Another Dwarf Fortress part 3: The Second Siege

I am playing Dwarf Fortress again and here I am, writing about what befalls my fortress. Check out the first and second part, before reading this one.

After the attack, several of the dwarves became depressed, having lost friends and family in the fighting. The dwarven children on the other hand were more content, as the dead invaders had brought clothes for them to wear (producing clothes is something I still haven't quite figured out). The population was growing and I was preparing for the next attack whilst also working on the betterment of the fortress.

I thickened the walls to double stength, mostly for stilistic purposes as I have yet to encounter anything that can break walls in the game. I started enlarging the living quarters and built a large second meeting hall, as well as a statue-garden and more kitchens on the second level below ground. Furthering metal-production, I was dead-set on getting all my close-combat dwarves into a full set of metal armor before the next big attack came. Food production would be advanced by creating more farming-plots underground on the third floor below ground. I also set up a prison, even though i do not know how to use it.

Another Dwarf Fortress part 2: The First Siege

I have started playing Dwarf Fortress again. Let me tell you about my exploits!

After year 2 of my new fortress, the population had grown. I had dug out spacious housing for the dwarves, the militia counted twenty dwarves, the first two of which were armored with chainmail shirts and -leggins and the wall surrounding the area above the fortress was done too. There was a channel of water, protected by a grate underneath the wall leading through the water-hole in the pasture and into the cistern below, which held ten by ten by seven squares of water and had a well connected to the bottom floor of it in a room beside it, separated by a wall so dwarves couldn't fall into the cistern itself.

Food production was going great. Animals were being butchered as well as hunted, honey and eggs were produced, plump helmets and wild strawberries grew and sometimes I would even get my dwarves specialties from the caravans, such as cheese or rum. The masons and stoneworkers were working on making a really nice new meeting hall and carving appartments and offices for the nobles of the fortress. The defenses included a path inside the wall that was overlooked by a ballista behind an arrow-slit and there was a central room for crossbowdwarves to fire out of without being endangered themselves. I was getting giddy for action. That is never good in Dwarf Fortress...

Another Dwarf Fortress part 1: Starting Out

I've recently been playing the great/complex/astonishing Dwarf Fortress again. My new fortress is using all I have learned to do in the game so far - and I'm still learning to use more features of the game, my ability to survive growing constantly. Let's see, how far this will get me this time...

The first year of the fortress was easy, as they always tend to be. Seven dwarves with hand-picked skill to get me trough my first winter and get a basic production and growth of the fortress going. A mason, two miners, a carpenter, a negotiator and a cook, I had the essential skills for all my dwarves. The group brought a small group of chickens and a rooster to get egg-production going too.

Making a Roguelike: Thoughts on Combat

As our roguelike-project is starting to take the form of an actual, playable game (which I still won't publically reveal until we're at Beta-state), let me talk about the philosophy of encountering monsters in the game.

Monsters need to be scary. That is the very essence of the word. Monster. When I DM an pen & paper campaign, a fight that is not a threat to the player-characters' lives is not a fight worth rolling dice for. I dislike success-porn. When playing a video game, my opponents better be a threat to me too. If not, what's the point? For me as a player to feel good about myself? That's a bit like punching toddlers, isn't it? This is one of the main reasons I like difficult games for. Playing a game to overcome adversary (actual, effective adversary, not just pretend-one), not just to get a pad on the back.

Gamescom 2013

So... I was at Gamescom 2013 - for work-purposes as I was there with the PR-department of a games-developer, rocking a stage in the consumer-area of the convention center. As I have just returned home last night after six days of hard work and slightly less hard parties, my thoughts on what I've seen and experienced are as of yet a bit unstructured but lest I start to forget, here come some snippets from my Gamescom-trip.

Please read on after the jump!

Thoughts on Pen & Paper: Player Interactions

One of my players in our sci-fi pen & paper campaign complained that there wasn't enough player-interaction going on in the game. Being as he was the pilot, that was true. Being a fair GM, I thought I needed to change that. Being also a somewhat rough GM that I am, things went bad quickly. Well, the goal is for everyone at the table to have fun. Most things did work out. Read on to find out how things went!

Some people say that the pilot of a sci-fi campaign should better be an NPC, as all they have to do is fly everyone else from A to B and whenever they get action, everyone else is just strapped into their seats anyways. I usually try to levie that by having the others busy with quick-repairs and fending off boarders forming from the very walls of their own ship. Yeah, it's a rather high-tech setting. Now over the past few sessions, there really wasn't much dangerous piloting or space-combat to be done, just exploring an ancient tunnel system in a planet/optical computer/religious site. And they always left the pilot behind so yes, he got bored.

So I started with, when the rest of the crew returned to the ship and they started loading up loot into their cargo-bay, having the pilot see different stuff than everyone else. The implications were clear, as the pilot spent most of his time linked to the ships computer he would be the first target to any sort of cyber-attack. As the crew spend most of their free time in a VR simulation of whatever they like, the rest would fall too but they hadn't had a break for a while. So the pilot is going crazy, seeing an intruder who, after some testing by the chief of security, isn't there although she ship does react as if they were. The result is that the pilot gets knocked out with a phaser and restrained in the med-bay, where he spends the rest of the session, while the rest of the crew shuts down the computer core and fights the two escaped prisoners whom they had brought from another system.

I do agree that I kind of pushed my pilot into open rebellion against his comrades. He got phasered and forced to inactivity for most of the session, which was a bummer for him as a player but at least everyone else got to interact a lot with all the suspicion, threats, pulling of rank and discussion appropriate for the tense situation of being in a ship with a computer compromised by a vastly superior enemy.

I will have to find ways of doing this without the group restraining each other or going all-out PvP in the future. After all, we're all at the table to enjoy ourselves.

Making a Roguelike: More Design Ideas

Let's talk about some more things we're implementing in our roguelike. Once again, I won't talk about the interface system yet but the mechanics of a good roguelike don't need much of that anyway, do they?

A lot of roguelikes require you to eat in order to survive. The classics, like Nethack do that, Rogue Survivor always puts you against the clock by having starvation threaten and force you out of hiding, one could even argue that a space-shooter roguelike like Transcendence does the same by having your ship consume fuel. The threat of starvation is a good gameplay mechanic to prevent the player from standing still too much if food is a limited resource. In our game, you die of dehydration, which is another name for the mechanic that I though was a little more realistic about what kills you first. If the game was more survival-based I'd probably have planned a hypothermia-feature as well but as it stands, the only two things in the game that kill you are lack of water and monsters.

You find sources of water in the cave. Statistically there should be some on every floor although statistics can lie and in our monster-less test-build there have been cases of death by dehydration. All the better, in a roguelike, sometimes the dice are just against you. Now on a somewhat lucky run, the finished game should take about 20 to 30 minutes to play through if everything goes well and you know what you're doing. If there are sources of water though, you could in theory just camp there. What do I as the designer do against that?