You talk about madness and your scientists summoning demons and other horrible things,can we promote this and go down the path of madness and run a colony of cultist and have it be a feature and have it playable ?
I want to have a colony of mad scientists who have free reign on their research while I push them down a path of the occult
And will there be a alpha/beta maybe even a kickstart ? And can we buy into the beta like minecraft ?
It will be possible to play with a bunch of mad cultists, but the game is designed so that these influences are extremely unstable. You will definitely be playing on hard mode, so to speak
Regarding beta purchases, Kickstarter, and other mechanisms for fundraising: we don't like to receive money for anything other than a finished product. There will of course be lots of testing though, and if you guys are interested we would love to have your input when we're at that point, but it will be a while.
Regarding the lower user base: yes. It's really lame when you alienate players because they don't have beefy enough machines, and this happens with
every game, including our software rendering in Dredmor, believe it or not (though obviously less so than CE). We are tailoring the system requirements to the hardware that we think will be necessary for some of the features of the game which are core tenets of its design, which refreshingly have very little to do with the graphics. In such a case, we can't lower the sys reqs without impacting our simulation layer, so that's where we set the bar. We're doing everything we can to squeeze every last flop out of your CPU to make sure these requirements are as low as possible, but that will only get us so far.
I also want to mention that, as you guys have no doubt suspected, we are huge fans of Dwarf Fortress =) We are really looking forward to contributing our own little piece to the story-centric colony builder genre.
(Hi!)