Comment by Mobius01
4 days ago
I wish nothing but success to Tarn and Zach, it’s great that releasing on Steam and adding a friendlier UI helped the game reach new audiences. It’s the proverbial time black hole.
4 days ago
I wish nothing but success to Tarn and Zach, it’s great that releasing on Steam and adding a friendlier UI helped the game reach new audiences. It’s the proverbial time black hole.
Weirdly the ASCII art was what drew me in the most. Once accustomed to it, feels like The Matrix where they're reading the world.
as someone who grew up playing ascii games I was pretty excited about the graphical update.
there is a novelty to ascii, but its a barrier to entry and major eye strain.
In a documentary about them putting Dwarf Fortress on Steam Tarn talked about how he had to split the $7 million first payment from Steam with his brother and it turned out the easiest way was to just use the bank app.
The noclip documentary series for any other readers who might be interested
1. The Origins of Dwarf Fortress: https://youtu.be/MxV24so-dw8
2. How Dwarf Fortress Evolved over 16 Years of Development: https://youtu.be/PiNeDarPzeI
3. How Dwarf Fortress Coming to Steam Changed Everything: https://youtu.be/TX65XCk2-6U anecdote about the money starts @ 18:40
4. Life After the Success of Dwarf Fortress: https://youtu.be/I5zgBXp4e8A
You are thinking of the NoClip documentary! It is fantastic and well worth your time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwLSgaYPKA0&list=PL-THgg8Qnv...
NoClip does a great job. I also recommend their Prey/Arcane documentary.
I’ve never received $7M but a few times I’ve handled large sums (when buying a house and previous startup exit) and it felt so weird to be how completely normal it was. Like just… oh yeah go ahead and write a cheque for six figures. Or do an e-transfer into your chequing account for six figures. It felt like… no there has to be a whole special world for large sums, no?
I'm sure there is special handling for large sums... but six figures isn't it. Businesses routinely write checks for half a million dollars, two million dollars... it's perfectly normal to see such amounts within the banking world. There might be some extra scrutiny on the back end that you don't see, but since it's well within the realm of normal operations that the bank sees happen every day, it's nothing special.
Now, eight or nine figures, that's probably going to pass the threshold for special attention. As in, you might be required to go to the bank in person with photo ID in order to authorize the transaction, that sort of thing. But under 10 million U.S. dollars? Many businesses will handle those amounts monthly, and the bank is used to seeing them.
What is it like when billionaires sell like $10 billion worth of shares? Do you need a special bank account to hold that much?
I had the muscle memory for the full keyboard control on pre-steam releases and the loss of some complete keyboard controls and things just changing made it so I never really got into the Steam release, which was pretty disappointing. I get it though.
I'm in a similar, but less extreme boat. The new interface has its perks, especially in terms of discoverability, but for tasks that need to be done repeatedly (request 10 beds be made before you have a manager, for example), you really miss the ability to rock some chords.
It took me some time to remap the muscle memory but it felt so worth it. The Steam version is not just a new AI, it introduced a lot of gameplay changes which really improved the underlying systems a lot.
Does the non-steam version not receive the same gameplay updates? I had been under the impression that the only difference was the UI.
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steam release is a major improvement beyond just the graphical updates.
if you are a fan of the original I would encourage you to give it another shot.
“Friendlier” and still one of the worst UIs available. It’s nearly impenetrable and the game has no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players, and is probably the most overrated game I’ve ever had the displeasure of playing.
I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun. The promise of dwarf fortress is far more interesting than the actual gameplay.
EDIT: To people who are rebutting this by saying “it’s just not for you” - that’s entirely my point. Few people enjoy it. I am the majority opinion here.
Minecraft was very fun and was selling like hotcakes when it had "no tutorial to speak of, no on-ramps for new players". Even nowadays there's no tutorial as far as I know and much of how to play is left to discovery. The achievements tree is a bit of a guide, just by telling you some of the things that are possible, but it sure doesn't tell you how to do anything.
I think having an official tutorial or an on-ramp for new players is not a requirement for a good game. In a broader sense of the word "game", a game is separate from a tutorial, so a good game can exist without a tutorial. Chess has no official tutorial or on ramp for new players, and yet it's widely considered to be one of the greatest games.
As soon as I bought Minecraft I opened the Wiki and used that to figure out how to craft stuff.
It was the first mainstream Wiki-based game. Now, every game does it that way.
You cannot be serious! That comparison is a joke. There's worlds between the complexity of Minecraft and DF.
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Unlike dwarf fortress, minecraft is fun and engaging from minute zero, and exposes its systems to you naturally over time. Terrible comparison.
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So just because you couldn't get into it means everyone who's enjoying it is a poser? That's some pretty self-centered thinking right there.
No one should be judging you if it's not your thing. Those of us that enjoy it readily admit its faults and own the fact it's not a game for everyone.
some people never developed theory of mind as children sadly
You may prefer a game like 'Going Medieval' which is a similar concept to Dwarf Fortress but is heavily simplified, almost as though someone played Dwarf Fortress then decided to make a version for their kids.
> Few people enjoy it. I am the majority opinion here.
The majority of people do not play videogames. The majority of those do not play any roguelikes. Citing the majority is completely useless.
Furthermore I'm not convinced you can make a tutorial for Dwarf Fortress. There's too much complexity, too many edge-cases that you end up needing to know. Most people seem to burn out if fed too much info at once.
> I’m convinced from articles about dwarf fortress that it’s a game that few actually play and enjoy, but like talking about as if it’s fun.
On my Steam friends-list I have 14 friends who have purchased the game. The top three by play-time are at 314, 267, and 67 hours. The remaining 7 with playtime average 22 hours, the other 5 have it in their backlog. That to me is some excellent playtime. Not Lethal Company numbers or anything, but that game didn't have a release before steam either.
The tutorial is the wiki. I used to play Dwarf Fortress back in the 2008-2009 era, and I kept going back to the wiki when I needed to learn something. It was, and still is, comprehensive, containing not just a "getting started for beginners" tutorial page, but also a list of every building and workflow (from ore to metal to swords and armor, from seeds to plants to food and drink...). In-game tutorials are not the only way to learn about a game; a well-maintained wiki (that isn't on wikia, oops sorry they're called fandom dot com there days — but that's a whole other rant) is also an excellent resource. And certain types of games seem to lend themselves to having well-maintained wikis: Dwarf Fortress's wiki is perhaps the best I've ever seen, narrowly beating Minecraft's also-excellent wiki.
Yep, the game is difficult to get into, it's not for everyone.
The game is great, though. You are in the "I have no idea what's going on" phase.
It’s the games job to create an on ramp to understanding. It’s not mine to spend 200 hours grasping every concept before I can play “the real game”, that’s just shitty game design.
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No great game is enjoyed by everyone. Your options when making a work, of any kind, are to either A) make something utterly inoffensive to the point that no one will have strong opinions about it at all or B) make a game that some people will love and others will bounce off of.
Dwarf Fortress is solidly in category B. It's a sandbox game, which already selects for people capable of making their own fun with a toy, while alienating those who want more concrete goals. It's a simulation game, which selects for people who enjoy the thrill of experiencing something that nobody else has before, while alienating those who prefer a crafted narrative. And it's got a lot of fiddly little systems, that offer just a little bit of reward for mastering, which selects for people who like figuring stuff out, whether through experimentation, external resources, or a combination of both, and filters those who just want all their options presented to them in a streamlined experience.
If a player meets all those selection criteria, they'll likely find Dwarf Fortress one of the most fun games they've ever played. They'll marvel at all the intricate details, and invent explanations for things that are (probably) random, like imagining the master engraver who keeps carving masterwork depictions of that one time he single-handily defeated a forgotten beast all over the captain of the guards' bedroom as being petty as hell.
If a player gets filtered, then they'll bounce off the game, and because they haven't engaged with all its fiddly details, feel like the game is just boring.
I can't speak on the Steam version, but the UI was perfectly fine in the ASCII version. The worst thing that I remember was how things were categorized. IE it was something like (b)uildings, (q)ueries, (d)esignations and whatever (i) was, got weirdly split apart. I forget the exact nature of it because it's been so long since I last played. But that seemed more a quirk of the game's spaghetti code ontological structure, because these things did have genuinely different behaviors despite being conceptually similar. That's a problem at a deeper layer than the UI/UX.
The only other thing I can think of is the labor menu was kind of annoying for large fortresses.
As someone whose spent ~5k hours playing DF you are right, every person I have ever talked to about it has liked the idea and like 1/50 has gone on to play it for >10 hours.
congratulations for stating what the the creators of the game have said many many time.
nobody is making you play it, and the people who enjoy playing it don't really care if it you liked it or not.
You're not wrong!
I used to play it, and for me, I think it scratched the same creative itch that Minecraft does in other folks. Building grand designs, etc. But in Minecraft, I'd have to place it block by block, and the physics... well, they're just absent. DF is like Minecraft, but with Lemmings, and a full physics system.
I still remember some of those designs, and I can see them clearly in my mind - not as the game represented them, but as the dwarves would have seen them. A grand underground bridge, with water flowing alongside it, before spiraling down into the main hall - where the wagons would enter the marketplace, and the dwarves would pass through the mist generated by the waterfall (forgotten beast got 'em all.) A giant vertical chain, build out of stone, standing as a monument to the grand fortress that sprawls underneath it (half-completed, as the fortress succumbed to madness.) A fortress built into a volcano, underneath the open sky, with the forges powered by magma, and a small river diversion creating endless obsidian (fucking birds kept swooping down and either eating my dwarves, or knocking them into the volcano, because I couldn't build the roof fast enough.)
I keep wanting to go back in, and I should - but I'd literally have to dig out the `cheatsheet.txt` file I had to keep on my desktop while playing, PLUS I'd have to figure out if I still needed the third party app that makes managing dwarven jobs reasonable, because in-game it's a fucking nightmare - and whether that app even exists for OS X, because I think it was a Windows-only thing that would interact with the game by directly reading RAM.
It sucks, but it's so good.
FYI, the newer versions with their mouse-driven interface solve a lot of those issues. Dwarf Therapist (the RAM reading tool you were thinking of) isn't needed any more, because there are much better in-game tools for managing what kinds of work certain dwarves do. The new menu layouts are a lot more discoverable, allowing you to find most things with just a little bit of clicking around (and the descriptions of stuff are a lot better now, so no more googling "what the heck is a quern?"). I miss the old keyboard controls sometimes, but they're gradually adding them back in the form of shortcuts. DFHack is still around, and basically necessary for automating some of the more fiddly resource chains (stuff like, "request 50 trees get cut down out of this patch of forest if our number of logs gets below 200").
I hadn't played in like 10 years when I picked up the Steam release, and I found it pretty easy to get back into.
I am going to boot it up and play today just to spite you lol
Makes me think how would an AI interface to a game like dwarf fortress play out. Where you tell it what you want like some sort of dwarven ruler.
The point of DF, to a large extent, is precise control and detail. It's the opposite of the approach taken by AI games that want to generalise based on simple prompts.
I would pose that's a matter of holding it wrong. Like, integrating generative AI as a prompt to an API endpoint exposed to the user is one of the worst, most naive and bland ways to use it as a game subsystem that I can think of.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of problems with trying to use generative AI as a subsystem for a game, problems which exist at a conceptual level. But all the games I've seen that integrate AI as a subsystem don't even come remotely close to hitting that ceiling. I think it's ultimately up to the fact that an interesting usage of generative AI requires a level of technical competency and theory that's well beyond that of the layman. The people making games that utilize AI generally seem to lack the chops to make a good game or do interesting things with AI. The people with the chops and manhours to make a good game with AI:
- Don't want the backlash of having a generative model in their game, because no matter the context that's a lot of very bad press for something that's very difficult and time consuming to implement.
- See the immediate problems and difficulty that arise from a decently integrated concept and execution, and even without the bad press, understand that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. That it's always going to be an immensely stupid gimmick in the end, one that's trying way too hard.
That won't stop us from having 10,000 pieces of shovelware getting churned out that have the worst, most uninspired integrations imaginable mind you. We clearly already have those. For those that could do something better with the tech, there's too many good reasons to not touch it.
> The point of DF, to a large extent, is precise control and detail.
I don't know, it's basically Minecraft with Lemmings. You control a lot, but at the end, the AI comparison might be somewhat apt - you tell the dwarves what to do, and they mostly do it. When they're not struck by a strange mood, or when they're not too depressed to work, or when they're not being eaten by a Forgotten Beast (beware its deadly dust!)
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to each their own, but that is the least interesting part of DF for me.
I like the narrative element and enjoy delegating random shit and seeing what happens.
been messing around with this idea in godot for a few months, if you are really interested i can send you an alpha build once its in a playable state.