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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Kitfox's Note
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
Updates, Date Explanation, and Toady + ThreeToe at PAX West!
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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Kitfox's Note
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.
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
Undead Lieutenants Get More Magical Powers
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
Kitfox's Note
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
Petting Animals is Important (and Maybe Deadly)
Hi!
Way back in July of last year, I added the ability to add party members and pets to character creation in the Adventurer Mode of Dwarf Fortress (which is the RPG part, rather than the fort management sim.) Back then, I left some bits unfinished, and for last week and next week, I'll be cleaning that up so that I can get started on adventurer villainy and investigations.
Last year, we'd already completed the ability to start with named pets, the ability to lead them around and pack items on them (if they are an appropriate animal like a mule or horse, rather than, say, a cavy. There are a score of options, and the elves have more than a hundred), and the basic ability to ride mounts. Relative mount velocity impacts weapon damage. However, I didn't handle the party aspect of riding and some other issues.
That's done now! You can change the speed of your mount. If it's something normal like a horse, it has traditional gaits like gallop, canter, and trot. Your party members will mount when you mount, and dismount when you dismount, if they have their own mounts and you aren't in the heat of combat, and they'll try to follow you around and adjust their speeds as best they can.
Somebody asked a long time ago about undead mounts, and I didn't have an answer. But after a bit of work, necromancer adventurers can ride any mountable undead creature that they raise.
Also, importantly, after this update is finished you'll be able to pet animals. They don't have to be friendly (or not undead) for you to try, but assuming that risk is up to you.
Next up, I'll be handling tactical party combat. That is, the ability to indirectly command or directly control the multiple characters you can start with now, as well as giving commands to others you recruit later. Then we'll be to the main matter of adventurer interactions with villains, then to fort mode.
- Tarn
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Kitfox's Note
There's no way we can talk about animals without letting you see what they might look like, so here's a small peek at some of the sprites that Meph and Mayday have been working on. Nothing is set in stone, but it's nice to see!
They are small but powerful. :') Also, we do have a Dwarf Fortress newsletter sign up for these updates in ~email format~ if that tickles your fancy. But otherwise, see you around!
- Victoria
Hiring Assassins is Hard Work
Hello!
As we noted in the last news post, I'm finishing up the villain work that was in progress before we move on to getting the Steam release together, and this work had just hit the 'post world generation' phase, where we take our foundational but abstract data and code that was used to make the world's history and get it into a form that can be used in player fortresses and in Dwarf Fortress's RPG mode. In the previous post, I'd just finished a basic assassination plot.
The next step was to get the villain's lieutenants and handlers to work with assassins. In our existing plots from DF history generation, the villains don't always contact the assassin directly, in order to better conceal their identities. This adds some complications once you get into play, because the villain needs to contact the handler, and then the handler needs to hire the assassin, and each of these pairs need to meet in some location, which isn't always simple since the desired assassin (or the handler) might be doing something else, making an immediate meeting impossible. There are various sorts of possible missed connections, some unavoidable, but the basic two-step plots are working now.
However, sometimes a villain or handler is just too important to go on a lengthy secret trip (they are a ruler, say). To solve this problem, I've allowed sufficiently important people to send messages more abstractly. An important villain might send a message to a handler, who then travels physically to hire an assassin, or a villain might physically travel to speak to a highly-placed corrupt official, who then sends word to an assassin via message. The messages still take time to travel, and they'll be a form of evidence when we get to the investigation process, where you as a fortress mode player or adventurer are trying to unravel whatever plot you've encountered.
But in most situations, there will be people moving around, going about villainous business, and these will be the same people that arrive at your tavern in fort mode, looking to meet a conspirator or otherwise cause trouble for you.
Some supporting features from history generation have also needed to make the transition to play. For instance, as I mentioned last time, we added some religious information (on top of mercenaries, merchant companies, etc.) in order to give the villains more connections for their plots, and I spent some time transferring that into a form that can be used once play starts. Each culture now tracks religious demographics and certain historical data (such as persecution and famous sermons) in a way that the in-play civilians can see. These include dwarves immigrating to your fortress, and the people you meet as adventurer.
Additionally, I began updating the other (non-assassination) plots - there's still a bit to do there, right where the action of the plot happens (whether it's sabotage or a theft), but they mostly use the same code, because concepts like 'handlers' work the same regardless of the plot.
- Tarn
(P.S. a note from Kitfox Games: talk about this and other DF lore on the official, friendly Discord! This past week we've had great discussions of hatching forbidden eggs, coffin advantages, and disarming prisoners...)
Development Progress: Plots and Villains
Hi! This is Tarn Adams, a.k.a. Toady One.
Ha ha, yes, we have a Steam News section! We thought we'd start posting here when I was able to work on the graphics code in earnest (I'm completing the half-finished villain features before that begins), but we've been reminded that a lot of people don't see our regular development logs over at Bay 12, and additionally, the artists have been hard at work and we can certainly start sharing what they are creating before the coding begins.
To start, I'll just use this opening post to make sure everybody is broadly on the same page with the odd creature that is Dwarf Fortress development.
Back in July of last year, before there was a publishing contract or much thought of one, we finished our last major release cycle, and started up on the next version for what we now call Dwarf Fortress Classic. Basically, the fortresses that you play in the game will be subject to devious plots of NPCs in the world well beyond the normal sieges that have been in the game since the beginning.
We thought this would take several months, though it's not that unusual that we're rolling up on almost a year now. And of course, something unusual happened in the meantime! We're have a Steam page now, and the work toward a Steam release has begun. The new music and sounds are complete, thanks to Dabu! Meanwhile, Mike and Patrick are producing lots of great sprites for the game. We'll have more on the art progress to date in a future news post.
For now, I'll just try to join the stream of dev logs, what we've been doing for the last months, up into the News section here. Due to the layered nature of the game, where a world history leads to a dynamic in-play world where you control either a fort or a single character, new features are generally added in the following fashion:
1: the broad contours of the feature are added to the world map+history generator. For this release, that means hundreds of plots unfolding over decades or longer, operating all over the map simultaneously, but without a lot of actual moving creatures. Most of the logistical details are abstracted away.
2: make it work in play, in the detailed ongoing world simulation, away from the player. The logistics are handled here. Most of the data and code can be transferred over from world generation, but we often need extra information and mechanics. For instance, a villainous plot that used to rely on a plotter contacting a saboteur with an intermediary, easily and abstractly, now has to actually see more than one person moving over the map, arriving to meet the person they want to meet in a defined location, and advancing the plot step by step (where many steps didn't even exist before.)
3: handle it in Adventurer Mode, the RPG side of the game, which is quite underdeveloped compared to the main Fortress Mode, but it has the advantage of being very granular. If something is wrong with a feature, it's much easier to spot it if you are walking around inside of it, interacting with each detail. For villains, this means two things - adventurers that can be villains, and adventurers that can investigate villains.
4: make the new feature work in Fortress Mode. Having worked with the feature for some time by this point in detail, we can focus on the player experience and getting the new mechanics hooked up in an interesting fashion that interacts with other player-facing pieces of the game. With the villain release, for example, this includes the existing fortress justice system, and the existing ability to send dwarves out on missions.
So where are we in this process, and when can we get started on the Steam features and graphics coding (while the artists continue working)?
We're in the middle of step two. The hard foundational part, world generation, is complete. The villainous plots are done in history, all of their main pieces work, and they can be quite entertaining! Assassination, sabotage, embezzlement, theft, coups, corruption, bribery, counter-intelligence and surveillance, with mercenaries, merchant companies, guilds, religions, and new relationships thrown in to give the plotters and their adversaries more connections and tools to work with.
It's important to note that the villain release I'm talking about here will be the classic, free version (without graphics, so, not yet the Steam release) -- though of course it will then be included in the Steam release. After the villains release is complete, we'll be able to start in on the code for the graphical version, which of course will have all the villain features along with everything else.
I'm sorry that the development plans are a bit convoluted here, with this unusual initial step to complete. The DF boat has been sailing along and gaining tonnage for many, many years now, and turning it can be quite a process, but we will arrive at our destination, as we have many times before. Never anywhere this shiny, though, he he he. It is good to be seeing the pixel cats and alpacas.
We'll be keeping everybody updated regularly here on Steam News from now on, as well as continuing the Bay 12 development logs as usual.
- Tarn
Announcing: Lucifer Within Us!
Last night, we revealed our newest title: Lucifer Within Us, from the creator of the Shrouded Isle.
As a digital exorcist in Lucifer Within Us, you’re asked to solve murders, purify the possessed, and purge their daemons.
Question your suspects. Watch their movements and testimonies closely, as the reconstruction may be based on lies. Use contradictions and clues to form your own hypothesis. Who is lying and why? Who is possessed? You must decide what is the truth for yourself, based on the evidence presented.
Real mystery-solving.
No hidden plot twists, no QTEs, no random puzzles or mini-games, just you and the information. Don’t just act like a detective -- BE a detective. Finding the murderer will require true understanding of the case, not just following the story.
Banish daemonic A.I.
Enter the minds of citizens to gain insight into what they don’t want you to know. Dig through their subconscious and accuse the guilty in order to cast out their daemons, for the good of the Inquisition. Any damage done to a citizen’s psyche as a result of quarantine, exorcism, or rehabilitation is a consequence of their own immorality.
Expose the False Utopia.
Through centuries of indoctrination, humanity is taught to think pure thoughts and speak true words, untainted by falsehoods and delusions. Yet beneath this facade of purity, you find dark desires stir deep within people’s hearts, yearning for release.
