Is the goal to soften the learning cliff, or to make a hill after the cliff? It seems that adding complexity would make a hill. (This is not a criticism. Germ theory doesn't explain why planets orbit in ellipses: it's not supposed to.)
Both.
The problem with the game right now is that it is very, very inaccessable. In fact, I just had this discussion a week ago, let me quote myself from then:
The reason people don't play this game is that it isn't accessable. It's not just given a very difficult to learn interface, it's got no tutorial as part of the game itself (yes, there's fan-made ones, but you have to go looking for those), and it overloads new players with information they have no idea how to sort.
Since I'm already linking Extra Credits, I might as well link this, as well: Why there are so many easy games.
We don't need the game dumbed down, and we don't need Skinner boxes or empty rewards, we just need the game's elements presented to the player in a manner where they can learn the individual components of the game before being asked to perform all of them at once.
Toady already has "make a tutorial" as part of his longer-term goals. That would go a long way in helping players clear the cliff by breaking it down into smaller segments. He already mentions how it would be based upon a text file that would guide you through it, though, so I think maybe he should take a look at that clip, as well, because learning works best when you can interact with what you are learning in a manner that cuts out all the distractions.
What players would really be helped by is a mode of the game where you can focus on just one aspect of the game at a time - For example, a mode where all your ability to build things is locked out, but you have full access to the military screen, dwarves who train at super-speed, and equipment laying out and ready with enemies on the other end of a gate that opens at the end of a timer. The player has to set up a military, get them equipped and then trained in time for the attack. The player can be given a written set of instructions on how to "do it right", but learning works best if you just dump them in there, point to the military screen, and let them experiment until they are capable of overcoming a basic challenge.
However, that obviously lies beyond the scope of the suggestion I already laid out. (Crap... I'm going to have to make a tutorial suggestion to lay out how these things should be laid out for the player, aren't I?)
EDIT: Ooops, I forgot the other part of my answer to this question, the first part took so long!
Part of what I try to do in the Improved Farming thread, however, is make starting farming much simpler - there will be an interface that automates much of the micromanagement, and early farms aren't an engineering project. It is only advanced farming that becomes progressively more complex, forcing the player to devote more time and resources and understanding to the system the more that he demands out of the system in return.
Out of curiosity, if you were Toady, and you decided to implement this, where would you put it in the project timeline?
Well, Toady has a pretty difficult problem on his hands in triaging what gets his attention. I think
this thread is a good indication of why.
The playerbase of this game is a rather disparate one. This game is so large and so many
different things to so many different people that spending a long time working on any one aspect of the game will wind up upsetting people who aren't interested in that aspect of the game, and will demand that attention be put on their pet projects, instead. Right now, Adventurer mode is getting a pretty big facelift, and it really needs one, but I've never really been interested in Adventurer Mode for as long as there was nothing to do but kill things until you died. If/when you start getting abilities like being able to become a lord and raise a farm and have tenants you can demand rent from, then I'd be more interested.
So look at what he's been doing: He did a major upgrade to Fortress Mode in the jump to 31.01, and then mostly worked on steaming out the most major bugs. After getting rid of the worst of the bugs, he went to work on some minor things (bogeyman and such) while also adding some little things to the Fortress mode so Fortress players can get something to tide them over, too. He then went and did a fundraiser by promising new animals in the raws, and he'll sprinkle these in for Fortress players, too. He's going to be going on doing major work on Adventurer Mode before turning to the ESV's top ten suggestions. Along the way to the big things, we're going to see more little things like new flavors of monkey or maybe a "bard" job thrown in to keep the people who demand weekly updates mollified as he gears up to tackle the big issues like the Army Arc, which is what the people who are long-term players are demanding, alongside fixes to the less-critical bugs like how hospitals don't work properly.
Basically, he's trying to juggle the demands of several different factions of players who all want contradictory things by handing out short-term and long-term benefits to all types of players in succession. I don't think he's doing a bad job of it, either.
The thing about these short-term additions, like throwing in pandas or penguins or whatever, is that eventually, you just clutter the game with extras that don't have enough of a meaningful difference between one another.
In 40d, there was basically no difference between one creature or another except size, damagable body parts, and some of the special features they had, like being able to swim. Now, we have individual body models, syndromes, materials each creature is made from, and material properties. (Which, unfortunately, is mainly dummied-out material.) This gives a whole new level of depth that can be added to these creatures, but it took a major time-out in game development to produce this jump, because it meant revising the basic systems the game ran upon to accomidate a much deeper level of complexity in how creatures operate so that meaningful differences between creatures could exist.
In some of my suggestions, I call for something similar - the Improved Farming thread is a ground-up (no pun intended) overhaul of how farming works, because the current model essentially consists of "get floor wet" and "throw seeds at mud". It needs to be given a much deeper level of differentiation between plants to become a meaningful mechanic. Likewise, Class Warfare calls for a rebuilding of Dwarven psychology so that they aren't all automatons, and are capable of some sort of response greater than "happy" and "unhappy", with "unhappy" eventually leading to tantrums. The (Toady Dev Page) Kingdom Mode makes player interaction with the world deeper than just "time for the annual goblin attack". The upcoming siege mode changes on the dev page will give more depth to siege strategy. I've even gone and written a
Volume and Mass thread that talks about similar overhauls to the stacking, tile-occupancy, cave-in, and liquids systems, which is in a way an even more basic overhaul of physics that wouldn't really add anything directly to the player's enjoyment per se the way that someone will be positively thrilled they got penguins, but which I think is going to help the long-term development of DF as a game.
Toady isn't tripping over himself to impliment the things I am suggesting, and it's not necessarily because he agrees or disagrees (honestly, I can't tell which most of the time, and I really wish I could get more feedback on what he does or doesn't like, since it really helps me refocus my energies to addressing the arguments against what I have proposed), but because he has to manage his time between the more ambitious projects and the rewards to his playerbase that fund this project through their donations.
(And I once again manage to disgorge about a thousand words of text at a question of 50 words.)
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Topic: Xenosynthesis and magic fields (Read 53578 times)