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[Impaler[WrG]]

I’d be interested in hearing how you think that should look.  For instance, one long tutorial, or several guides aimed at different aspects of the game.  What subjects are the most confusing?  Should the tutorial map fit in the world itself as a mission from the Mountainhomes for example?

Tutorials should be short, completable in under 5 minutes each (assuming you do it right).  Each tutorial should be a separate map files but very small even 1x1 maps and theirs no need for them to be part of a full world (not sure it that's even possible but it might help reduce package size).  Tutorials should have a clear Title and introduction text that explains what your going to learn, player action triggered pop-ups that instruct the player on each step and a satisfying conclusion text with an option to immediately load the next tutorial.  An overall story arc to the tutorials is a nice touch, for example the one in which we learn about mining would feature a hermit dwarf prospector rather then a full set of seven, then we transition to a normal group of seven and follow them for more tutorials, later when we learn about immigrants our prospector returns as one.  The interface should be massively dis-able in the beginning tutorials and progressively unlocked as they progress.  Also make the first tutorial about simply have to navigate around the world (particularly changing z-levels as lot of people miss the TERRIBLE default key combination for that) and how to gather information with [k] and how to pause the game, don't even give any dwarfs to control until the second tutorial.

[kutulu]

You all have many valid complaints, as should be expected.  It seems like the thing that would keep the most players from giving up is a good tutorial, in addition to other fixes.  I’d be interested in hearing how you think that should look.  For instance, one long tutorial, or several guides aimed at different aspects of the game.  What subjects are the most confusing?  Should the tutorial map fit in the world itself as a mission from the Mountainhomes for example?

If you have ever played the old "city building" games from Impressions, like Pharoah or Zeus, I think that style of in-game tutorial works best for DF.  Its more common to see an Age of Empires style tutorial but those require a different map for every section; the Pharoah tutorial built up one city in stages, building on your previous efforts.

I think the idea of a tutorial mission from Mountainhome is perfect.  In my mind I'm picturing that you'd get some kind of mission briefing via a full-screen set of orders from the king.  The right-hand menu would be replace or augmented with one or more tasks that clearly describe, say "<d>esginate the highlighted areas for <d>igging.  <d>esgiante some nearby <t>rees to be cut down and <p>plants to be harvested." etc.  At certain pre-defined goals (# of square of farmland; # of bedrooms designated; # of workshops built, etc.) another full-screen message would move you forward -- more menu options would light up or appear, and more random actionss may be likely to occur.

If you are going to undertake this kind of effort, I think the key is that the game needs to support it fully.  There are a ton of excellent tutorials and beginners guides that walk you through the early game as it is (though getting some of the authors of those to let you ship them would be cool too).  But the tutorial missions should make it impossible for you to fail unless you suck at something you've already learned.  That is, no goblin raids until you've learned about military; no starving until you've learned about farming; etc. 

[Moron]

Ok, well I haven't read the whole of this thread, so this might already have been mentioned, but essentially there are 4 things I find frustrating and cause me to take long breaks from playing DF, though I have always come back so far.

1. The inability to have even basic prioritization of tasks. If I want my carpenter to make a bucket instead of doing endless 'store item in stockpile' jobs, I have to go into his profile and individually turn off ALL labors except carpentry. Then I have to do the same for several other dwarves if I want other specific important jobs done. Then when they've made that important item and they're just sitting around with 'no job' when there's lots of hauling to be done, I have to go back and turn all the hauling labors on again.

Surely it would be relatively easy to get a short-term fix, by having an option for each dwarf 'prioritize professional tasks' - ie they prioritize any tasks that they have skill above dabbling in, or any non-hauling job that they have the labor activated for, and do them before hauling jobs.

2. It seems like every menu uses different keys to navigate around, ie some use + and -, some use the arrow keys, and also, you need to use different keys to get back out of them - most use [space], but then sometimes you need to use F8 etc.

3. The fact that when you switch between [k], [v], [q] etc, the cursor always jumps back to the middle of the screen rather than staying where it was last placed.

These three are all things that I find most frustrating as a relatively experienced player; the thing I found most off-putting and difficult to understand as a beginner was the relationship between ramps, stairs and Z-levels - I guess it was largely down to the fact that building or digging stairs only builds 'half a staircase' so you have to build the corresponding stairs on the level below to make the stairs useable.

[Fedor]

What turns me off about DF?

Let's divide this into two categories:
1) What got in the way of the fun when I was starting out
2) What gets in the way of the fun now.


What got in the way of the fun when I was starting out?

1.  Interface.  How visually crude (and ugly, and distorted) the curses-style ascii was, how many menus, commands, and keys I had to learn all at once to operate a beginner fort, and how tedious it quickly got to manage dwarves.  See addendum at bottom of post.

2.  Lack of information.  Utterly inadequate and cumbersome in-game manual.  Failure to warn about even obvious perils (like a flood, an approaching lion, a trapped dwarf, or a lack of food or drink).  No tips on what any room does, how to set up workshops and establish material production chains.  No interface or basic gameplay tutorial.

3.  Complexity of making even very basic things happen, or be done semi-effectively.  In order to get logs, you need a dwarf with the woodcutting labor activated, an available battleaxe, and designated trees.  You must be careful about how you designate; your woodchopper might start with the ones furthest away or begin work right next to a magma pit.  The battleaxe might not be available; good luck finding it if you haven't learnt how to take an inventory.  Thw dwarf might not be doing the work; you'll need to check paths and see whether other assigned jobs are constantly distracting the little dude.



What gets in the way of the fun now?

1.  Sites where you can't experience much of the game coolness; the difficulty of finding a site with enough features to have fun in.  Sites without adequate fuel and no way to get it, without wood, without metal, without sand, without flux, without fresh water, without interesting wildlife or inhabitants, without civilizations to interact with.  The continued inability of trade to get you things you need in bulk.

2.  The lag monster.  Every fortress I've ever gotten serious about has died to the lag monster.  The more coolness I reach for, the sooner the game bogs down in growing frustration.

3.  Lack of underground interest.  So many of the neat things in the 2D version are gone.  Seasonal floods.  Gremlins nipping for your levers, antmen coming out of your wells, batmen raiding out of a chasm you had to cross instead of one you can simply tunnel around.   Adamantine you really had to work hard and face terrible danger to get at.  At present, you don't even know whether you can grow tower-caps or find underground plants.  Also, boring rock formations, metal-poor environments, and entire screens where there's literally nothing there except ryolite and microcline.




Addendum:  copy of my first post on these forums (August, 2007)

Inconsistent keybindings.  I trip up over and over again when trying to navigate the menus; no sooner than my fingers get the idea that 9328 navigates than they must re-learn /*-+.  No sooner than I get used to the 'd'esignate interface ('d' to mine, return to select a corner, navigate, and return again to select a box) then I must re-learn how to plot a field or bridge (use letters).  Some interfaces actually combine these.  It almost seems the game is determined to experiment with every single method of using the keyboard to control stuff; this drives me to distraction!

Excessive number of commands.  It is unnecessary to require the player to use 'q', 't', 'v', and 'k'; these should be reduced to at most three:  one to look at a grid, one to look at/manipulate stuff, and one to examine creatures.  Better might be using shift and control (look, examine, manipulate).  Certainly better would be single left click to select grid, left click again to get details, or right click to manipulate.  And the other hand stays on the keyboard to navigate menus.

Excessive depth of menus.  It is unnecessary to require five keystrokes to start editing a dwarf's profession; an example of an alternative method within the limited space is to list the major commands, and then lump everything else into a '*' option.  So viewing a dwarf's opinions would require 'v', then '*', then "return".  Better would be right-click, pick from list.

Utterly inadequate information display on dwarves (the subject of several player add-on programs such as [Dwarven Manager] that I find more and more necessary after the first year).  Sorting for skills, for unhappiness, for lack of rooms, for lack of current employment, for married status - these are just some of what we need to fully wallow in the coolness of this underground version of The Sims.

Disorganized information display.  For example, you cannot learn what your soldiers are up without delving into the 'v' interface, the 'm' interface, and the 'x' interface.  Even if you run through all these, the game won't tell you if a soldier knows where his barracks are, where his bed is, whether he recognizes a place to shoot or spar, or whether he really is actively using a quiver, backpack, etc.

[Rilder]

Whenever I play, I think "Well, I shouldn't get to addicted or the update will just make me have to restart EVERYTHING." Which is an annoying habit because I really want to play but I get so immersed that I hate to have to get the newest version.

Second, I wish there were much more goblin sieges, and there was some way to increase their frequency from within the game, so I could start having 24/7 sieges once my fort's defences are all set up.

For your first one. I thought, except for the next update all saves were compatible with newer versions? And its not that hard to transfer settings over.

Second, I don't agree with this, more goblin sieges wouldn't make it any harder, if your defenses can defeat one of the current goblin sieges they they can defeat another goblin siege, what we need is sieges that are actual sieges, with larger numbers of enemies, balista/catapults lobbing rocks at your and if you can't be assaulted directly the AI attempting to find alternative ways in.

Just increasing the amount of sieges would just make iron management impossible.

[Sordid]

Of course, better (in-game?) documentation and stuff would also help. Being on IRC and the forums and having the wiki burnt into my brain helped me enough where I could get by just fine, and I guess some of the industrial practices are helped by having a decent knowledge of things like chemistry beforehand, although I've actually learned a lot about a lot of those real-world processes since I've started playing DF. Ideally, though, I shouldn't have needed access to any online resources in order to learn how to play, although the lack of documentation is probably par for the course for a game that's still under development... it would suck for Toady to have to update a ton of help files with every new version.

Well, how well does wiki converts to a window's style help file?  If it can be done quickly, the Dwarf Fortress wiki can be made into a downloadable help file.  Since having in-game help you need to access anyway can be done just as well with a separate file (wondering what does fishery do?  search "fishery" in help file).

How about cutting out the middleman and incorporating a simple browser into DF so that you can view the relevant wiki articles directly from DF?

[qwert]

Another big one in my mind: the "Embark Now!" option is hopelessly useless for a first time player, one who doesn't know how to dig, let alone farm. It has an anvil, which newbies almost definitely won't use, and runs out of food in less than a year of play, so if you miss the first caravan, have no animals to hunt (or don't know how), don't know how to farm or cook (like almost every newbie), then you are probably going to die and give up. In addition, the choose carefully screen is one of the most bewildering in the game for a newbie, and would probably turn people off before they even get to play.

[Slackratchet]

3. The fact that when you switch between [k], [v], [q] etc, the cursor always jumps back to the middle of the screen rather than staying where it was last placed.

This. This is my #1 problem and its especially bad if you're working near the edge of the map.

[Rhenaya]

i am just fine with df, maybe because i play it now for more than a year and used to it, i have no idea how to make the UI better, its so komplex, it just cant get any better ^^

one think i might add if i try to recruit new beardy leaders:
the manual is to loose, so it would be great to add some more info into the install package, like a pdf with a how to play tutorial... stolen from the wiki ^^ and maybe some kind of ingame browser like the wiki itself to look up information, like "how to make steel", "clothing industrie" and advanced concepts, even i have to look up sometimes, but not everyone know the wiki or have an inet connection all the time

next thing is the init file, some kind of executable to switch the values with a handy tool would be recommend, thats even something someone else could do, so toady can still focus on the game itself, maybe also ingame changing would be fine.. i would like to rise popcap turn on/off economcis, etc, step by step without save and restart all the time

and as last the ascii graphis, well there are lots of graphic packs to make it easier. for new users, its not easy to implent graphcis with all the little things you have to do (and lack of manual howtodo). maybe we should do a user voting to implement one of the graphic packs into the default zip file from the bay12 site, so if someone cant go with the ascii he turn on graphics and it is already there

[Kardos]

I would suggest adding a text line below the announcement line.  Have it give random tips on how to intereact with the menues, and how to place buildings and furniture.
For example, on the default page you might get a few tips that say:
Press 'd' to bring up mining, logging, plant gathering and item reclaim options.
Press '<' or '>' to shift z-levels.
Holding shift while scrolling across the map moves you 10 spaces at a time.

Then in submenues, such as the 'd' menue you might get random tips such as:
Channeling removes the floor tile and the sqaure tile below it.
Ramps follow one direction.  There must be an open tile before and after a ramp for Dwarves to use it.

This doesn't completley remove the need for a tutorial, but for newer players, and even experienced players, it serves as a helpfull reminder, and hopefully removes the need for rampant wiki visits.

[G-Flex]

You all have many valid complaints, as should be expected.  It seems like the thing that would keep the most players from giving up is a good tutorial, in addition to other fixes.  I’d be interested in hearing how you think that should look.  For instance, one long tutorial, or several guides aimed at different aspects of the game.  What subjects are the most confusing?  Should the tutorial map fit in the world itself as a mission from the Mountainhomes for example?

I don't personally think any "tutorial" style thing should really be a part of the gameworld, because I wouldn't like to see something so artificial being shoehorned into the procedurally-generated universe.

Aside from the interface, the most confusing things for newbies, I think, are the industrial processes. In other words, I think people would be a lot better off in learning the game if they had a way to, say, know all the uses for something like wood, or potash, or flux, or what-have-you. Granted, that's not really something a tutorial is necessary for, and I'm not really convinced a tutorial is what DF needs as compared to a decent in-game reference.

[change name please]

As a veteran Dwarf Fortress player, the most distressing thing about DF is the dearth of late-game content or challenge.  An entire fortress can survive on two 5x5 plots of plump helmets, and goblins show up once in a blue moon to damage your framerate much more than your dwarves or fortress.

The most frustrating thing is Toady's development process.  Slaves to Armok II is rapidly becoming the new Slaves to Armok I, in which feature bloat is given priority over core gameplay ideas.  Consider this before tracking individual dwarf genealogy and beard hairs:  Is the game fun to play?  Is there a point to continue playing?  Is the player ever challenged?

The thing that irritates me most is that all of the advances made to DF ever since it went 3D have been primarily focused around making a big mess of Mad Libs that you'll never pay any attention to.  Dwarf religions, preferences, personalities, none of these influence gameplay.  Now we are being treated to a six-month dev arc about making the already complicated wound system even more complicated.  It does not make good sense to add all this fluff while the game itself is so boring compared to what it was in 2D.

[change name please]

As far as a tutorial goes, I don't think it's that big a deal.  Maybe include a link in the readme telling people to check out the wiki.  With farming being pathetically simple now the only thing that's left to learn is how to read ASCII and which buttons map to what in the GUI.

[Neonivek]

I don't personally think any "tutorial" style thing should really be a part of the gameworld, because I wouldn't like to see something so artificial being shoehorned into the procedurally-generated universe

The tutorial world could be a pocket world that comes with the game or it even could be a seperate Dwarf Fortress if Space is an issue.

A good Tutorial in my mind would be heavily scripted to give the player a safe area to make mistakes and not lose because he took to long learning how to set up the military. It should also give players tips on playing somehow such as fortress design or food strategies... I am not quite sure how to do such though.

I think a Tutorial would be great for the less computer swavy players (Well in a Dwarf Fortress way. One of my friends is Computer Swavy but can't play it). I don't show Dwarf Fortress to any of my friends because I know they can't play it and I don't have enough freetime to teach them. I don't expect, however, a dramatic result in the playerbase.

Consider this before tracking individual dwarf genealogy and beard hairs:  Is the game fun to play?  Is there a point to continue playing?  Is the player ever challenged?

It is an attempt to keep Save Compatability for a long period of time rather then Toady believing it is a vital aspect of gameplay that needs to be in the game NOW! Then there is the fact that often to get to the gameplay improvements you have to revamp the whole game at once rather then in a steady stream over long periods of time (because balance isn't one sided). This is a good reason why the "Combat Arc" likely exists rather then being part of the Army and Dungeon Arc.

[penguinofhonor]

Ooh, another interface thing I think needs to be fixed is the Build menu. It should be restricted to things like workshops and roads, and we should have another "Set Up" menu for things that need to be pre-built like beds and cabinets. It's confusing to new players when you try to get your dwarves to build a bed, and then get told that you need to have one already. It would be easier if you tried to set up a bed and the menu told you "You need to build one at the Carpenter's Workshop first."

Another thing is that new players should have some way of finding out exactly what materials in what amounts are required to make everything at a workshop before assigning it to be built. Maybe by moving over it with + and - and then pressing ?, so a bed would have "Requires 1 wood" and bone grieves would have "Requires 3 stacks of bones" and obsidian swords would have "Requires 1 obsidian and 1 wood".