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[fricy]

Yes, it would be great if DF could be finished in a year or two.

No, I don't see it happening ever. Sorry to crush your idea quietlyconfident, but there's a reason why people choose to do jobs they are best at. Toady is an otaku,(imho) his comfort zone is coding and not managing people. And no amount of (crowd) funding will turn him into a CEO of DF ltd, who's prime responsibility is telling other people what to do. That simple. Nothing good would come out of forcing someone into a position they are uncomfortable in, I'm 100% sure that such a venture would be a disaster of epic proportions.

But not all is lost: look at the 3rd party utilities, especially the development of dfhack in the past year or so. They are close to adding full graphics support, lighting system, the GUI is much better then ever, etc. All done for free by the community. Some -official- support by Toady would be great, maybe a little incentive could help the wheels turning a little faster (doubt it), but it will get there on it's own eventually.

[10ebbor10]

If I remember correctly, Toady's not much of a people's person.

But you should ask the only people who knows about it. I mean, parts of the graphic system has been programmed by someone else.

[hermes]

Cool.  So, I think that it is necessary to take into account that the project is always growing, and ask whether the support structure is also growing.  A development methodology that works for years while a project is in its early stages is not necessarily one that will work later when the codebase is 2x or 3x or 4x the size it used to be.  Though I understand your point that there is something to be said for not changing what is working; there is certainly always room to examine what is being done and ask if improvements can be made?  I don't think anyone is claiming that this is the best of all possible
development processes.

Well, I think it is the best, or pretty near to it.  The development process has given us the game as it is to date, with an even better version on the horizon.  What more could we ask for?  I'm not 65, so I don't really have any need to call for faster development.

To respond to your points here in reverse order: I agree, and likewise I believe that there are some important real world considerations that the community might want to think about in terms of possibly stepping up support.  One of them is, for those who would like to see the game get more polished (fewer bugs, better interface, etc.) how quickly is that likely to happen?

Not quickly, I imagine.  But Toady has said it will happen, so I expect it will.  Again, what's the rush? 

Perhaps without a serious discussion and proposal re: crowdfunding, Bay12 think that the current level of support is the best that the community can do.  But what if a better deal comes along?  I know I know, they said they wouldn't.  But there is a lot of money at stake, and these guys are regular people, and it is crazy to rule out the possibility.  If the community could get its act together and put together some sort of serious crowd-funding / community funding proposal, maybe they wouldn't need to go outside the community for support.

A hypothetical is not a good reason to chuck out your modus operandi.

And (in my humble opinion), Yes, I definitely would want Toady to stop programming (as much) . . . IF, as a result, he spent more time game-designing, and the things he designs made their way into released versions of the game quicker.  Maybe that means, Toady designs something and then roughs out a feature, but leaves it to other programmers to work the bugs out, do all the menus, etc.  Maybe that means, Toady does all the first pass programming and the new guy just fixes bugs.  There are a lot of ways to integrate new members into a team.

Basically, I think it is a win for the players-of-the-game anytime hours that Toady is currently spending doing non-unique work (e.g. fixing bugs, transforming designs into code, etc.) get turned into hours that Toady spends doing something that is unique and special coming from him (e.g. designing a new cool combat thing, or whatever - something creative).

Some people actually like programming.  I like the confluence of game design and programming, thinking about how players will react to the AI and so on, and anyone who does this for years as a job by choice probably enjoys it too.  Maybe Toady would like a break and he would like to just design - but he's been doing this for ages and that doesn't seem likely.  Maybe help would be good, but trust and commitment are things that only Toady can decide upon.

As to management and so on, sure, those are issues in any organization.  I don't think it is reasonable though to think that the answer to management issues is to not manage people.  Certainly it is an option, and it appears to have gotten them to where they are now.  But once again, is it unreasonable to think about improvements?  Is the current state sustainable?

I, and others I guess, are not against a kickstarter per se, there basically was one previously with the animal donation drive which was a great idea.  But you have to appreciate that most people doing kickstarters are starting from zero... Bay12 is starting from an almost unique and extremely enviable position within the gaming world whereby they have complete artistic freedom and, currently, a steady income by donations.  Any move that *could* endanger that is probably not a good idea, especially if the motivating reason is, "I wantz moar game NAO!!1!".  If everyone just sits back and enjoys the game provided to us for free and we happily discuss the new features as they are added, we can enjoy this game for many years to come.  We don't need it finished now or in the next year or the next two years.

edit - Would like to add, this is all very player centric, and perhaps Toady would really like some help, maybe.  In which case, if he said, "Hey, we have this great guy to join the team and we need money to pay him," then that would be a decent reason for a donation drive/kickstarter.  But it would all need to be a top down thing I think, not really organized from the grassroots up.  Personally though, if DF development was getting a bit stale I'd rather Bay12 released another project to develop alongside DF and hopefully keep morale up, rather than get someone else to take the reins of DF.  Space game, please!  *wink*

[quietlyconfident]

Yes, it would be great if DF could be finished in a year or two.

No, I don't see it happening ever. Sorry to crush your idea quietlyconfident, but there's a reason why people choose to do jobs they are best at. Toady is an otaku,(imho) his comfort zone is coding and not managing people. And no amount of (crowd) funding will turn him into a CEO of DF ltd, who's prime responsibility is telling other people what to do. That simple. Nothing good would come out of forcing someone into a position they are uncomfortable in, I'm 100% sure that such a venture would be a disaster of epic proportions.

But not all is lost: look at the 3rd party utilities, especially the development of dfhack in the past year or so. They are close to adding full graphics support, lighting system, the GUI is much better then ever, etc. All done for free by the community. Some -official- support by Toady would be great, maybe a little incentive could help the wheels turning a little faster (doubt it), but it will get there on it's own eventually.

Hi, thanks for your reply.

Regarding "finishing" DF in a year or two, I don't see that happening either regardless of whatever development strategy is pursued, and it wouldn't be the goal of a crowdfunding effort (IMO).  I'm really just interested in getting faster updates and bug fixes.

As to the rest, I have a couple of responsive thoughts in no particular order:

• I wonder, how many people posting on this board actually know Toady (aka Mr. Adams?) I definitely do not, and I sort of guess that few people on this forum actually know him personally (e.g. have shaken his hand and/or had a beer with him.)  Could be wrong but that is my guess.  For those that don't know him, including myself, then I would discount very strongly their opinions of him, his motivations, and how he'll act in various hypothetical situations.  As such, I don't really have any opinions about what he will or will not do, whether he would be a good or a bad manager, etc.  I prefer to just have an open mind about it, and assume that in most respects he is just an ordinary guy who stumbled into creating a cool game.
• Nonetheless, judging from the comments, people don't generally seem to give Toady too much credit in the career flexibility / intellectual adaptiveness / working in a team department.  Sure, he does now what he does now.  But is it impossible for a person to change his mind or learn something new?  Clearly he is a creative guy, I don't know the man but from everything I've read about him, and especially given the fact that there already is a small development team working on DF, I don't see any reason why adding another would totally change everything. And though he very well may enjoy both coding and design, it is a pretty common thing for people to get their fill of the grunt work and move on to higher level thinking.  I'm not convinced that he wouldn't want to or couldn't do the same.
• Just to be clear, I'm not advocating any sort of "forcing" or making anyone uncomfortable & so on. My proposal is merely, lets think about whether it would be possible to organize a way to gather more money for DF development, and present the option to Bay12.  If they really hate the idea so much they'll turn it down.  Or perhaps, if a large portion of the community turned out to say, we'd like you to take more money if that would mean more development faster, maybe they would consider it and make changes.  Of course, maybe not.  It is their project.

[quietlyconfident]

Well, I think it is the best, or pretty near to it.  The development process has given us the game as it is to date, with an even better version on the horizon.  What more could we ask for?  I'm not 65, so I don't really have any need to call for faster development.
. . .

Thanks for your reply.  I understand (though I do not share) your view re: hurrying. One reason I'd like development to be faster is that, if I'm going to play this game for the next X months / years; I'd rather it get better sooner so I spend more time playing the best version of it, rather than have the improved version appear closer to (possibly) getting tired of it or being interested in something new.

A hypothetical is not a good reason to chuck out your modus operandi.

Blind conservatism is not really a good reason to keep doing what you've been doing.  Sorry, couldn't resist jumping in with an aphorism of my own 

But you have to appreciate that most people doing kickstarters are starting from zero... Bay12 is starting from an almost unique and extremely enviable position within the gaming world whereby they have complete artistic freedom and, currently, a steady income by donations.  Any move that *could* endanger that is probably not a good idea. . .

Attached is a chart of DF revenue.  IMHO, I don't think it is steady, and I think it may be reasonable to have concerns that it is not sufficient to support the interest of the current team forever.

[Man In Zero G]

Attached is a chart of DF revenue.  IMHO, I don't think it is steady, and I think it may be reasonable to have concerns that it is not sufficient to support the interest of the current team forever.

Please do not take the tone of what I am about to say the wrong way:
This chart is terrible. And your opinion of the woefully inadequate data sample is horribly misleading. The donation amounts are completely transparent and posted for everyone to see, going back to 2007. And the revenue has been historically climbing. Your alarming graphic merely shows a declining portion of a financial pattern that will spike again with the next release, as it always does. Every time there has been a long delay between releases, such as we have now, the donations suffer. Then the release comes, and it the donations skyrocket again. It really doesn't take an economics major to understand this concept. And as far as the donations not being "sufficient to support the interest of the current team forever": cost of living varies wildly from location to location. Since 2008, Toady has made more every year on donations while doing something he loves than my wife and I combined in our full time jobs. And we're comfortably raising two kids. Toady has himself and his cat to support, after ThreeToe's cut of the donations. Think on that.

As far as the rest of your comments in the thread:
Thank you for posting, and I understand that you believe you are correct. But the thing you need to understand is this: The people disagreeing with you are not just being mean, or trying to say they know what Toady would do, or whatever other counterarguments you have used. It's just that most of them have been part of this community for a long time. And we've had this very discussion, and similar ones, many times over the years. And quite a lot of us pay obsessive amounts of attention to every scrap of information about the development of the game that Toady gives us. So, for example, we've read (and heard) him say many times that he has no interest in bringing in more coders to help - this has been suggested an incredible number of times over the years - and because this is such a popular suggestion among new forumites, and it is posted so often, if his opinion had changed on the matter, it's the kind of thing he'd mention. It's certainly not that we think him incapable of working with anyone - it's that he's specifically said he does not want to do it. Also, you seem to labor under the misconception that Bay 12 is more than 2 guys. It's 2 guys. There's more in the credits, yeah, but their contributions were pretty much either licensing to let Toady use code that they had made (note, not even the guy who did the graphics upgrade got his hands on the DF source, he just got the relevant code that DF's graphics were based on, if I recall correctly), or as volunteer play testers. The actual permanent team is just the Adams brothers. Which may color your impression about the donations being inadequate.
I think it's great that you want to think of ways to increase funding for Bay 12. And some kind of crowd funding with the promise of working on a specific thing next could be a great idea - or it could actually slow him down - or lead to a disappointment if the specific promised thing is a letdown. We've done it before, as mentioned already, with the animal sponsorship. It raised a lot of donations. It added a bunch of animals to the release. It also definitely added development time to the release, as it was a side project to the release's main features. And while some of them were great additions, that actually have an impact (honeybees!), others are kind of lackluster - often because the animal itself isn't all that interesting in reality. Which is kind of disappointing.
Basically, what I'm trying to say here is, he does better work when he's doing what he's inspired to do in the moment, we hear more about it, his posts are excited and frequent. When he's coding the things he's not as excited about, well, we go weeks sometimes without a peep. It's better to let the man code what he wants than to try to impose our will on the process, through what is honestly bribery - "We're donating more for this specific feature, do it now!" is not a good idea at all. And that is, honestly, the impression your initial post (that you've backpedaled from) gave.
The reality of the situation is, he has turned down (considerable) amounts of money from publishers who would have furnished him with a coding team and let him design away - what makes you think that the community saying "we'd like you to take more money if that would mean more development faster" would get a different response? That's frankly selfish, and a terrible attitude to have, you might as well be saying "we're not going to donate this money if you don't work faster/hire help/do it our way". And it is. Because any "donation" that comes with strings attached is not a donation- it's a bribe. Taking bribes make you beholden to the influence of others. And, hey, I don't know the man personally, but history shows that's not how he wants to do business.

[Cobbler89]

(I want to preface this by saying this is meant as constructive commentary more than naysaying, even if there's some criticism involved.)

• However, there is no connection between those things and the particular person who types the code into the computer.  At present, with fewer programmers, the creators design feature X, then spend a week coding feature X, dealing with compiler errors, memory leaks, end-of-array access issues, & so on.
• Imagine if Toady could design feature X, have a conversation with a programmer on precisely how he wants it to work, and then go on to designing / working on feature Y, . . . 
• In other words, with more programmers, the creators could spend more time doing what they are clearly and uniquely amazing at - designing and directing the progress of a super cool game; and less time doing what is a fungible and commoditized skill that lots of people are also good at - coding.

Spoiler: Length discussion of coding, fallibility and tradeoffs (click to show/hide)

Unfortunately that isn't the whole story of how it works -- even if the whole story is nuanced and may admit of pros and cons, programming jobs are never as simple as somebody else making the program happen on their time instead of yours based on instructions that take less time than coding. Even the programmers who are also the designers (Toady and Threetoe) are constantly revising the design based not just on ideas, but on what they find feasible to do at the present time in coding. Furthermore, even they often make bugs that affect the gameplay and may not be isolated for years (no joke: there's a recently figured out bug that 9/10 of all creatures will not grow larger while at the fortress, and for years all we knew was that militias and especially hundreds of fortress-bred war dogs seem inexplicably puny). Think of it this way: if you found a programmer who was ninety-nine percent perfect, then asked him to write a hundred thousand lines of code, how many lines of code on average will contain a bug? In the corporate world all sorts of systems have to be put in place to deal with this one simple problem of programmer fallibility, entire frameworks of testing and user agreements and project management and oversight into hiring more developers and the list goes on -- and gets wilder the farther you get from directly influencing the quality of the code, until at the extreme the entire I.T. department could be reorganized on the theory that some improvements could be made to the system if only the entire structure was different. (If you want evidence of this, I suggest talking to anyone you happen to know who works in a corporate environment. You don't have to take my word for it.) Obviously, Toady and Threetoe aren't exactly set up to run a whole organization with the kind of frameworks that could do that (or attempt to do that, as the case may be), and it's understandable if they wouldn't want to be for one reason or another. But more importantly it's not, in any case, a matter of sending the coding off to a programmer and having removed that work from Toady and Threetoe, it's a matter of exchanging one form of work -- coding it themselves, with its pros and cons -- for another -- making sure that the guy who is coding it not only knows what to do but manages to do it. They're lucky enough that for certain select parts of the program they've been able to have someone they know pitch in and actually be helpful (the graphics, in particular); it's quite unlikely they'd have the same success with anything broader or more intricate within the game, not because of anything that would need proving about the code's complexity or the measurable aspects of the job but simply because sending the work of coding to someone else doesn't actually make it go away, not without much larger frameworks in place to support such separation of designer and implementer while still getting the finished product evaluated by the designers easily and corrected if necessary in a timely fashion.

Sorry about the Wall o' Text; I have a "talent" for not explaining things briefly... and this is a pet peeve of mine based on professional experience in I.T. I should clarify that more programmers on a project *can* sometimes make it more manageable if they're all sufficiently good *and* all understand it in and out, but with a life's-work project like Dwarf Fortress the kind of understanding that would have to be opened up to have that in and out thoroughness is arguably more a personal than a professional decision. Without additional project members being closely tied to the project and understanding it almost as well as the designer, you run back into the situation that the designer would still have to deal with the work done by the coder in place of doing the coding himself, because the only thing that would allow the other developers to correct and improve their own work is if they truly understood the goal it was supposed to meet and weren't simply told to "do X".

Just to be clear, I'm not advocating any sort of "forcing" or making anyone uncomfortable & so on. My proposal is merely, lets think about whether it would be possible to organize a way to gather more money for DF development, and present the option to Bay12.  If they really hate the idea so much they'll turn it down.  Or perhaps, if a large portion of the community turned out to say, we'd like you to take more money if that would mean more development faster, maybe they would consider it and make changes.  Of course, maybe not.  It is their project.

I think this is pretty reasonable. You get some people coming in here and saying, "Dwarf Fortress is a great game, but man, it needs to have a development team so it won't be in alpha forever and will get actual graphics! Let's pressure the Adams brothers to sell out!" Naturally, the community that enjoys the game now and likes what Toady and Threetoe plan on doing and the sort of results they've been getting from Toady about his plans so far don't care much for such suggestions (and after getting used to fending them off, many of the forumites understandably jump on whatever sounds like the same old thing being pushed again). But that's clearly different from what you're saying, at least in this bullet point. There's no harm in letting Toady and Threetoe know what sort of options we'd be willing and ready to support if they should ever feel that such options are sensible from their end.

Maybe we should try to shift more of the perennial questions about Toady buying into a development team or something to improve the rate of development in this sort of direction: what would we be willing to do to support him, what can we do to support him given his current decision, and try not to argue past that. After all, it's not like he didn't do the animal fund drive for the previous release; maybe somebody will come up with something creative that really does help us get what we'd like and helps him give it to us without compromising his unique connection to the development of the game, provided they're thinking about it in terms of how we can help within Toady's preferences more than what Toady could change to make development more productive.

A hypothetical is not a good reason to chuck out your modus operandi.

Blind conservatism is not really a good reason to keep doing what you've been doing.  Sorry, couldn't resist jumping in with an aphorism of my own 

If something that was done before worked so far or worked at some point in the past, it's not strictly blind to give it the benefit of the doubt, since its prior success (or the implied perception of success by whoever thought it was worth continuing) is at least a little evidence in its favor; although maybe not much in all cases. Sorry, another pet peeve.

Attached is a chart of DF revenue.  IMHO, I don't think it is steady, and I think it may be reasonable to have concerns that it is not sufficient to support the interest of the current team forever.

[ninja'd, but posting anyway...] If you go back through old Bay 12 Reports and compile a chart going back multiple years, and cross-reference with releases, you can see (or at least, I saw when I tried a few months ago) a trend of an overall average increase and of spikes correlating to releases -- which, with the current alpha-till-Toady's-out-of-ideas development model, are going to continue being put out indefinitely. ;^) It's stabler than it looks at first glance, although I'm sure Toady and Threetoe have thought about what they'll do if it deteriorates one of these years, but that is, as it's been pointed out, hypothetical at this point.

[weenog]

Just making something up here, lets say you could combine the "code maintenance" and the "training" by having the new guy learn about the code by reorganizing it.  Creative input not required, just making the code do the same thing but be organized differently.  Sometimes this is referred to as refactoring.  So lets say the new guy and Toady are programmers of equal strength.  The new guy spends two months refactoring some portion of the code, and Toady (again, hypothetically) spends 100% of his time tutoring him on the code.  Once that is completed, that code is more efficiently organized, and the new guy knows all about it, so all of the sudden development can go 1.9x as fast as before.  Perhaps not 2x as fast, because he'll have to ask Toady a bunch of questions about how he wants this or that feature to work once the bugs are fixed.  If things worked out like this, the break even point would be 4 months.  In other words, for months 1-4, less forward progress has been made than if the new guy had never shown up. But in month 5, everything is caught up and now development proceeds twice as fast as before.

Brooks's law is a bigger problem than you give it credit for; those numbers in your hypothetical are hilariously optimistic.  The mitigation options there are not in place and likely not applicable.  Understand, this is not a modular program designed for comprehensibility and assembled with various discrete plugins to a standardized frame.  This is an 11 year old, organically grown program, designed by a self-taught coder, who writes for the comprehensibility and understanding of just 2 people, and still winds up surprised by his own results sometimes.  Getting new coders up to speed would be similar to trying to get them to understand, manipulate, and control a unique living tumour while it's still growing.  After growing them some new eyes that can view the tumour in the only spectrum in which it's visible.

[Mrhappyface]

Hahaha, 3.3 millions dollars. Hahahahahaha

[Cruxador]

For those who want actual graphs, there's this:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlDpW-JgGnDkdFNDck1zOWI4TjZ3anRvaVdTS1Q1ZXc#gid=13
Somewhere along the line it got really messy, so I've made a more intelligible graph there with just the monthly income.

[Crinkles]

For those who want actual graphs, there's this:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlDpW-JgGnDkdFNDck1zOWI4TjZ3anRvaVdTS1Q1ZXc#gid=13
Somewhere along the line it got really messy, so I've made a more intelligible graph there with just the monthly income.

Those are some pretty cool graphs...now adjust them for inflation! ^_^

[WanderingKid]

Not-So-Quietly Confident, I'm going to put this in east coast terms, maybe it'll help.

If Toady stands up, says "Gimme more, but only via Syrian Paypal", half this community would open Syrian Paypal accounts and factor in their stake.

Then double it.

You're utterly convinced you know what the man making this game wants better then he is willing to admit in press releases.

Cool. Guess what.  There's a donation button.

DO THAT.

Until Toady and/or Threetoe stand up and say "Hey, guys, my kids are hungry", your legs are as worth standing on as a lower broken spine and one broken arm by a dwarf trying to clean themselves down at the magma forges.

Toady has a dream.  He likes his dream.  He's never said he's making a game we can play tomorrow.  Hell, in a recent DF talk he mentioned this game possibly being finished in 2030 sometime.  He's quite comfortable with a single thread, x86 game releasing 20 years from now.

I like his dream.  Get off the pressure, let the man work at his own pace so I can play in his world.

[Cruxador]

Until Toady and/or Threetoe stand up and say "Hey, guys, my kids are hungry"

Probably going to be a while on that, since not only are they both childless and single (as of the last time a reporter bothered to mention it) but Toady's said that he doesn't want kids as that could cut into dev time.

[Irenices]

Didn't Toady put in some crowd gathered data on stone density a while back?  I think thats probably the only type of help he's willing to accept.

[Ranold]

I think the OP makes a mistake by assuming that the developer goals are the same as his. While crowdfunding is nice, it also requires commitment to some kind of goal, focus and time table. Which would require DF becoming a real game. The forum counters and popular mods, should give a rough estimate, as to what should be the focus of development.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Right now DF is not a good game, at best its a drawing board for a game, and at worst is an an example for how not to make games, which should be contrasted with Paradox games which provide games with deep/complex gameplay and not just deep/complex learning curve as here

However, from the developer perspective, DF is hitting a very specific niche, has no real competition,offers a steady income(from the charts above) and very large/active technically orientated community that does many things for free i.e. graphics,sound,UI,tweaks and content (tilesets,stonesense, soundsense, threapist, DFhack scripts, various mods etc etc).

Basically this way it is the dev is get paid todo what he wants, providing for the rest a "platform" to build on.