Sorry if I made my post sound too negative. I was mostly trying to point at the fact that YouTube is a more widely viewed medium than any blog, so it would have been a fair idea to acknowledge DF there in anticipation of the people who won't read your blog.
The issue is that I only use YouTube as a free method of video posting for my blog. As you can see, some effort went into giving a good design to the blog, but the YouTube page is pretty much default. But things got out of hand when I started to give some information there and actually listen to the request of showing what my progress is. I’ll consider if I keep YouTube a main communication channel or not. I’ll still keep posting videos.
...And why in the world did you capitalize the "H" in Dwarvesh? That bugs the heck out of me.
The “H” is an abbreviation and a somewhat juvenile internal joke. Since I seem to have taken on the alias of DwarvesH, I would rather not give more information regarding the meaning of the term
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It's pretty clear you're not as informed on DF as I think we all assumed. Let's just say you're not the first person who has tried to do this. While your project ideas may be your own, your approach is not. You're not the first person that has creavitely borrowed parts of Toady's design while doing their own work. Plump helmets are just an example, you've also got his skills format, the embark screen, and other features that seem directly cooked from what you found in DF and liked.
Well I have no obligation to be familiar with the entire history of DF and this community. It may be interesting trivia but nothing essential. I am becoming aware of the fact that this is probably not the first attempt of someone to implement the formula. And you seem to have had some negative experiences before. That is unfortunate and may color your expectations of other future attempts. What is essential is that I am aware of DF and Stonesense.
But don't be surprised at the hostility you can get, because you basically launched yourself with no real grasp of how this looks to parts of the DF community.
I think you could have presented yourself much the same way, and gotten a much better reaction, if you'd taken the time to make some original, tangible content instead of using short cuts.
The interesting bit is that I did not launch myself and did not present myself to the community. There was no official launch. There wasn’t even an announcement regarding the new project. I was not at that stage yet. But the Internet has its own will and has yanked me from the comfort of my developer position and forced me to present myself prematurely. For all intents and purposes, I had just a development blog where I was documenting my progress and a few tools to track that. But I do care about what the community thinks and that is why I got involved here.
Like, have you even talked with Toady? You don't have to, no one's making you. But that would be the professional thing to do. Just a friendly "Hey, love your work, doing my own thing, ect...." To find out how he actually feels about what you're doing. The fact this thread was a mystery to you means you probably didn't.
No, and I have no intention to contact him at this moment. I am sure he is busy and doesn’t like to be bothered by random people. Especially if those people have things to say that can be interpreted at first glance as “I am making my own DF”. A good time for contacting would be after I decided on the release schedule and a few weeks before going public. There is always the risk of me abandoning this project for something cooler and more challenging technically. If the project gets to a stage close to releasable, that risk is practically zero.
Second, I can understand the placeholders. Of course you're going to change it later. It just... seems a bit strange to to use these particular placeholders. While it gives flavor to the world, whereas saying "Mushroom Plant" might not be as good as "Plump Helmet", it still bothers me. It's like making a game about an Italian Plumber named Mario who uses Fire Flowers and jumps on Goombas. It's not Super Mario Bros, and could even be a strategy game, but the use of names is just very uncanny.
The problem is that a lot of people cannot put themselves in the mind set of an engine developer. Using DF data is not just a good idea. It is the best and most pragmatic one. While you may see DF as a game, computers and more precisely my engine sees it as a giant set of verified test data. Some technology out there offers official test cases, like Unicode and SVG to name a few. And so does the “civ simulation with dwarves genre” with DF.
And while it is obvious and I have always admitted that some items, like plants, are directly taken from DF, it is not their name that makes them a borrowed item. The engine does not care about names. The reason why my plump helmets are the same as DF’s plump helmets is because they have the same properties. They are both purple underground mushrooms that grow fast in all seasons and can be brewed. Names only scratch the surface and are largely inconsequential.
i'm betting when dwarvesh's project is released, df will have moved a few steps toward procedurally generated content, and will no longer have any stock plants, making dwarvesh's the only game featuring plump helmets(if he ends up including them as a reference)
Actually, I have this idea lined up for a “Total chaos” mode. I thought it would be fun to add it and it would take the game back to more rogue-like roots. When activating this mode a huge warning would pop up because there is no way to balance it. The idea is to randomize both item looks and properties. You may very well wind up with a world where your previous source of food is now poisonous. And you have no way to determine the properties of items except the experimental one. Obviously, such a niche feature will be at the end of the development cycle if ever.
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Topic: Dwarf Fortress Clone? (Read 69532 times)