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[flap]

Well, It is really cool to, but it also really cool to get some new from the guy who made it :

- DF has been released since 2 or 3 weeks now. What do you think of it ? Did the player have the reaction you've suspected ? have you been surprised in anyway ?
-Of course we keep sending bug reports of any kind. Did expect that much, or did you fear much nastier things ?
-Finally, we, of course, keep suggesting all sort of things. Is it more than what you expected ? Less ? Different ?

Well basically, just to know, what you fell with your work yet; and if the reaction met your expectations...

[Capntastic]

-What other games influence you, both positively and negatively?

-Do you play an instrument?

-What mad conversation gave birth to the idea of Liberal Crime Squad?

[Toady One]

I was surprised about the forum threads at other places.  That was more than I expected.

The playtesters were mostly happy, so I thought a lot of people would be able to bear with the interface/text and enjoy the game.

The bug reports/feedback are about the same tone/mix as what we were getting during playtesting as well, just in higher volume, which makes locating and resolving issues faster.

Lessee, the list for Threetoe and I might be a little different...  but mostly the same.  I liked:  Starflight I, Seven Cities of Gold, Rogue/Hack 1.03/Larn, Pirates, Civ, Dune II, Ultima IV, Ultima Underworld...  and many others, pretty much all fairly old.  The last computer game I remember really getting into was Transport Tycoon.  We also went to the arcade every week or so, and we had an Atari 2600 and a VIC-20 and a Super/Nintendo.  It's harder to trace the influences though...  I've been programming as long as I can remember.  Both Threetoe and I threw together hundreds of strange little ASCII games before we were teenagers, and then we got more into graphics and made many other strange games.  On the whole, experiences at school, movies, books and pen & paper games influenced us more than the available computer games did, although some of the games I listed above were formative.

I've been playing the guitar for the past 3 years or so.  I did the main DF music (including all the flubbed notes and buzzing and so on).  I have a sarod, and I can't play it, but that's what you hear in the intro...  random strings until it sounded about like what I wanted.  I've also accumulated an electric keyboard and some drums over the years, and a few harmonicas, but I can't play them either.  I used to play the flute, but I don't remember much about it now.  I can do a Bb scale I guess.

LCS came out of wanting to make a game with an Oubliette-like interface for no reason.  The rest is just mind wandering and latching on to some strange crap, and then talking it out at some point.  LCS started as a quickly released joke, like a bunch of our other games, and all of the thoughts surrounding those are somewhat blurry.

edit: past not passed....

[ September 11, 2007: Message edited by: Toady One ]

[Curiousepic]

Which reminds me, I quite like the music btw.  Most of the comments about it have been "how do i turn it off?!?" and although there is a point where we need our own music instead of a single track, it is very well done.

[Toady One]

Rygar still has my favorite video game music for some reason.

I'd like to do more music actually, but the download is already large.  If I remember, I'll put up a no music version next time just to make it smaller.  If I had 700MB to use on a CD, I'd probably put more music and pictures of kobolds that show up at random and move across the screen.

[flap]

Last game you really went into was a long time ago... Funny, apparently happends a lot when people go into programmming : as soon as I started to mod a for a specific game (Hardw[a]r) I stopped playing : The game I had in mind was ten times richer than the actual one... I believe that when you are testing DF, you really are not playing the same has we do : You are playing its past present and future.

Well about music : There could be 2 separate downloads. Lite and full.

[PresidentEvil]

Sup fellow Hardw[a]r dude, slap.

Toady, how much has DF changed during development. Were there features you wanted that you ended up saying "Crap, this isn't gonna work" to?

[Toady One]

Well, there are plenty of things that on some level we'd "want", like time travel, but just aren't feasible.  When we plan things over the phone, we'll pretty much stay within the bounds of what's reasonable, so it never gets too far out of control, unless we're just ranting.  The list is so long I can't really be sure, but I think almost every Core/Req/Bloat has a notion of an implementation behind it that would work either with the current game engine or a reasonable extension, and those that don't didn't seem too far out of bounds at the time.  Now, as far as "crap this isn't going to work", there have been incidents like that -- but those just sparked a few rewrites.  This happened when we stopped using curses and went over to OpenGL because input was annoying in curses, and it happened when I learned some OO and changed around a lot of the existing code to make some additions I wanted easier.  It might happen again with the interface and display, and so on.

[einexile]

I found this thread on Something Awful last night and the first thing that drew me in was the music. I registered here just to search for this thread, in fact. Specifically I came here looking for more.

Is there more? I almost never shut off the music in games, but I might be tempted with DF simply because there's not much of it and I don't like getting sick of things I'm fond of. No need to offer two different downloads, but if you've got more I doubt I'm the only one who'd be happy to get it separately and listen to it with another program.

[puke]

there were guitar tabs posted for the game music a while back.  it would be pretty cool if we could twist toady's arm to release more samples of his work, but it hasnt happened yet - to my knowledge.

sometimes i turn the music down, but i usually dont turn it off.  even though i've heard the same loops time and again, i find it to be unobtrusive and soothing, and the transition between loops is smooth.

i stumbled unknowingly into a random SA goon-meet a few weeks ago, but none of them had heard of Dwarf Fortress.  I tried searching the forums there for mentions of the event, but i guess the local threads arent browsable by non-members.  it seemed like a cool crowd of people, though.

[Shoe]

Holy necro batman.    

[Turgid Bolk]

Wow, I'm glad this thread got bumped (from before my time). This is pretty interesting info. One of the first suggestions I came up with was "more music," especially seasonal changes or depending on the biome, evilness etc. of the area. I see it's already on the dev list, but maybe you could offer the music as a seperate install to save space.

[Toady One]

Yeah, I've always wanted to do more music, at least up to having seasonal pieces, but there hasn't been time for it.  I'm still practicing almost everyday, but mostly that's just sitting around improvising and looking for sounds on the fretboard.  The main DF song is still the only one I completed, but a while back I managed to get about 2 mins in on 3 other songs that might work.  Haven't recorded any of it yet, and I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to finish.  I've been meaning to work on those songs with my practice time, but it's been hard to focus on that while I'm still pushing forward on this release.

[Reign on your Parade]

Perhaps you could make the music act like the creatures, with the ability to add your own in, and then a .txt file where you could control where it would show up. Thus you could actually release music seperately from the game itself, and people could add their own.

[puke]

well.. you can slip in your own ogg vorbis files as it is.  just no more than are already there.