the earth, or demons and creatures of the night.  Certain necromancers can now summon otherworldly monsters, and other necromancers can perform experiments on townspeople and livestock to create new humanoids and beasts to fight for them.  Some of these experiments are intelligent and not wholly evil, and if they escape from the tower in sufficient numbers, can even become playable characters or fortress mode travelers.  Finally, necromancers can raise ghosts of historical figures as lieutenants.

- Tarn

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We've gotten a lot of comments asking about the release date, so here's a little explanation that Tanya, our captain, wrote in one of the forum discussions here.

"The problem is that we genuinely don't know. Under normal circumstances (like when we're developing Boyfriend Dungeon), game devs use production methodologies where we count up all the tasks remaining, add some buffer time, and voila, we have a predicted release window that's at least sort of reliable, +/- a few months. This method however assumes the game dev tasks are knowable and finite.

But Dwarf Fortress is different, because DF is so crazy-complex that Toady often couldn't possibly predict the difficulties/challenges of a thing until he's halfway through implementing them. So..... the villains update, for example, will be done when Toady says it's done. I am literally incapable of either rushing him, nor making him predict his deliveries more accurately. And then there will be bugs. I mean maybe there won't be bugs because wow that would be cool, but realistically, there will be important serious bugs to fix. 

And THEN once villains is stable-ish, Toady will start serious work on the Steam version, which..... won't be a HUGE ordeal like most big patches (some UI tweaks are much more manageable/predictable than deep system guts), but we also haven't yet defined exactly what should be in-scope versus what is too much/too risky/not worth it. And since the Steam launch is going to be a TON of peoples' first impressions, maybe extra polishing/fixing time makes sense, right? So it might take a bit longer than we'd like, even if the code changes are relatively 'light', compared to villains.

Anyway, that's why we can't give a release window, at least until we're nearing beta testing. We announced it a bit earlier than maybe most people would (sorry) because we wanted to give the sprite artists a headstart, and we were worried about the whole Steam and Kitfox thing leaking and people getting mad without us being able to explain and manage it properly. We were all having nightmares about poor Toady getting tons of harassment. Luckily that didn't happen! But here we are quite far from the finish line."

Hope that helps, everyone!

In other news, I've got some official updates on the Bay12 PAX West plans. I hope you can swing by the booth on Sunday or Monday to say hi to Tarn and Zach. :) We'll be Booth at 6120, on the 6th floor.

Or you can catch Tarn at these two PAX panels, which I'll link below.

Dwarf Fortress Live!


System Design!


I believe the System Design panel will be streamed onto PAX's Twitch channel, but I'm not sure about the other panel. If there are recordings or anything, I'll be sure to update y'all on it.

Also... Happy birthday, Urists! It appears Dwarf Fortress ~officially~ released its first alpha version on August 8th, 2006. :') That's wild.

Whew okay, that's all from me for today. Don't forget to wishlist Dwarf Fortress on Steam - it actually helps out a lot!

- Victoria

Hello again!

These last few weeks I've been bouncing between all sorts of adventure mode topics. This tends to happen, as the point of doing adventure mode before fort mode is to see all the new features up close, and there's always lots to do.

I started with the ability to control multiple characters in adventure mode. This means entering tactical mode, and controlling some or all of your party as combat (or any situation) progresses. You can still control a single character most of the time, and the rest of your party will follow you around. People that you invite to join you later on cannot be controlled directly, unless they are retired adventurers from previous games, but you'll still be able to give spoken orders to them.

I've also been working on maps. After so much time working on history generation, there are many new or changed locations that need tiles now. Earlier, we changed necromancers so that they'd spread a kind of blight aura slowly out from their towers over their history of necromantic misdeeds. It grows every time they animate bodies, for example. In play, these areas have dead vegetation. Demons of various kinds have also been given the spreading evil treatment, though instead of dead vegetation, with their regions you'll often get eyeball-grass and nightmarish critters. In order that the world not slowly go to evil permanently, these evil regions fade over many years. Fort mode games can run over several years, so this isn't purely theoretical, but it might take a few games.

While messing about in the evil areas, we also decided to give undead lieutenants some more magical powers. These are undead that, unlike the more common animated zombies which are in the game, maintain their souls from their previous life and are able to act independently. They can be raised by necromancers, including any player that gets their hands on the secrets of life and death, as well as certain demons. The easiest powers to do were based on existing poison code, which modders have already taken advantage of, allowing them to blind, suffocate, paralyze, open wounds of various kinds, nauseate, cause dizziness, and so forth. I also added some completely new effects, including the ability to summon creatures, change the weather (they like heavy fog, which complicates ranged weapon use), and propel enemies off their feet (this effect applies a force, so smaller enemies fly several tiles, while an elephant might not be affected at all.)

I've also done maps for shrines, which unlike the temples we already had, can be in much smaller locations, perhaps just a tile or two on the side of a building, but they can also be entire plots of land. Their placements and objects of devotion are chosen according to the history of the sites where they are found. This necessitated the addition of altars, and I also included divination dice in some of the shrines. Since I was already working on magical powers a bit, I went ahead and threw in a divination system where rolls of the dice lead to various curses and blessings, depending on which face or faces shows up. Long-time followers of the game know that the addition of dice is part of the procedural dice/card/board game generation system we've been planning for years, and divination seemed like a good way to get a small piece of that in without biting off the rest before I get this final Classic release and then the Steam release together.

- Tarn


If you're headed to PAX West, make sure to drop by our booth (#6120). We'll have the Dwarf Fortress trailer playing, our other games, and mostly importantly... both Tarn (Toady) and Zach (ThreeToe) will be there for the last two days of the con.

There will also be a panel, but more details to come on that after. Cheers!

Victoria