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[Footkerchief]

Actually, understanding the nonrepresentational graphics seems to be, in my experience teaching others the way of Dwarf Fortress, the least of the hurdles. 

I don't think it's a strict dichotomy, I just think whether or not the graphics are appealing is not even the most influental factor in the playability of this ludicrously complex game. 

I can agree with that.  The interface is definitely a bigger problem.

On that note as well as why it would be BAD to have commericial involvement is the ESRB rating would be forced. It would immediately be mandated that the export of Dwarf Fortress be labled as AO for the amount of, well, awesome.

ESRB participation is optional.  Other countries do have legal restrictions, though.

If DF's hypothetical commercialization is still a topic of discussion here, it's worth noting that Toady said flat out in the Just Press Start interview, "Bay 12 will never sell a game."

[slink]

At my current resolution and screen size I can't see the tiny figures that seem to be the standard for graphics for DF.  I simply can't tell what anything is.  I could zoom in to smaller areas, but I'd much rather see more of the screen at one time so I can plan projects.  I went to a lot of trouble to find an ASCII tileset that allowed me the maximum field of vision while still allowing me to keep the screen resolution that I need in order to see what I'm trying to look at.

I like Stonesense, as it stands at the moment.  I may use it more when it properly supports modded-in plants and properly displays the different colors of rocks.  Until then, I use Visual Fortress to gauge my progress towards my imagined goal.  I'm not terribly excited by the idea of animated 3-D figures, and I certainly don't intend to download music for the game.  Ironically, one of the things I use Stonesense for is to help me to locate the magma and underground water sources, which makes it a closer cousin to Stone Sense than perhaps the authors intended.   

The interface is idiosyncratic to Tarn Adams, but I have gotten used to it.  So much so, in fact, that I sometimes try to use Shift-cursor to move around more quickly in other programs.   

And on-topic, DF is being properly developed, and it's being sold the way Tarn Adams wants to sell it.   

[quinnr]

I do that too,
using Shift+Arrows to try to move down the page faster. I think it's kind of funny. 

[qoonpooka]

I used to play Battletech online in the age of MUSE/MUSH/MUX.  Realtime battletech in ASCII glory.  I attribute most of my typing speed to that game.

That was MMO before Everquest.  The source was uncommented (because the original author was a dick, and concerned with purity of the base), and it was nightmarish to run.  Most of it was in MU* softcode. 

That said, it had built-in support for a game as complex as DF, only in an MMO format.  I picked up a copy of the source and started to mess with it.  I was lacking in skills to go it alone, so I brought in a team to help me.  It never launched.

Every time I had a cool idea, I'd get told how it could never happen, no one would ever play it, etc, etc.  Most of my ideas were for a game like DF - built a base, stand against all comers, if you get wiped out start over.  Persistent world, the whole shebang.

It's clearly a model that's been successful for Toady and my hat is off to him for that.  He has a designed an epic piece of entertainment software that's engrossing and immersive.  He's done that with an ASCII alpha release, to boot.

OP asked why this is still an indy game when it's so awesome (and, it is assumed, deserves a full production budget).

This is the wrong question.  The question is: Why is this game so pure to its vision, and therefore so unapologetically awesome?  The answer is: Because it's a solo indy project being written to please no one but the author and sold only for its market-perceived value.

There's a small part of me that would like to see Toady with an entire dev team at his disposal.  But RL has a UI that's even more abstracted from the minutia of production than DF does.  He wouldn't even be able to give orders for specific components.  There's only the 'Build game' order, and he would have to keep grinding at it until he got the project he wanted.

Then there's the issue that DF just isn't mass marketable.  It appeals only to a very small set of us who the bulk of the gaming industry wantonly ignore - to their financial gain.  Games made for us don't sell well enough to justify the massive budgets necessary for their production.  We're an impossible-to-please set because we want something harder to do well than graphics: good, vast, and deep gameplay.

tl;dr: If you want something done right, do it yourself.

As for graphics...  the only games that come close to being as complex as DF /AND/ having great graphics?  The Total War series comes close, but I think EVE: Online gets the award here.  Keep in mind, though, EVE has its issues and its problems (not the least of which is that it's impossible to play casually).

DF is abstracted from that first-person level, though.  After a while the graphics cease to be important - it's just information your brain needs to process to determine what's going on.  ASCII does that very well, once you've adapted to the set. (And stop thinking mountain goats are goblins, because you've played enough other rogues to know that letters are groups-by-type, not groups-by-first-letter.)

I get the information I need to understand what's going on.  At the speed and sheer quantity of information DF is?  That's all I'd get out of sexy graphics anyway.

[Innominate]

There are also some standardisation problems that hold people back. Consider the system used by Assassin's Creed, with four buttons corresponding to a 'puppeteering' system; top button for the head (sight and speech), right button for the empty hand (grabbing and physical non-lethal interaction), left button for the armed hand (lethal interaction and punching) and bottom button for the legs (movement). The controls are consistent throughout the games and between them. It intuitively makes sense that you can hold right-trigger to use the unsubtle actions (climbing, grabbing, running instead of walking, impressive assassinations).

Compare this to Dwarf Fortress. To mine a wall you have to go to a sub-menu, select the option to mine (unless your cursor was inside to start with in which case mining is already selected) then use the arrow keys to designate a rectangular area. Except you can't mine constructed walls this way. For constructed walls you need to deconstruct, which is even slower than a dabbling miner, and practically anyone in the fortress could decide to do it.

Dwarves can only construct walls horizontally, and will prefer certain directions (descending clockwise from left) when doing so, while most other constructions can be constructed from other directions. You can't build stairs downwards even though you can carve them, ramps will be removed when all orthogonal walls are (unless it's a constructed ramp), bridges don't support other constructions (but those constructions can still be ordered, they'll just instantly cave-in), wrestlers steal and retain socks despite common sense, soldiers might spar with adamantine weapons and fight with silver, areas under constructed rooves are not considered inside for the "stay inside" order or refuse decomposition purposes, water dropped by a pond designation into magma will only create obsidian if it falls more than one level, some menus are exited with space, some with escape and some with F9, some menus are navigated using the arrows and / with * while others use those for different parts of the menu, and more difficulties besides.

I'm not saying these things don't make sense, nor am I saying they trouble me - I've definitely got the hang of all of them. But showing off the amazing features of DF is much harder when a new player must struggle through the sheer number of options, confusions and ASCII all at once. Thankfully I found a tutorial that worked wonders for me. Toady doesn't have to develop one himself; I'd much rather have him do the important stuff that the community can't. Having one tutorial linked from the main page however might assist the retention of newbies. Failing that, pointing people towards the forums and the wiki might help.

DF will have a more consistent and easier interface when Toady has gotten around to improving the various aspects in turn. Currently we have placeholder interfaces and mechanics for many parts of the game. So I think most of our worries will disappear in time despite DF only increasing in complexity.

[Apolloin]

As someone with over a decade in the mainstream Games Industry, I have to say that Dwarf Fortress is absolutely NOT a commercially viable product for studio development. The concept is niche, some of the core gameplay mechanics are obscure to the point of being occult, the User Interface is clunky and unintuitive, the graphics are primitive to the point where experienced Dwarf Fortress players appear to be able to 'read the unencoded Matrix' from the perspective of the tyro player. Absolutely obscene amounts of resources are dedicated to generating and tracking details that most players will never see. It's far too easy to get two years into your fortress and discover a critical shortage of some mineral or natural feature that wrecks your plans completely.

I, of course, love it for all these reasons - but part of being 'one of us' is coming to terms with the fact that we are a minority. This was always meant to be a hobbyist project, that's precisely how it's being run and I think it's doing very well in it's proper niche. Trying to move DF mainstream would kill it dead. Mainstream DF would be Bullfrog's venerable Dungeon Keeper series - a fine series in its own right, but NOT Dwarf Fortress.

[silhouette]

Dungeon keeper got screwed in dk2.
Serriously.
So many bad ideas.

Dk2 is an example of why you should keep the same people working on the project :O.

[Noble Digger]

I like DF how it is, as long as Toady gets 2 grand a month or so from us, he keeps making an awesome game. Super excited for the release.

[Samyotix]

Hm.
To be able to sell DF to a games company you'd need a playable prototype that the Marketing and Sales people could understand. This won't work because it's ASCII.
If you make a 3d graphics engine for the marketing people, maybe even just bitmap tiles, they'd start asking about how much money you get and how many copies can be sold.
How many people would buy a hard-core strategy game that's been donationware for years? A couple of thousand worldwide if you're lucky. This game is more "niche" than even geek classics like Malfador's Space Empires. Mind you there's been commercial games that sold in the Hundreds, worldwide :/
Next they'd ask about the game design; if you tell them it's like Tropico 2 they'll look that up on NPD, find out it didn't sell well because everyone copied it back then, and say they don't want it because in the past, similar games failed to meet revenue targets.
Next they'd ask about the target audience and how to expand the target audience to include housewives and young girls, like add 20 new dwarf clothing items but remove all combat, and make the UI more like The Sims or World of Warcraft please, people only buy games that look like WoW nowadays, oh god no please don't innovate.
Then if they decide to publish the game they'd refuse to spend much money on marketing for a niche game so few people would buy it.

... I guess most publishers would utterly ruin DF and try to cheat Toady at the same time

[Apolloin]

Commercial products are commercial, ne? That stands to reason.

In order for a product to be commercially viable you need to maximise your return on investment - in other words the maximum number of people playing the game for the minimum development outlay.

Personally, there are some aspects of commercially driven development that I think would be good for Dwarf Fortress. It would be nice to have someone who's studied UI design to actually design a clearer and more intuitive UI. It would be nice to have discrete milestone releases demonstrating features and concepts clearly within those milestone releases.

Nobody can say that the current situation of YEARS between releases is good for the game or good for the fanbase, surely? I stopped playing DF months ago, and all it would take is a few new features and a more efficient version of the gamecode to get me playing again.

[sproingie]

Years between releases is par for the course with roguelikes, and I'm not convinced the already-niche fanbase would appreciably increase with a tighter release cycle.  Given the ambitious scope of the new features added to the next release, I'm not sure Toady even could make more frequent releases, seeing as he has to practically rewrite the game every time.  UI development at least seems to be running on a somewhat parallel track.

[CursedBurger]

I am neither a developer nor an accountant, so I shall ask you people who apparently have more experience in this field: Does anyone know if Bay 12 Games is a LLC or a sole proprietorship or whatnot, and if not, will that affect revenue from taxation / tax deductibility due to server costs and such? I personally would feel more comfortable donating if I could write my checks to Bay 12 Games instead.

[dakenho]

perhaps if you donated a few million dollars they could hire an army of programmers and pump out a commercial game.  Slight problem if you develop a commercial game one needs to set things in stone, toady does not want to do that, he wants them to evolve naturally (or at-least it seems that way).

[sproingie]

Bay12 isn't a charity, so deductibility of donations on your part is out of the question, regardless of how Bay12 is structured.

[The Scout]

only CPU-unintensive graphics option

You mean the only way for our computers to not have a thermonuclearcatsplosion. Also the reason is that we get to play free thus attracting more people.