Dwarf Fortress - Not Alex
The Adventure Mode update is approaching, so let's talk about it, and the upcoming year more broadly.
In the way the terms are usually used, Adventure Mode is something like a computer roleplaying game or a traditional roguelike, but it doesn't follow the expected contours. You control a character or party and set out into the generated world. The characters you've read about on Fortress Mode wall engravings are out there, as well as the cities and goblin towers. Making the entire world come alive has been a massive project to tackle alongside Fortress Mode over the decades, and to this point we've explored some avenues more than others. It's a wholly unique, rough experience that can be compelling as well as frustrating. Here is just a small sample of the art for the procedural portraits and clothing with different species done by Carolyn:
There's no storyline per se, but you can...
Fight: If you've read some Fortress Mode combat logs, you know part of what to expect. Combat in Adventure Mode is turn-based, and you can aim at body parts and wrestle as you see in those logs, with even more detail. Ever tried to convert your entire Fortress population into necromancers or vampires? Nothing will stop you from seeking these things out as an adventurer (why not both?), and using your new powers as you see fit.
Roleplay: Play as an animal person and ride around on a giant animal with a small animal on your shoulder and another animal running alongside. Dance in a meadhall or under the earth. There are even bandits and giant rats if you are feeling nostalgic. Or you can offend the gods and become a giant rat for a week, or offend a mummy and become cursed for the rest of your miserable short life.
Explore: Visit your old fortresses, or retire in a town and recruit yourself later. See the world to its full extent, from the glaciers to the deserts and jungles, from the kobold caves and night troll dens to minotaur labyrinths. Face the demon emperor of the goblin civilization on their home turf and use ancient knowledge to bend them to your will. There are really quite a few things to do.
These possibilities lead to difficulties which aren't atypical in games these days. Sandbox games are undirected, and the sandbox can have cracks. Adventure Mode is no exception. It's a large sandbox with large cracks. Some problems we've noticed from previous Adventure Mode iterations:
- You won't always get the reactivity you expect to your accomplishments and from your actions.
- Characters can have a cookie-cutter feeling to them.
- It can be hard to find the information you need to pursue a goal you've chosen.
- Battle is merciless and it isn't simple to heal.
- Some aspects of towns are thrown together and shops aren't satisfying.
These problems are well-known; most are the starting point for games that operate in this mode. Some are easier to tackle than others.
As with our earlier work on Fortress Mode, the goal is to update the existing visuals and interface and also make the game more approachable for new players. A lot of the graphics carry over from Fortress Mode, and the menus are generally less complicated, which is good. On the flip side, tackling the new player experience is somehow even harder this time around. There are all kinds of ways to handle it, and we've chosen a way forward that's consonant with our overall goals for Dwarf Fortress.
There are several menus left to tackle. The information screens and character generation are the main remaining bits. Carolyn is drawing a ton of combat icons that came up for wrestling and striking (so you can target toes with your crab pincers), so we don't have combat menu footage yet. We're also adding combat animations!
Before any Adventure Mode update, we need to:
This is probably a good time to mention that there will also be a whole new full soundtrack released alongside Adventure Mode by Simon & Dabu.
We're still aiming to release all of this in April -- that's only three months away! The cabin building aspect of the game may or may not make it in, since it's complicated. If it doesn't make the first update, it will be in the second feature update.
We think it's more important that we immediately, directly address the new player experience.
Adventure Mode suffers from the sandbox frustration of feeling lost and aimless. Adventure Mode has had three difficulty levels up to this point: Peasant, Hero, and Demigod. These affected your starting statistic point pools in character generation - the more elite-sounding levels are easier, not harder, reflecting the power of the character. We're turning Demigod difficulty into both a tutorial mode and an avenue for us to improve magical aspects of the fantasy setting generally. Peasant will remain the pure sandbox old players are used to. Hero balances these approaches, easing some of the difficulty of finding companions and quests.
Demigod characters will receive instruction and ongoing help from their patron/parent. All difficulty levels will benefit from changes to deities, but sandbox characters will have to find their own ways to interact with them, at their own risk. We'll also:
- tweak the Hero level encounters with gods to something that strikes a balance again, leaning toward a more epic feeling
- expand dungeons and temple relic hunting to facilitate more direction for Demigod characters
- provide more healing options
Again, other difficulty levels will be able to interact with these pieces of the world as well, on different terms.
People that have been following Dwarf Fortress development these many years will recall both the current cosmology of the game in these changes, and perhaps wonder about the aspirations we have toward proceduralizing the entire setup (including the existence of gods and how and whether magic works). We're going to use this opportunity to set the stage for the new framework, to be expanded upon in the future.
Siege improvements (he he he), investigations of villains, the ability to lead criminal networks, and other features that were in the air before we made the transition to the Premium version are not forgotten either, and we'll be seeing about working on these after the initial Adventure Mode update.
Where does Fortress Mode fit in? First, we have an update with bugfixes coming in the next week or two (thanks Putnam!).
But on top of the ability to explore and visit your old fortresses, Fortress Mode at the very minimum will see these benefits with the initial Adventure Mode update:
- the addition of portraits
- that whole new soundtrack I mentioned earlier
- site map visuals on embark
Forts will also eventually have access to the new healing methods, and the new deity improvements through temples, but implementing those connections might occur in a subsequent update, since the hospital in particular is complicated to change. It's exciting because magical healing methods will be fully procedural, and connecting that sort of system to Fortress Mode has been a long-standing dream of ours.
Finishing Adventure Mode will also allow us to get back into regular Dwarf Fortress development, where most subsequent feature updates will either center on or impact Fortress Mode, while Adventure Mode and Legends Mode continue to evolve in parallel.
- Tarn and Zach
What is Adventure Mode?
In the way the terms are usually used, Adventure Mode is something like a computer roleplaying game or a traditional roguelike, but it doesn't follow the expected contours. You control a character or party and set out into the generated world. The characters you've read about on Fortress Mode wall engravings are out there, as well as the cities and goblin towers. Making the entire world come alive has been a massive project to tackle alongside Fortress Mode over the decades, and to this point we've explored some avenues more than others. It's a wholly unique, rough experience that can be compelling as well as frustrating. Here is just a small sample of the art for the procedural portraits and clothing with different species done by Carolyn:
There's no storyline per se, but you can...
Fight: If you've read some Fortress Mode combat logs, you know part of what to expect. Combat in Adventure Mode is turn-based, and you can aim at body parts and wrestle as you see in those logs, with even more detail. Ever tried to convert your entire Fortress population into necromancers or vampires? Nothing will stop you from seeking these things out as an adventurer (why not both?), and using your new powers as you see fit.
Roleplay: Play as an animal person and ride around on a giant animal with a small animal on your shoulder and another animal running alongside. Dance in a meadhall or under the earth. There are even bandits and giant rats if you are feeling nostalgic. Or you can offend the gods and become a giant rat for a week, or offend a mummy and become cursed for the rest of your miserable short life.
Explore: Visit your old fortresses, or retire in a town and recruit yourself later. See the world to its full extent, from the glaciers to the deserts and jungles, from the kobold caves and night troll dens to minotaur labyrinths. Face the demon emperor of the goblin civilization on their home turf and use ancient knowledge to bend them to your will. There are really quite a few things to do.
Sandbox Problems
These possibilities lead to difficulties which aren't atypical in games these days. Sandbox games are undirected, and the sandbox can have cracks. Adventure Mode is no exception. It's a large sandbox with large cracks. Some problems we've noticed from previous Adventure Mode iterations:
- You won't always get the reactivity you expect to your accomplishments and from your actions.
- Characters can have a cookie-cutter feeling to them.
- It can be hard to find the information you need to pursue a goal you've chosen.
- Battle is merciless and it isn't simple to heal.
- Some aspects of towns are thrown together and shops aren't satisfying.
These problems are well-known; most are the starting point for games that operate in this mode. Some are easier to tackle than others.
What's left to do?
As with our earlier work on Fortress Mode, the goal is to update the existing visuals and interface and also make the game more approachable for new players. A lot of the graphics carry over from Fortress Mode, and the menus are generally less complicated, which is good. On the flip side, tackling the new player experience is somehow even harder this time around. There are all kinds of ways to handle it, and we've chosen a way forward that's consonant with our overall goals for Dwarf Fortress.
There are several menus left to tackle. The information screens and character generation are the main remaining bits. Carolyn is drawing a ton of combat icons that came up for wrestling and striking (so you can target toes with your crab pincers), so we don't have combat menu footage yet. We're also adding combat animations!
Before any Adventure Mode update, we need to:
- do some basic cleanup in the human towns, with how shops and other buildings handle items and furniture
- clean up how property is recognized
- generally tighten up the city side of the experience to give the new player some grounding
- old adventure menus must also be fully converted for mouse + keyboard
- the graphics and audio must be complete
This is probably a good time to mention that there will also be a whole new full soundtrack released alongside Adventure Mode by Simon & Dabu.
We're still aiming to release all of this in April -- that's only three months away! The cabin building aspect of the game may or may not make it in, since it's complicated. If it doesn't make the first update, it will be in the second feature update.
We think it's more important that we immediately, directly address the new player experience.
Demigods and Tutorials
Adventure Mode suffers from the sandbox frustration of feeling lost and aimless. Adventure Mode has had three difficulty levels up to this point: Peasant, Hero, and Demigod. These affected your starting statistic point pools in character generation - the more elite-sounding levels are easier, not harder, reflecting the power of the character. We're turning Demigod difficulty into both a tutorial mode and an avenue for us to improve magical aspects of the fantasy setting generally. Peasant will remain the pure sandbox old players are used to. Hero balances these approaches, easing some of the difficulty of finding companions and quests.
Demigod characters will receive instruction and ongoing help from their patron/parent. All difficulty levels will benefit from changes to deities, but sandbox characters will have to find their own ways to interact with them, at their own risk. We'll also:
- tweak the Hero level encounters with gods to something that strikes a balance again, leaning toward a more epic feeling
- expand dungeons and temple relic hunting to facilitate more direction for Demigod characters
- provide more healing options
Again, other difficulty levels will be able to interact with these pieces of the world as well, on different terms.
Myths and Magic
People that have been following Dwarf Fortress development these many years will recall both the current cosmology of the game in these changes, and perhaps wonder about the aspirations we have toward proceduralizing the entire setup (including the existence of gods and how and whether magic works). We're going to use this opportunity to set the stage for the new framework, to be expanded upon in the future.
Siege improvements (he he he), investigations of villains, the ability to lead criminal networks, and other features that were in the air before we made the transition to the Premium version are not forgotten either, and we'll be seeing about working on these after the initial Adventure Mode update.
What about my fortress?
Where does Fortress Mode fit in? First, we have an update with bugfixes coming in the next week or two (thanks Putnam!).
But on top of the ability to explore and visit your old fortresses, Fortress Mode at the very minimum will see these benefits with the initial Adventure Mode update:
- the addition of portraits
- that whole new soundtrack I mentioned earlier
- site map visuals on embark
Forts will also eventually have access to the new healing methods, and the new deity improvements through temples, but implementing those connections might occur in a subsequent update, since the hospital in particular is complicated to change. It's exciting because magical healing methods will be fully procedural, and connecting that sort of system to Fortress Mode has been a long-standing dream of ours.
Finishing Adventure Mode will also allow us to get back into regular Dwarf Fortress development, where most subsequent feature updates will either center on or impact Fortress Mode, while Adventure Mode and Legends Mode continue to evolve in parallel.
- Tarn and Zach
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