Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep.13: In Which Alexei Convinces Jonathan That Dwarf Fortress Is A Roguelike

Episode Date: August 25, 2019

Alexei's talk on Nethack SourceRoguelike Radio episode on Kitchen Sink game designIncompetechBay12 Games Donation Page — Please Donate To The Adams Bros!

Hi. Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. I'm Jonathan. I'm Tony. And I'm Alexi. And so we're doing an interview today. We've never had anybody absent from a podcast, Alexi. So we've thrown you off your rhythm. So Roland, unfortunately, isn't able to be here right now. We're hoping that he can drop by during the podcast to at least stick his head in and say hello. But we do have a wonderful guest today, Alexei Pepper's. She is a technical designer with, is it Improbable Studios or just refer to? Just improbable. Yeah. So what does Improbable do? Well, they make this technology called Spatial OS, which is for enabling kind of cloud computing backend for video games on this massive scale. So you could make games with huge amounts of simulation, persistence, and scale. And I work at

the Canadian Improbable Studio, which opened up just about a year ago. I just had my year anniversary there, and we're working on making a game using that technology, which sadly can't say anything more than that because AAA is secretive as hell like that. But yeah, spatialist is cool. I would love, honestly, to see something Dwarfortress-like, like a rogue-like kind of thing on spatial, because it would handle the simulation kind of side well. So, yeah, but that's my day job. Awesome, awesome. So yeah, we're really happy to have you on here. I first heard you on an episode of, well, it's Rogue-like Radio, but I think that I might be on an interdict where I can't actually say that now. Is that right, Tony? I can't. I can't say Rogue-like Radio.

I think that's banned. I think the lawyers have shut us down on that, unfortunately. you know i think it might be before actually tony even came on i referred to roguelike radio about seven times an episode for our first few episodes it's a great show it is it is i wish they were more regular getting episodes out yeah yeah that's right guys come on you heard him call you out sorry you can totally edit that out i'm too sure no that's fine that's fine keep the levity man But I heard Alexi on an episode of Rogelike Radio on KitchenSync in Roguelike Design. And she spoke quite highly of Dwarfortress. And I thought, we've got to have her on here to speak highly of Dwarfortress with us.

Yeah, it's funny because most of my roguelike community work has been around NetHack, because that's been kind of my favorite roguelike since I was a kid. but Dwarf Fortress is definitely one of my favorite games of all time. I'm a huge fan of it. Definitely don't get to talk enough with other human beings about it. And so I was extremely excited. I hadn't heard of this podcast until you reached out to me. And it was very easy, immediate.

Yes, I would love to just come talk about Dwarfurtress for a while. Is Dwarfortress, well, Dwarfortress is certainly a roguelike when it's in adventure mode. I don't know that there's any deny in that. but I don't know that it is whenever you're playing in Fortress mode I mean do you think it gets grouped in just because of the default Asky tile set and people kind of look at it and they're like

oh that must be like NetHack or whatever oh it's you know I always wonder about that I mean so there's the Berlin interpretation of what makes a rogue like because it's such a hotly debated topic and it is like Tor Fortress only hit some of them in fort mode it is Asky which is kind of part of what people

perceive as rogue likes. It does have that feeling of you play many times and you fail quite often. You learn from that failure and it makes you want to play again, which is kind of a key element of roguelikes. And it's got the kitchen sinky kind of like complexity and complex simulation, which tends to come up in rog likes. So yeah, I mean, in the end, I think that the main reason I think of it as a roguelike is because the people who like it tend to play a bunch of other rogikes. that makes a lot of sense actually I mean grouping it in like that and I think a lot of the people that play the roguelikes

are probably drawn in by the asky look of it so that that totally makes sense we'll allow it it still has the vibe of a rogue like just with like a much longer play time well that's not even true because like a game in a hack if you're actually good at it which I'm not

can take a very long time and a game or Fortress can be extremely short it certainly can if you've ever embarked into a purple zone. And those games for me are always incredibly short. That's what I was thinking of. There are two times. I tried once a very purple place, which was filled with harpies and anything that died animated. It didn't last there for very long. And I also tried once to do a like Antarctic embark. And that didn't work. Yeah, those, those are short. Yeah, I did a purple Arctic one time.

And yeah, it was just like, somebody went out, hunted, and we were all dead in probably under 15 seconds. I was like, oh, that's fun. Awesome. Cool. Lesson learned. Alexi, how did you first discover Dwar Fortress? Well, it's funny because it was long enough ago that it's a little fuzzy. I started playing it in high school, so I don't know, probably at least 10 years ago. I think that it was about when boat murdered was quite fresh, because I'm pretty sure that I found out about it because someone linked me boat murdered as like, hey, here's a interesting story I found online. And I thought it was just so cool

that I had to know more about this game that they were playing that let them have this kind of amazing experience. So I just kind of jumped right into it and started out. I think I feel like there was about a solid month where I played along with tutorials, I think through the Dorf, which was Wiki, just the written ones.

And so just kind of laboriously learning the key controls and learning the steps of like, okay, first you build some bedrooms, you build some stockpiles, here's how to disassemble your web, wagon, like all those kind of like first steps to be able to get a running fort. And I would have to just always play with the list of key commands and shortcuts up. So I could eventually learn them.

But after about a month, I was at the point where I could just sit down and play Dwarf Fortress and not have to worry about that kind of thing. I don't play it constantly over the last 10 years. It's kind of it ebbs and flows and that every now and then I'll have time for it and I'll think of it and then I'll play it intensely for a while. And then I might have a few years where I just, you know, I have to play a lot of other games and stuff like that. And then I'll come back to it, which is actually great because usually by then there's been a few patches. And I create a new fort and there's fruit trees.

It's like, whoa, getting food has become so much easier. So you started playing Door Fortress and pushed through without setting it down for a while. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah. So you're the first person we've spoken to that was that way. all of us and so far all of our guests have picked up to a fortress been scared away or or have just just didn't get it their first shot put it back down then come back two or three months later after I guess it had time to work its way into their psyche and then they picked

it up and started playing it and had what you pretty much had for your experience from the start I mean I can certainly understand why I think maybe I was lucky I don't remember if it was during school or if I was maybe on summer break. But I tended to have a habit as a kid anyway of during summer just kind of choosing some random topic I decided to get better at and just kind of powering through it. So I think that helped. That may be it.

The folks that we've talked to about it, all discovered Dwar Fortress as adults. We're going to be speaking with a user named Dill Soup coming up. And he is, I believe, 15, but he plays a lot of Dwar Fortress. And we're going to try to get a perspective from someone who is still a youth playing it. So it'll be interested in to hear what his experiences are. Yeah, I feel like it's easier to find the time to properly play it when, yeah, you're not an adult and you have a little bit more free time in your life.

Well, I think it also depends on what's your, like, what method do you come in to the game with? Because I got a, I got the O'Reilly book sent to me, you know, how to play Dwar Fortress. And I think, like you mentioned, I think I'd read boat murdered or whatever. And I was like, oh, this seems pretty cool. And then I started using that book. And I was like, I don't know what's happening here. I'm done. And then, yeah, I picked it up and came back to it later.

So I think, yeah, I mean, I'm just really interested in like how people get into it. Because it's not, I mean, it's not that hard when you figure it out. But it's getting to that point. It's a little time consuming. I think it also helped for me that I played NetHack as a kid. And I'd kind of gone through the learning curve there because NetHack is also very obtuse. game at the very obtuse control scheme. And so having learned to play that and then enjoying it so much,

I kind of already knew that these types of games are worth the effort and that once you put it in, they're really rewarding. Yeah. And I think once your brain can get around the fact that a percent sign is a tree root or whatever, you know, then maybe if you're already at that point, then diving in is a little easier. Which is interesting because I think I've heard, because I've listened now to some episodes of this podcast, which was fun.

Some of you use graphical tile sets, I think. Oh, I do. I'm all about that now. Yeah. Yeah, which I thought is interesting. I have not even tried them. I feel like I'm almost stubborn. Like, I went to the effort to learn the ASCI.

I'm going to keep using the ASCy. Yeah, that's fair. And I think that's what's cool is that TOTE kind of opened it up. And he's like, look, I'm doing this thing and it's going to have ASCy because that's what I can do. And if I'm going to make it open, so if other people want to, you know, put in 3D, graphical animated sprites or whatever, you know, go nuts. That's not my, that's not my jam. And I think that's what's really cool is you can have it look a million different ways.

And, you know, it's bespoke. I think that I'm going to have my next fortress that I start on my own actually be vanilla dwarf fortress. Well, maybe not completely vanilla. I might run a dwarf therapist. Is that right? Dwarf therapist? Oh, yeah. See, you're already setting down the slippery slope there, man.

Oh, I've used that from the start first. I know, I'm saying, try, you can't go backwards. That's the only one I've used is dwarf therapist. I think, like, I've never used any kind of other modifications to dwarf fortress. And I'll only, when I hit about 100 dwarves, I pillow dwarf therapist. And I'm like, all right, this is now necessary to keep the fort running. See, I've never been able to get dwarf therapists. I should, maybe I should just look at a tutorial on it.

Because every time I've pulled it up, I've just been like, oh, my God, I don't know what's going on here. And I'm on a 4K monitor. And so also the fonts on it are like two centimeters tall or two millimeters tall. So I like, I can't even see who's doing what. So I just, I mean, if my forts are huge, I'd cheat with auto labor. And that kind of keeps things orderly and tidy. Imagine that, a dwarf fortress related program that has troubles with the UI. Hey, but that's not the official toady one UI.

I'd still prefer to manage them in the game than therapists. I think that's probably just me not understanding he's the therapist properly and having learned the other way. And now I'm like, damn it, I spent all the time to learn how to manage these dwarves this way. I'm not cheating.

I'll just use auto labor or whatever you know or self-manage. I do plan on I'm playing some vanilla door fortress with the ASCII again because I think that the tile set helped me get over the initial inaccessibility on it.

And I think that I'm comfortable enough with the game itself to be able to go back now and use the ASCI original interface because I do like the fact that it is abstracted enough to where you can, it's almost like reading a novel where you have in your mind what is happening on there and you're not pinned in by the graphics.

Yeah, I find it sometimes amazingly evocative. There's also some nice stuff that I feel like is somewhat recent because I have been playing Door Fortress a lot lately after kind of a dry spell and just the way that like seasons and things like that and leaves falling from trees, like there's a lot of like dynamic action going on and it is like I remember I have this fort right now and it has some like maple trees and things like that and apple trees and some of them have white blossoms and some of them have red leaves and so when the right seasons change the

ground just gets covered with these little circles of red and white as stuff kind of falls down from the trees and I can just see it in my head and I even had the situation where the mayor of the fort not long after embarking climbed up into a tree for God knows what reason. I think with a step ladder and then I think someone stole his step ladder and he ended up stuck up there. Yeah.

And we had a visiting like from the mountain homes kind of group. And so the person for the mountain home was also up the tree and they were conducting their meeting at the top of this tree but they got stuck there

and I didn't realize as for a long time. And so when I figured out what was going on, they were starving. And I desperately started trying to build a staircase upwards. And right as I was almost finished, the mayor tried to get down on his own and fell to his death. Oh, I mean, you hate to hear it. I feel bad for your poor mayor. It was very tragic, especially this was a very nice fortress. I think of my forts when I embark of how the dwarves must have some awareness of if they're going into a purple kind of biome. Because I've decided to try that or if I've picked somewhere nice that they are just expected to be successful. And this was quite a nice embark.

So I think that it was a tragic event. But we ended up building a memorial slab for the mayor at the base of this tree that he'd fallen from and kind of making a nice walled statue garden around it, which had the side effect that all the dwarven children would go play there because that was the only like meeting zone I had at the time. And so I just thought it was quite a beautiful thing. I can just see in my head this little peaceful walled garden around this. tree. Beautiful till the Ware Lama shows up.

Yeah, that fort has actually ended, well, it's not over, but it's gone very poorly. It got up to

about 100 dwarves, and then there was a goblin siege, and there was a lot of trauma associated with

that. And I started having troubles with tantrums, which I haven't had to deal with in a while. And then there

was a wear gecko, not a wear llama, but... Ah, the weird gecko. Yeah.

So one of the things you just said kind of took me for a moment and you're like, I just assume that when I deploy to a purple area the dwarves are aware of the danger and I just suddenly thought

that just seems so bad because it's like me as the host here I guess like I'm knowingly putting these dwarfs into a situation where they know they're going to get you know, can they get their heads cut off or whatever and like I, gee, I never really thought of myself as like subjecting these. I don't know for some reason mentally I just kind of hope they don't know

And it's like, oh, no, what happened? Isn't that worse, though? Because I feel like if they know, then they couldn't prepare. They could have said goodbye to their loved ones. Oh, but see, they just do what I tell them. So they don't know. I feel like there's no concept of free will. Well, maybe there is.

But I, oh, wow. I'm going to have to sit in my rocking chair or something and contemplate my ever deploying in purple. This makes me feel so sad. See, then this game does that to you, right? It does. I get surprisingly emotional about my dwarves. where they go through things.

Yeah, there are definitely times, like, and that's part of why I feel like I think of my dwarves as kind of knowing it to a degree, because when I do the Antarctic purple biome, I'm like, well, if this isn't going to end, well, I'm just going to try it out. I don't feel quite as bad when those dwarves die because I was expecting it.

Well, those are the hardy dwarves that were akin to the ones who went to New South Wales whenever the British were. Yeah, they volunteered. Yeah. It was that or, you know, a life of servitude at the mountain homes? Well, I mean, getting to Sydney versus going to Barrow, Alaska or whatever. Now, that's, there's a slight difference there.

Like, Sydney, you've got nice surfing and beautiful beaches and Barrow. You've got mosquitoes in the summer and tundra in the winter. I don't know. Oh, I'm speaking New South Wales in about, you know, 1795. Right. Yeah. Yeah, there wasn't a huge surfing scene there then, I guess. And I'm from Canada.

Alaska doesn't sound or Antarctic, like, oh, I'm basically already there. All right. So talk to Yachtuk or Dawson, in Canadian terms then. Yeah, I think it was like a penal colony where it was like a dangerous prison. Australia was. That's how it sounds fun. Yeah. Sounds amazing.

Yeah. I recommend you watch the old mini series Against the Wind from the early 80s. It was a great drama about the settlement of New South Wales. So, yeah. So there's going to be a Door Fortress series coming up on NBC I heard then. There's not. I'm kidding. There's not.

There's not. There's not. But I think you could. I think somebody could do it because there's such a narrative element to it, isn't it? I mean, and I don't have a huge, like, rogue light experience. Like, I've played, well, NetHack, of course. But I don't know that there's that same sort of depth on a character level with that. It's just kind of awesome and endless.

But, or in my case, very short. potentially endless. And cataclysm DDA, I think kind of touches on that where you can get kind of attached to the character and overcoming, you know, adversarial situations or whatever. But, I mean, I think it kind of lends itself to that sort of narrative. Like somebody could build this into something even more. And I know that there's one YouTuber who I'm not going to mention this episode that does that really well. But I think there could be potential for more of that or, you know, somebody even sort of evolving it. And I think that's a really interesting thing because, you know, we made a movie about World of Warcraft, but I don't know. Yeah. Anyway, I'm going to stop because I don't want to slag off any other games, but. Yeah. No, I think it's interesting because I play Dwarf Fortress very slowly because I like to, a lot of that narrative element, I feel like, is kind of hidden down a few layers in the UI. So stuff like I spend a lot of time looking up the family relationships between dwarves. Because it adds such a cool narrative layer when you realize, like, oh, the reason why this person is kind of having a bad time and tantruming is because their wife was just killed in that goblin attack and they have like a two-month-old daughter.

And it's like there's a whole story there that you wouldn't necessarily know about unless you dug down into the thoughts and preferences and relationships of your dwarves. Well, and that kind of brings you into Legends mode too, which I think isn't very easily accessible after you start playing the fort. And I think it, you know, you've got the Legends viewer or whatever, which is pretty neat. But it would be really cool to have it more part of the in-game thing. So you could see, you know, how these dors work and who these humans are. And, you know, why are these people coming to my fort? Why would they do that? Because I think you get that with Legends viewer, or at least you can kind of imagine why this would happen.

Is the Legends file updated as you play? I believe it is. it should be possible to ride a small utility program or something like that to display the most recent text entry from the from the legends file while you're playing yeah you can you can use df hack to do export legends and and that works but when you do it when you're in the middle of a fort it gives you this kind of scary thing it's like well you can do this and it'll be cool or it might just destroy everything in your life and i'm like well that doesn't sound very good i don't want to destroy everything but um but yeah i don't know i've just

done it because I'm a madman with nothing to lose and it hasn't worked out badly but it's pretty cool and you can use that what is it the legends viewer I think it's called simply called legends viewer and it lets you view all sorts of awesome stuff about the dwarves and search the people's names or whatever I'll check that up so I want to hear about the goat Yeah, so that was actually, so this is from the same fortress and is an example of what I find so fascinating with dwarf fortress with these narrative mechanics. And we were talking about free will of dwarves a minute ago. And I think that it's interesting that I feel like in dwarf fortress, there's a delicate balance where dwarves do have a degree of free will and they are capable of surprising you, even though you are in another sense dictating what they do. And so I did have this situation where in the same kind of peaceful fort, I had a dwarf named, I think, Lorbam.

And he wasn't anything special. Like, I didn't know who he was until he died because there were cave spiders in the caves. And this is kind of like a textile industry fort. And so he was down there collecting some silk and got, you know, off by a cave spider. It happens to the best of us. But after he died, after any dwarf dies, I like to try and figure out. kind of who they were and some stuff about them to figure out what the narrative's like. And I found it very sad because when I looked him up, he was 72 and his dream was of having a family.

But despite being in a fort of 77 dwarves, his only relations were three passing acquaintances and his pet goat. So basically he was somehow a horrible, horrible shut-in who dreamed of having a family and died in the caves. And so I thought that that was pretty sad. And I decided to give him a tomb. And I went to to make a statue to put in the tomb. And something I only learned during this playthrough was that when you specify you want to make something like a statue, you have the option of also specifying what the topic is going to be. So you can actually tell the dwarfs make a statue of Lorbam. And I expected that then this would be very specific.

But what they actually did was they made a statue of Lor Bam's pet goat and Lorban hugging each other. Okay, that is totally amazing. It was so amazing. And so I put that in the tomb. And it doesn't even in there because then a goblin siege showed up. And this poor goat, who's named Abam, was outside and was struck down by a goblin crossbow. And when I put another kind of coffin in because some dwarfs died as well, they actually put the pet goat in the coffin next to Lorbam's coffin. And I I'd forgotten that they even buried pets, honestly, so I was shocked. But now, so underneath this silver statue of Lor Bam, the dwarf and Abam, the goat, hugging, there are the graves of Lorbam and the goat. And it was just the most delightful thing, and it was that sweet spot of, like, I did tell them to make a statue of Lorbam, but it was their free will to decide,

hey, Lorbam actually really loved his goat. Let's make a statue of him hugging his goat. You see, we have talked before about what other level that Tarn Adams must be on to program this stuff. That just floors me that that happened. Did he plan to, did he program it such that, okay, if someone has a beloved pet and they die, let's try to bury the pet near them? Do they treat like the relationship between a dwarf and its spouse, will they try to bury them near each other? Wow.

I can't really even imagine what the code of this game would look like. And some of these decision trees, it's kind of, it's just, I'm sure it's beautiful and messy and wonderful all of the same time. I can't even imagine what could be intentional and what's just a happenstance. Yeah, I can see it a little bit. You know, okay, so what's this dwarf's relationships, whenever you know, it's going to be the subject of a work of some sort? Well, even if it's like making an artifact We're engraving this guy's life story on a sword We take his relationships

Who does he like? Okay, who does he dislike? Okay, if he dislike it, we'll have him putting a sword through its head Or, you know, an axe to its head or whatever. If he likes it, then we'll have him hug. Well, and I wonder if it is in this case Because he had no closer relationship Because he only had passing acquaintances otherwise.

Like, who knows? And I mean, I do find it interesting. So one of my talks at Rogue Lake Celebration was about the source code of NetHack, which I looked through in the process of some research that I did. It was very interesting for me, as someone who played NetHack my whole life and thought of it is this amazing work of complexity and genius to look at the source code. And it still is a work of genius. But it's also, I had assumed in a lot of ways it had to be doing something more complex and it really was, which is the trick of game design a lot of the time. and even for these procedural games and system-driven games

where in some ways you can just take the player and 50% of the way there and they'll form the patterns. So there can be situations where I'm sure there's lots of times where I've had dwarves with relationships that I've buried

who didn't end up next to each other or anything and I didn't notice it. But of course I noticed the times that it does happen. Information bias. Yeah, exactly. So I do wonder, some of it might not be quite as complex as it seems

but it is still I can't imagine the source code of dwarf purchase must be just fascinating and I can't think that it does it with net like NetHack surprised me by being very hard coded it is very exception driven so instead of programming a more systematic approach to their content they have a lot of switch statements and a lot of if else's and they basically

manually handle every possible case which is wild, but it lets them get what they need done. I can't imagine that Dwarf Fortress could possibly work that way because there's just so much of it, but who knows? Dwarf Fortress has the responsibility, though, that where that heck doesn't, of simulating an entire fortress with every turn, with every, with every clock tick, it updates, at least I've heard, it updates, you know, the status of every object in your, in your, in your, in your fortress

and if anything has changed on them which is why you get the frame rate death eventually yeah people laugh when I mention that Dwarfurtress

needs a high-powered PC to run effectively a bigger forts and stuff like that because they see the ASC and they're like I couldn't take anything to run this kind of game

but no the simulation is it turns out single core CPU is the driving factor if you're a Fortress player, you're shopping for a new computer.

It's like, all right, tell me the single core performance. I don't care about all these 82 cores or whatever. Yeah, I can have an embedded graphics card. Yeah, don't care. Just give me high single core performance. I'm a true gamer. I don't care about graphics cards. Exactly. Just a single core, baby.

That's all I need. You know, I also read that as important as your CPU single thread speed is your RAM speed. So you want to have the fastest RAM that you. you can possibly get. Not even so much having large amount of RAM because it will only utilize one or two gig, even with a large fortress. But what you do need is to have it be blazing fast. Yeah. As an aside, I can tell you my CPU is an I-9-9900, and I don't know how, I mean, probably pretty decent RAM, not as fast as it could be. And I got a fort of 307 dwarves, and I'm still at, I don't know, 80, 90 frames per second.

That's not. That's doing okay. Yeah. So single cores matter. I'm in the middle of designing my next box, and it's going to be built around running Tor Fortress. There you go for I-9. Is this in Dwarfurturet was running in the MoMA?

I wonder what kind of machine they've set up. 286. Because I think it went in there about. Guy in to specifically set up. fortress machine. Well, it'll run on my Ubuntu box is just fine. So, yeah, the, what's another thing I love about the game? Whatever your platform is, well, now, let me just say, I love it because they support Linux.

Yeah, because I love Linux. And that's going to wrap up this episode of Dwarfortress Roundtable. Join us next time for the riveting conclusion of our conversation with Alexi Peppers. We'll discuss roguelike celebration, emerging gameplay, user interfaces, and much, much more. And if you can, don't forget to stop by Bay12 Games.com and click on the Yellow Dinosaur and drop a couple bucks into the Adams Brothers Pockets

to show your appreciation for this awesome, awesome game that they've been working so hard on for so many years. All right, until next time, have a great time. This has been Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things dwarfy. You can find all our past episodes at DF Roundtable.com. Please stop by and leave a comment or suggestion in the comment section of this episode.

While you're there, you can subscribe to Door Fortress Roundtable or find us in the podcast service of your choice. Music is Sky Q Ellen, composed by Kevin McLeod. You can find Kevin McLeod's music at Incompetec.com. You can find a link in the show notes.