Not of my own but memory as a game mechanic. The article is interesting, in my opinion, but I am a bias fanboy.

The article does brings up an interesting point that Adams have espoused to embrace and that is it is a game with actionable memory. Its an idea that has fascinated me and I have played around designing with as early as Ultima III and other RPGs in its style where, for example, I would pick a cabbage from a farmers field, he might yell at me then and there because he witnessed it, but he would act like he never met me a if I ran off screen and came back. that always felt 'lifeless' and 'gamey' to me. I have often dreamed of games with better memory. A simple encounter with a recounted memory could really go a long way in helping games 'breath' and feel more alive and powerful. I've even gone so far as to create schema and algorithms to simulate degradation over time and strength of an individual memories. Which would generate weighted responses from "Hi there stranger!" to "long time no see!" and "Why are you still here?" Its a set of ideas I have carried with me for a LONG time and one I will work into my work at some point. This memory feature one of the many reasons I love Dwarf Fortress. The procedurally generated history probably has more impact on gameplay than one might suspect and I am only a player of Fortress Mode. I bet the "Stone Soup" like Adventure mode is a 1000x more interesting because of that memory...

http://killscreendaily.com/articles/road-two5six-tarn-and-zach-adams/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


The official site:

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ (it is free btw, they lives off donations)

 

Best outsider article I have read to date:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-of-dwarf-fortress.html?_r=2&ref=magazine&

 

A good game developer-centric article:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131954/interview_the_making_of_dwarf_.php

 

There is no manual really... just a lot of discovery... however you choose in game or out.

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Main_Page

 

Here is the bit about inclusion in MOMA

http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/11/29/video-games-14-in-the-collection-for-starters/

 

Well the news is local if you live in Kitsap County in Washington State, in ye olde United States of America (no to be confused with DC!)

http://www.kitsapsun.com/news/2013/apr/06/kitsap-creators-of-dwarf-fortress-make-losing/

 

As a stalker of me you should know I love me some Dwarf Fortress! I envy Bay 12 in many ways. Being able to work on your life's work is pretty darn cool. I always fear that some day something awful requiring a lot of resources from Tarn and Zach Adams will cause them to be pressured to 'sell out'. I don't think I would mind. Actually all they have to do is ask and I bet thousands upon thousands of us would simply open our hearted wallets and help them through the dilemma.

Nuf said on that.

 

 

 

 


Well I a lot has happened since last update. Lets see if I can summarize.

Doodle Army 2 (DA2) has gotten a lot of attention this round. It was due. We have always had a serious hacker problem. It stems from an architecture choice made from its inception that makes hacking easy. At the inception it was easy to handle bluetooth near proximity networks, and community policed. You just walk over to the offender and knocked the device out of their hand and had words ;).  I could care less about the piracy of in app purchases. I give a lame kudo for keeping a buck or two out of my pocket per script kiddy using your hack. Its a game after all, and those purchases function within the normal expected bounds of the game experience, but what I can not abide by is people hacking to gain "1 shot" kills, infinite life, etc. That affects the positive multiplayer experience in a negative way, which effects the number of people who want to play, etc. So DA2 is getting some serious client and server tweaks as we take steps to make it annoying to hack, etc. The sad part is it ups the amount of work the servers have to do, so it actually costs us more. A downer, but that work has went well. We added some new weapons. Fixed some odd bugs (rocket launcher and map related. We had some issues integrating an ad framework into DA2, that slid us to the right several weeks.

In other great news we are still working on an Android for Doodle Army (the original) and now we are just starting a port to Windows 8. It is a matter of time before we are simply building games in an agnostic as possible fashion then porting to every platform. The days of use being a one platform pony show are coming to an end.

Zombie Road Rage is doing well enough. Not super amazing, but interesting to see how many people are still playing (about 1/15 the amount as DA2)

Flip the Bird... (Flop the Bird) Well the kids love him. We see him going free someday when we have a slow moment. Otherwise it is just underwhelming. We think we know part of the problem. It needs a tutorial, and a 

I am sure I am leaving out something interesting... In any case I better get back before someone realizes I have slipped out of my enclosure.

What I really want to do is fire up Dwarf Fortress and Tekkit (Minecraft)... But that will have to wait... There is much work to be done yet.


There is a tight coupling between the user experience (UX) and the user interface (UI). They are often synonymous, I think they are nearly interchangeable in many aspects.

I think it is safe to say when you block the UI thread with some long running process you are *blocking* the UX from being as good as it could be. Maybe when multiple processors were not really prevalent I could accept it. Now I can not. I know better and now so do you (or at least you have my word of caution.) Short of citing examples and writing tutorials to show you I know better you know better from reading this PSA. You have an entry point to discovery. Go do it! NOW! The next time I see an app run and go get data and block the UX and create an unresponsive app I will bring out the gauntlet of shame and slap you with it! Since no one really reads my rants the world is pretty safe ... For the moment. Soon to follow is my PSA on creating threads all 'willy nilly'. There is a time and place for it... A good rule of thumb, never spin up another thread. And then only do so when a queued/scheduled task will not suffice. Do everything on one thread AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE, but be smart and don't tank your UX (I know I know, its not easy, this is tough love time.)

There is one exception to my tolerance, Dwarf Fortress, although since having gone to OpenGL (did I date my playing time?) I rarely encounter anything less than 45-60FPS except when my fortress is collapsing and/or filling with lava and water... (physics/fluid dynamics baby! the simulation demands it! the simulation must have its synchronous way with you! I have a very unhealthy love of Dwarf Fortress... I know this...)


Time to get your Friday nerd on! Here is a gaming oddity. I didn't actually look into Dwarf Fortress (DF) till a few years ago. I was on a personal quest for some kind of time filling 'simple' RPG when a friend (Miccah Merrill) suggested I get over my hangup and try it. There was a new adventure mode (satisfying my desire for an RPG), but I never got that far! I'll try it someday along with Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup RPG... There is simply not enough time in the day. And the latest release notes said something about mining carts. OK now this I got to see!

I agree with the source blog's title and the graph is rather accurate... I am glad and sad I waited this long in life to finally stop whining and get into this game/simulation/lifestyle. Bay12 Games (Tarn Adams and his brother) have been crowd sourcing this game for decades. They are the first kickstarter before kickstarting was cool since they operate solely on donations. Read this well written article by the NY Times for the full history.

 

If you ever want to be bored to tears about my escapades in DF just ask!

I don't know if the following image was original work of the blog post I caught site of it on, but here the link. And the image is being served from my service (as a courtesy to their bandwidth, what are the accepted courtesies these days?) 

http://dodonov.net/blog/2009/09/12/one-game-to-rule-them-all/ 


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