To go from $15k to $15M, x1000, in a matter of weeks must feel incredible. Particularly after 15 years of hard work.
The game is made for the love of making it and what little money they made was always just about allowing them to keep doing what they love. The resulting good will from their 20 years of labor and refusing to sell out paid off in the end when they needed it. Honestly, I'd have bet that if they released the "premium" version for free on bay12 but $30 on Steam they'd still make the majority of what they have.
Still a huge success, though.
I wish them the best of luck, entering a codebase developed by a single dev for 15 years.
My expectation is it's just an absolute mess, but I'm so curious.
Was curious what programming language it was written in, and instead found this: https://www.dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Language
WTF is this game?
> but this should eventually help with bug fixes, ports
eeeeeeeeee
Congrats to the team on their success!
What features did they streamline? I thought they just replaced the ASCII graphics with sprites and changed some hotkeys?
Instead of painstakingly assigning jobs to dwarves in a very fine grained process through the labor menu for each individual, dwarves are assigned to jobs.
That is, the vast majority of jobs are by default assigned to all dwarves, and the game intelligently assigns work based on dwarf skill and pathing distance. You are free to tweak labor settings from there, for instance by assigning a forge to be the exclusive workplace of a legendary weaponsmith and only making weapons at that forge, or specializing miners to only mine so that they won't find themselves cleaning fish when idle between mining gigs. You can also create custom work profiles more akin to the old setup, enabling or disabling specific tasks and then assign that profile to specific dwarves if you want to get so detailed. However I find the new system works very well.
It's a totally new UI between the two versions: it's much friendlier to a broad population while still retaining the same game mechanics.
[edit] I'll also add my favorite change: performance. Before the steam version I always ended up abandoning my fort because the framerate just became unbearable. In the steam version I have yet to encounter these issues.
It has a simple tutorial, the interface is fully mouse driven, there's sound effects and music, and the tile graphics really do a great job to visualise what's going on in the game.
Everything used to just be in a central massive "press a single letter for this specific submenu" sub-screen on the right third of the screen, with multiple submenus to navigate to what you're trying to do.
In the "the feature is less complex" in the steam version (note most of these are still in the simulation, just missing from the GUI so inaccessible to the player), some examples are:
- Health and body part level damage - Reading historical logs - Ammo - Idlers counter
I couldn't play the game before, now it is a joy.
2)Automining veins is now part of the base game rather than a dfhack thing
3)The military UI is still confusing and counterintuitive but it's a billion times better than before. I've actually managed to effectively train, equip and station troops and deploy them in combat without having to check the wiki. There's no way I could do that in classic and I've played a fair amount of DF
4)Things like the minecart UX and the thing which specifies how bridges open etc are way less confusing than before. Small, but there are thousands of UX improvements like that.
5)Rather than sometimes it's hjkl and sometimes wasd and sometimes arrow keys and sometimes numpad and sometimes you can select a box and sometimes you select the first tile and then the last tile to get a rectangle and sometimes you select the first tile and then use hjkl (or sometimes wasd) to grow your rectangle to the size you want, now you click the first tile, then the last tile. For everything. Building bridges, specifying zones, specifying burrows, building stockpiles etc, they all work the same. (Ironically there is a keyboard cursor if you want that but it is buggy for me at the moment.)
6)The system for worldgen and embark is also a lot better. For example you don't have the 3 weird confusing maps any more, you just have a big map and if you zoom in you get another map where you can pick exactly where you want to embark and the size.
7)Notifications. They all appear on the side in cronological order with an appropriate icon, you can hover to get the basics or click to see more or interact. Right-clicking dismisses them.
I could go on but you get the idea. There are lots of examples like this. It's still DF, but at least playing it isn't some Kafka-esque bullshit nightmare.
Then life took over and I lost all the muscle memory.
Since the Steam release came out I've been playing DF almost DAILY again. It's so much FUN!
Adventure mode will take the world by storm again, so that will probably mean a huge uptick in sales once it's finished.
Anyway, i bought one of the copies and the game is fun, whenever i feel like doing unlimited amounts of micro-management ;-)
My main issue with DF is that the main challenge of the game, combat, is pretty boring and rife with issues. For example, let's say I'm new to the game and want to put some XBow dwarfs behind a few fortifications in my base. Will the dwarfs intelligently do this when a siege happens? Is there a specific way to tell the AI that specific spots are where the Dwarfs should stand to defend? No and No.
Instead I will either have to painstakingly set up individual zones / burrows for each individual defender or the dwarfs will just ignore the fortifications, even if they are in a burrow! And they'll just sit there and ignore invaders breaking through your kill zone unless you specifically micromanage them into 1-wide spaces with fortifications facing the kill zone, and even then they might just run outside your fortress on the other side of the fortifications so they're close to where you ordered them to.
Rimworld on the other hand, (for all of its flaws around random and explosive damage), will at least let you draft a pawn, order it to stand behind a wall, and the pawn will get a significant cover bonus even without fortifications. They're smart enough to lean out and attack on their own too.
I say all this not to criticize DF but to say that the genre has come a long way, and I hope that with this success they're looking at weaknesses like this in the gameplay loop so that folks don't just take 20+ years of goodwill as a replacement for the possibilities ahead.
PS: Fuck cancer
DF things that come to mind that no other colony-sim has:
- 3 dimensions (z-levels) and all of the shenanigans (hydraulics, creative traps, etc) that go with them
- geological and historical civilization simulation
- the inter-relatedness of the game session to the history of the world is a story-generating masterpiece.
- The "zones" (surface, caverns, spoilery places) and how different they feel. Oxygen Not Included does this kinda, but not as deeply.
- Three different games in one using the same procedural engine and world: Adventure Mode, Legends Mode, Fortress Mode (Steam edition is currently missing Adventure mode and it will probably be a while).
- The "flavor" procedural systems: Villain, Religion, Instrument/Music, Literature, Forgotten Beasts. They don't have tons of impact on gameplay, but it makes the lore so much more rich.
- Sub-biome "surroundings" regions (Good, Evil, Savage, Benign) which have large effects on gameplay. Evil areas can be hilarious Fun.
- the pacing feels just right to me. It's not realistic from a simulation perspective (skills increase too quickly, it takes very little time to build complex things, etc), but it "gets to the good parts" in a very satisfying duration in my opinion. The combat takes longer than it should, but then stories can happen.
This narrow view is like claiming Minecraft only has about 2 hours of gameplay, because that's how long it takes to beat the ender dragon. It's perfectly possible to enjoy dwarf fortress in a completely sealed off fortress.
The problem with every game that attempts to be in DF's genre (Rimworld, O2NI, etc) is that, as commercial products first, they lack depth. They're built to be a game first and foremost, rather than than an art project that's fun to to explore. The surface level game mechanics are fun, in many ways improvements over Dwarf Fortress's. But they cannot compete with the incredibly rich simulation complexity that DF has obtained. World generation, history generation, characters with complex feelings and motivations, mechanics that interact with other in myriad ways. DF is a fantasy world simulator first, and a game a distant second.
And that's its biggest strength: compared to other games in the genre, DF is infinitely replayable, because there are an infinite number of interesting things to experience. Kings gaining power thanks to backroom deals with criminal organizations blackmailing their competitors, Necromancers forming towers to hold their book club meetings where they discus "An Analysis of Urist Svolgen's Musings on ovin Gentrout's Review of The Secrets of Life and Death", a werepanther that repeatedly terrorizes not just your fortress, but also all the surrounding sites drowning in a lake because they turned back into a human while trying to swim across a moat.
Can combat be improved? Of course. But I'll take additional mechanics that explode into emergent behavior any day. And I would love to find another game that even comes close, but Rimworld sure as shit ain't it.
It might be the most 'challening' part of the game, but combat is not at all why I play the game, and neither are any specific gameplay mechanics the reason to be honest.
It's hard to put my finger on why I enjoy the game so much, but the fact that the game is about drunken and (mostly) grumpy dwarfs building a fortress inside a mountain in a world with a generated history and lore has a lot to do with it. The same game in a science fiction / space colony setting would be entirely unappealing to me for instance.
Then you can swap them with a couple clicks between training, off duty, and whatever station schedules you need.
Also, generally, it's a way to express solidarity with the reality that a lot of time there's no "hoping for good news", "buck up" is a horrible thing to say, and just... well, fuck cancer.
It's always great to hear of uplifting stories like this.
edit: this
I did manage to get it running with some weird incantation of x86 wine though; it worked exactly once and then not again..
I then just rented a vm from shadow.tech for it instead, which works fine. Also works on linux under proton, if you have any old laptop in a drawer..
So I hope the developers are getting paid handsomely, someone should be, with that level of intense obsession being produced :-)
Congratulations on your much deserved success Toady One and ThreeToe.
I guess I could try running it with Wine but that's not ideal.
Seems like you're not familiar with Proton[0], The "Wine + enhancements" compatibility layer that the native Linux version of Steam uses to run the majority[1] of significant Windows games.
User reports are that DF runs without problems under proton[2,3,4]
Anecdotally, as a thoroughgoing and (evidently) shameless cheapskate, I can report the free "classic" ascii only Windows version[5] works well under stock Wine-staging via apt on my Ubuntu laptop.
Having said all that, I share your sadness that a native Linux version wasn't released along with the windows Steam release, though reportedly it is planned for the future[6,7]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software)
2: https://www.protondb.com/app/975370
3: https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/zwk7b8/linux...
4: https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/zsv6fl/insta...
5: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/df_50_05_win.zip
6: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/11/dwarf-fortress-release...
7: References by Tarn Adams to "the ports", e.g.: https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/z82m0g/im_ta...
Plus I'm sure it works fine on Proton
Congratulations on the well earned success!
I hope they keep working on it.
Congratulations!
My mind is trying to wrap my head whether their lives would have been better or worse had they done this much sooner. I'm not sure I have a conclusion.
They can be satisfied that they didn’t start charging until they had a refined product.
They had "slack" (in the slack/moloch sense) to try out weird ideas that may not have been possible if they were relying on sales revenue instead of donations to stay afloat.
I’m sure their chosen way of working has made them a lot happier than launching a half-baked game as “early access” ten years ago. Even though that could have afforded them a much more comfortable lifestyle, I have a feeling the gaming public might have gotten tired of the game and moved on.
I kinda figured that but I wanted to couch my opinion because the last time it came up I got yelled at a lot when I wanted the sprites to face right when moving right.
Granted, I bet the source is.... labyrinthine and will take quite a while to get up to speed.
Now that they have more than one dev they will probably want to use source control...
Me: Are you guys planning on a Linux version? By that I mean a version with graphics, as the one you released on steam. Thanks
Them: Yeah! The existing code for linux was a little too fiddly to update (I'd always been doing symlinks or whatever that just weren't great and we generally want to do a better job). We've already started the ball rolling bringing somebody on. It won't be in December, but with the existing code we're hopefully it won't take forever and ever.
That is exactly how to play DF. There is no winning. Just do what you want, see what happens. I'm working on creating the greatest library in the world, hoping to get elven and human visitors to learn and contribute even more knowledge.
It does get harder as I get older to enjoy this stuff, but I have my moments.
Maybe now is the time to find out. I look forward to buying it!
Congratulations to the devs!
also i recommend a few youtube tutorials on the game.
I’m happy to see them doing well. I remember playing DF a bit in college and just blown away by the devs and their undying love for the game, all whilst doing it for free no doubt.
Polished and free for so many years....excellent!
- https://discord.com/channels/329272032778780672/105023368224...
It's likely they went with KitFox because they already had a relationship. One of the founders of KitFox is Tanya Short, who's edited two books on procedural game design with the DF programmer, Tarn Adams.