Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[clinodev]

Steam Community Update 15 June 2020: "Dwarf Fortress First Look Gameplay & Commentary ⚒️"

https://steamcommunity.com/games/975370/announcements/detail/2378411445035127532

Full Text:

Dwarf Fortress First Look Gameplay & Commentary ⚒️
Heya!

A bit of a mini-interruption from the regular updates you've been getting from Tarn (don't worry, they're still happening), but as part of the Guerrilla Collective showcase on June 13, we revealed a first look at the work-in-progress gameplay of the Dwarf Fortress Steam Version!

Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp7DEUzWOfo&feature=youtu.be

Note: Gameplay UI is in progress, and is not indicative of the final look.

The gameplay video includes:

    Developer commentary from co-creator, Tarn Adams
    Real time footage of a world map being generated and a first embark
    New graphics including workshops, bodies of water, dwarves, and trees


Hope you enjoy. We're excited!

Cheers,
Victoria

[voliol]

Steam Community Update 18 June 2020: "Serrated discs jammed by goblin bits ⚔️"

https://steamcommunity.com/games/975370/announcements/detail/2453847373783055559

Full Text:

Serrated discs jammed by goblin bits ⚔️
Hello!

Workerly progress on items and other art the last few week. It's an eclectic mix, as in the first image here:


Glass block floors, wooden floors, and dwarves, of course, like metal floors. Some of their favorite weapons are here as well, and shields, and trap components. You can use an enormous corkscrew to make a screwpump to move liquids around the fortress, but you can also place one in a weapon trap.

And why not add a giant axeblade, a serrated disc and various spikes? Hmm... dwarves have to clean them when they are jammed up with goblin bits, that's one reason, but a resilient dwarf can handle that job just fine.

Here are swords made of various materials being shown off by the proud Debug Creature that arranged them on the arena floor.


And more weapons and tools, along with a few reasons why you might want your dwarves to keep weapons around. These critters can all be found underground.


On the left we have a naked mole dog and a molemarian. The naked mole dog is like the real world naked molerat, but it is bigger, hence dog. The molemarian... is like a centaur, but instead of placing a human upper torso on a horse body, you place a moledoggy human upper torso on a naked mole dog, and then replace the head with a mole dog head... so it's just a lot of naked mole dog with some grabby arms.

Up top, the voracious cave crawler and the magma man. Occasionally, legendary generals will make a journey to the depths during world generation and tame voracious cave crawlers for use in war. Magma men, on the other hand, are just not safe to have around at all.

On the right, longer critters! A giant earthworm and a giant olm. You'll find that Dwarf Fortress has a lot of giant creatures...

- Tarn

--

Kitfox's Note

The Debug Creature's face is such a mood.


- Victoria

[clinodev]

Steam Community Update 2 July 2020: "Guilty lizards and the DF Talk Podcast!"

https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/975370/view/2504513502276761103

Full text:

    Guilty lizards and the DF Talk Podcast!

    Hi!

    Creatures and items, creatures and items. Here are lots of different seeds.

    You can grow all sorts of different real world and fantasy plants. Our dwarves like to farm a variety of mushrooms underground, but you can try aboveground plants if you like.



    I put them on a glass block floor, since I accidentally put an ice floor in the last news posting when I said it was glass, ha ha. I then spread some of the new treasure items around everywhere, in each of the currency materials. You can also make coins and treasures out of non-currency metals and materials.

    There were a few other treasures to lay out, but I took the screenshot early, as a lizard started eating my seeds (the guilty party still sits happily in the stockpile.) Normally you can protect seeds from vermin by using bags and barrels, and also by having some trusty cats around to hunt them and bring the remains to their dwarves.

    Mike in the meantime has drawn many animals over the last several days, among them the remaining birds. Can you name them all?


    I've also been experimenting with the mouse and clickable buttons and other fancy widgets. Animals next to the animal buttons, items next to the item buttons, rather than text text text. DF has had a little patchy mouse support in the past, but we're going to improve that situation for Steam. Hopefully I'll have some to show soon! Artists have to do a pass on my programmer art first, he he he.

    -Tarn

    Kitfox Note

    After a 6 year hiatus, the DF Talk podcast has restarted! Join Rainseeker, Capntastic and the Toady One (Tarn!) as they talk about Dwarf Fortress and answer questions from the forum.

    You can listen to it here, but fair warning... the volume levels are wonky. (In the words of Tarn, they "suck". Heh.) I figured it was still worth sharing though - think of this as the test run of better and more volume-controlled episodes to come!

https://steamcommunity.com/linkfilter/?url=https://bay12games.com/dwarves/df_talk.html

    - Victoria

[Starver]

PTW, now that I've spotted this again (to deal with its infrequency making it slip under the radar) Also a PTL, w.r.t the renewed DFTalk, which I'll now be sure to check later in one or other context.

[Nordlicht]

The birds somehow remind me about Simlife.

[Salmeuk]

Those animals are looking wonderful! A good mix of realism and symbolic depiction. And you can tell at a glance the species, which I never thought possible with a tileset. I will say, that emu's legs are so thick it looks like a dude in a costume haha

[Iä! RIAKTOR!]

Steam Community Update 18 June 2020: "Serrated discs jammed by goblin bits ⚔️"

https://steamcommunity.com/games/975370/announcements/detail/2453847373783055559

Full Text:

Serrated discs jammed by goblin bits ⚔️
Hello!

Workerly progress on items and other art the last few week. It's an eclectic mix, as in the first image here:


Glass block floors, wooden floors, and dwarves, of course, like metal floors. Some of their favorite weapons are here as well, and shields, and trap components. You can use an enormous corkscrew to make a screwpump to move liquids around the fortress, but you can also place one in a weapon trap.

And why not add a giant axeblade, a serrated disc and various spikes? Hmm... dwarves have to clean them when they are jammed up with goblin bits, that's one reason, but a resilient dwarf can handle that job just fine.

Here are swords made of various materials being shown off by the proud Debug Creature that arranged them on the arena floor.


And more weapons and tools, along with a few reasons why you might want your dwarves to keep weapons around. These critters can all be found underground.


On the left we have a naked mole dog and a molemarian. The naked mole dog is like the real world naked molerat, but it is bigger, hence dog. The molemarian... is like a centaur, but instead of placing a human upper torso on a horse body, you place a moledoggy human upper torso on a naked mole dog, and then replace the head with a mole dog head... so it's just a lot of naked mole dog with some grabby arms.

Up top, the voracious cave crawler and the magma man. Occasionally, legendary generals will make a journey to the depths during world generation and tame voracious cave crawlers for use in war. Magma men, on the other hand, are just not safe to have around at all.

On the right, longer critters! A giant earthworm and a giant olm. You'll find that Dwarf Fortress has a lot of giant creatures...

- Tarn

--

Kitfox's Note

The Debug Creature's face is such a mood.


- Victoria

Design of some weapons images is unrealistic and/or doesn't fit to ingame characteristics. Creatures is better, but whats about proportions? Also olms have two legs only.

[PatrikLundell]

The graphics thread is better suited for discussions than this devlog reposting thread.

The graphics thread is a bit hidden away in the Tilesets and Graphics section, but it's found here: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=173474.0

[clinodev]

Steam Update 16 July 2020: "Giant rats for the ratdom 🐁"

https://steamcommunity.com/games/975370/announcements/detail/4396027342293765009

Full text:

    Giant rats for the ratdom 🐁

Hello again!

    Giant creatures are a staple of generic fantasy worlds, and since Dwarf Fortress strives to generate worlds which are almost as generic as possible, we have giant versions of most real-world animals in the game. You can tack giant in front of almost anything. Sometimes, this can be trouble - the pandas in our game are just called 'pandas', but a more proper name for the real-world creature is 'giant panda', so that's why we have 'gigantic pandas' for the giant version instead. The same thing happened with the 'giant tortoise.'

    The rule in Dwarf Fortress is that a giant creature should be at least as large as a black bear, even if it's a giant version of a small insect. As the real-world creatures approach black bear size, and then beyond, we apply a curve, so that the largest ones are only roughly twice as large in every dimension as their counterpart. Giant whales are very, very large, but they are just eight times as massive as a normal whale, rather than the kind of scaling you see when you go from a spider to a giant spider.

    Here are some giant underground creatures:


The giant cave spider has been one of the more notorious DF creatures for many years. The paralyzing venom is quite serious, webs are nasty, it can spring from ambush, and it can also just bite dwarf-sized creatures into pieces. It is an enlarged version of the cave spider, which has a stunning venom (which is merely extremely annoying.) Giant rats are classic beings, of course. We also have large rats since it felt like there needed to be extra size gradations for ratdom.

I feel most bad about the poor giant moles that blunder into fortresses. The art doesn't make me feel better about it! Cave swallows are surprisingly colorful birds.

And here are some more modest creatures, a sample of small-but-not-too-small mammals:



As you can imagine, once we got up to a certain level of animal coverage in the game, it was important for us to get the two iconic monotremes in the game, and fortunately the community pulled through when they selected a few hundred animals to be added to the game back in 2009.

The platypus has poisonous spurs, as in real life, which can cause painful swelling. Perhaps your fortress would benefit by allowing a platypus person adventurer to become a resident monster slayer?

--Tarn

[voliol]

Steam Update 30 July 2020: ”Mischievous gremlins & vacationing dogs 🐕”

https://steamcommunity.com/games/975370/announcements/detail/2725193056659428990

Full text:

Mischievous gremlins & vacationing dogs 🐕

Hi!

The base creature pictures have been completed! As you can tell from some of the previous posts, that's a lot of animals, ha ha, as well as various fantasy critters. This also frees up Mike to do a pass on my ghastly programmer-art screens, which we should be able to show next time, while Meph continues work on items and buildings, as well as some additional work with derived creature types, like baby animals and zombies.

Here is one of the fantasy creatures, a mischievous gremlin.



Mischief here can be quite serious mischievous; gremlins like to jump on pressure plates, free animals from cages, and pull levers. Since pressure plates and levers are often linked up to important floodgates or drawbridges, they can be troublesome indeed.

Gremlins are good at sneaking, but a war dog placed at an entrance or strategic intersection is an option (you can always take them off the ropes if you want them to have a vacation from work with all their dwarf friends.)



Placing dwarf guards on patrol routes or having mechanically important areas behind some general bustle is also feasible, though gremlins wait in hiding for opportunities and can often slip through during breaks in hallway traffic. It's important not to leave a lever that can destroy your entire fortress too close to the deep cavern entrances, ha ha. If you are feeling ambitious, you can set up false levers near the caves to lure gremlins, and link them to traps that collapse or flood the lever room.

- Tarn

P.S.

Episode 24 of Dwarf Talk is here. The volume levels are a bit better this time, and the other host returned, so the original lineup is all back together, talking about the interface and playing with the myth generator.

[Capntastic]

I love lever gremlin

[clinodev]

I love lever gremlin

Right?

Also, thank you so much voliol for jumping in and putting these up when I haven't yet, and keeping my formatting! They seem to inevitably post when I'm off-line for an hour or so.

[Iä! RIAKTOR!]

Gremlins are mammals, they need two sprites - for male and for female.

[Starver]

a) Who says they don't[1]?
b) Who says that the sole known sexual dimorphisms[2] are even obvious at that scale of image?

Not every mammal (always, even if they do when nursing) has prominent lady-lumps of however many they might sport while obviously priapic man-junk probably isn't on the cards either,

[1] If there were two, in that abbreviated tableau, would we theoretically get a lever-fight?
[2] A rare chance that their litter is multiple, vs being geldable, SFAICT.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Gremlins are mammals, they need two sprites - for male and for female.

Don't worry, tilesets are moddable. You can add different male/female sprites as you like when you mod in the differences between male and female gremlins.

In vanilla, I'd say it's impossible to tell at this scale, as they're the same size and colour accoridng to the raws, so really no need to bother.