Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep.20:In Which The Adams Brothers Join Us to Talk About Some Game They Are Making

Episode Date: January 1, 2020

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Hi, and welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfie. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland. I'm Tony. Hey, hello there. I'm Threato. And I'm Tony One. And we are so happy to have you guys on to kick off our second season of Dwarf Fortress Roundtable.

we have a if you will a interrogation set up here that's relevant people have been keeping up with the devlogs we actually have a segment every episode we take a look at your devlogs since the last time that we had to show and discuss them

yeah we love to speculate yeah well we can resolve some of the speculation if you like I mean to the extent that that's possible sure should just start then. So going way back, like, how did you guys come up with the idea to tackle such an ambitious project like this?

Or did it start out small? Well, it started out with a drag sleigh, which is a game we made in high school back in the 90s. So it's been in Korea, it has been snowballing since then and just through different versions. We had, it got its, the biggest was. Slaves to Armont God of Blood, which came out in year 2000. Yeah, that's when we put up the web page. I mean, Slaves to Armach God of Blood was in earliest, early access, never really much of a game at all.

The 3D, the one with the 3D graphics. That was back when we had really terrible ideas about how to construct a project. We thought everything had to be built from the bottom up. And that turned out to be an absolutely terrible idea. but we did have arm hair before War Fortress got arm hair. I mean, Door Fortress was a separate, really separate idea for slaves to Armagh.

And when Door Fortress, when we decided to make it complicated, is when we decided to combine the two are really ambitious 3D game and a Askey-based game, which is just chosen because we wanted to be more roguelike, I guess. Yeah, I mean, I mean... Actually, except that it wasn't really. We weren't trying to make a roguelike.

We had all those Curses games, right? We had Liberal Crime Squad, but also all the other terrible curses games you can find up on the web page. There's like 14 of them. And Curses, that's like one of the display libraries for Askey stuff. And we were just making another silly little game. It was Mutant Minor was going to be this little Askey game about digging up like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mutagen canisters and growing arms.

so that you can dig faster and you find like these pockets of slime. We never got around to this indoor fortress. You'd like dig into the mountain and find like a pocket of like 10 blobs of slime or whatever that kind of pour out and you fight them and so forth. It was enclosed burrows and where little ants are coming out, that kind of thing.

Very arcady. It was kind of like dig down. Yeah. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of VGA minor. It's like a random game. game from the 90s you could download from BBSs, I think, or something? Was that still the BBS era? I don't

recall. Yeah, definitely. I mean, the tail end of it. Yeah, and you'd go down this elevator and dig, and you'd find different minerals. I think there's also a subplot where you have to put a dynamite under the outhouse to get your wedding ring back or something. I did that in real life. Yeah.

We never got to that part. But it's it was still another weird little inspiration for the game. and stuff like Boulder Dash and stuff would be closer to what that game was going to be. It was just not a, yeah, not what it is today. Yeah, it wasn't as all the two are combined.

We said, well, we might as well take drag sleigh and combine it with a dwarf fortress because both of them were getting, I mean, Slaves Sarmock was already so complicated and dwarf fortress just seemed to be, why did we decide to put them two together? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm trying to, yeah, It's because Mutant Minor was a failure.

Like, we never released Mutant Minor because we were doing, it was, again, a really bad decision about the turn-based. It was a turn-based game, like a Rogue, like we kind of had to want to have this. And VGA minor was this way too. You just wanted to kind of move around one step at a time. But we won multiple minors for some silly reason. And so it would just flip control between them and we're like, ah, we need to make this a real-time game.

And then when we were saying like, oh, we're going to make it a real-time game. real-time game, with multiple people running around. That was when we started having, you know, the idea that, oh, we could change the setting. You know, this could be about dwarves digging in a mountain. And then we had this epic sort of like three-day phone call where it was, it was, I mean, we slept a little bit in there. It wasn't quite like when we were playing Transport Tycoon and didn't sleep. But I was back in the university, we just, we took turns. going into classes and just kept this game running forever and didn't sleep for it was really yeah we got really sucked in the game badly but the the the dwarf fortress phone call we were like

you know oh it could be about dwarves they could be digging and they could have like lives and stuff they could have workshops and keep little diaries and and they always die at the end but then oh you could come in with an adventurer and go find the diaries and read about them go find the little goblets and bring them out of there and and you'll you'll get a high score based on how many diaries and crafts that you find to kind of give you the and this was the birth of adventure mode and dwarf so questions was this a phone call between the two of you yeah yeah I was I was living in California at the time and Zach was up in Washington state and so I called him right when

mutant minor fell apart and we just talked through what was going on and kind of built this this new idea and yeah the whole thing so armok was a 3d-ish were you think of 3d as in like like world fortress now was 3d with multiple levels multiple z levels or were we know 3d more like uh FPS or a third person game yeah it was more of the latter it was like it had 3d models it had triangles it had like it had a frame animation where you could walk on your hands or on your feet. It was really, really graphical. There's nothing like George Fortress.

Yeah. Oh, you can go to Bay12Games.com slash Armock and get it. It's got, and I think there may be screenshots still there. It's a defunct webpage. I mean, we intentionally made this webpage defunct because Dwar Fortress is just the better game all around. And even as a historical artifact, this is this is really bad uh it's just roughy and terrible but um but yeah no it's it's a 3d game got keyframe animation and um you know random but has randomly generated weird mammals and

stuff with like they're really bad procedural animations this is not like like nowadays people's like animations are really cool and have all kinds of inverse kin of whatever stambacab blah blah blah It's all the stuff. Well, yeah, but the main thing that switched from, like, Dwar Fortress obviously didn't carry on any of the 3D models, but what Slaves to Armach had, the Dwar Fortress took over is the really detailed body simulation, like the way that all the arms and torso are all different and all the internal organs get damaged and all that kind of stuff, all came from Slaves to Armach. Yeah, it was part of that top, but like build from the bottom up.

Yeah, instead of having the world and stuff, world creation, civilizations, and workshops, and artifacts and stuff like that, slaves to Armach instead had, like, which way do you comb your hairs on your arm kind of thing? That might be a little too deep, huh? It was pretty bad. And we finally got there in Dwar Fortress, though. I mean, Dwar Fortress has arm hair now, too. Thankfully. It's colorful and stuff.

And in Dwar Fortress, your nails grow, and your fingernails and your fingernails and your fingernails grow. I don't think we had that in slaves to Armachs. We've actually surpassed the silliness of the detail of the original game. Yeah, so that's, that was one of my questions. Like, how much is some of this, like, straight up you're planning it or some of it, you just think it would be kind of a fun idea? And you're like, you know, it'll just toss that in. Oh, that's both, both really, yeah.

I mean, because we have those dev pages, right, that go forward, you know, a decade or whatever, depending on how you want to look at it. And we've, we've, we haven't really stuck to that carefully. Yeah, we keep taking detour from the devlog. It's like we, uh, you know, we'll talk about something like this, this would be great to add this in. And, um, and Tarn will just take a detour and program it in. Yeah, I mean, look at the, uh, the villains release, for instance, was going to be the villains's release. Um, and there are villains in it.

Uh, but there are also adventure movies. parties adventure mode pets craft guilds the new organized religions also have shrines and things the merchant companies the mercenaries night creature experimentation yeah it's like really beefed necromancers that take over half the world yeah the disturbed mummies do the same thing and there's probably some other, though all those are detours from what we were, you know, it was going to be a focus place.

So, yeah, I'd say it's like mainly, Dwarfurtures is mainly detourous. I think that's what adds to the, the, I don't know, like, the charm. Is that the right word or the fascination of it? You know, like you... I have the beholder on that one. Yeah, I mean, you can tell it's like

you guys aren't driven by some scrum team and, you know, San Francisco telling you to do daily standups with them and customer features and stuff. Yeah, I mean, you know we're beholden to the clock, so we're going to be a little more discipline now that we have steam coming up. Yeah, I mean, speaking of scrum, we have the, we do the two, every two weeks we put a news post. That's practically scrum. You guys are actually really good about that for, you know, effectively a two-man operation.

You know, that's impressive that you can keep those things cranking out. Yeah, no, we work all the time. So it's, I mean, there's always something to talk about. It's not 100% healthy, but... Yeah, no, we put a lot of time into this. I mean, did you ever expect it to get as complex it is? Yeah, because Slaves Armagh was, that was our, that was what we were aiming for is to make a really, really detailed simulation.

So Dorf Fortress, it just became so easy because there was no graphics, so we didn't have to really worry about slowing down. down with the features, it just became really, really easy to add more detail. Yeah. I mean, I think some of the details, like when you get to the specifics, I think maybe we'd be a little surprised at where we ended up going with, like, the information, how it passes around, like, the rumor system and stuff. Like, we wouldn't have necessarily expected to have, like, dynamic reputation systems

based on incident reports and rumors and things. There's so many things that you guys can't see that's going in the background. That's like our biggest failure is not showing all the stuff going on, just all happening in the background and knowing to see it. Yeah, the whole world generation production, economy and stuff is all, I mean, it's pretty complicated, but it's, and it's happening week by week. They're like invisible weeks inside of world generation,

and everything happens according to these sort of schedules for milking and butchering and trading and producing every little thing and there's specialization levels in the towns and so forth and now that finally manifests a little bit through the craft guilds that form is all based on these hidden specialization of them. Yeah, for an example, it's like those dwarf thoughts as Z from the unit list

and you just, oh, you guys probably know what this is, but you see all their thoughts about how they're annoyed by rain and all that thing, that giant paragraph. Just imagine that, but in some other form that you can't. see and then you'll begin to understand what's going on in the Tor Fortress. There's just so much stuff that you guys can't see. That's, you know, that's what we got to try to do more as show that kind of stuff. I have seen a couple code bases that were of good size and it's really impressive that

this hasn't collapsed under its own weight because the amount of unexpected and tangential things that you guys put into this game would, you know, it was. just blow up unless they're code base yeah well that's that's that's that's practice for you i guess uh i mean we have a graveyard of three 400 games and some of them like literally just collapsed and eventually you start learning enough tricks and learning your own mind well enough to know why things fall apart and then it stops happening yeah this is what this is your 30 something of your yeah programming yeah it's a lot of it And how did you guys even get to coding?

Oh, our dad was one of the first people to introduce computers to sewage treatment plants. So he was there right when computers began hooking up to industry and stuff like that. And so he would go to Radio Shack and buy computers and show us out of program and stuff. So we're, it is, it is really kind of, you know, we had a leg up on this. It was really a life, or a lifetime project. I mean, yeah, in terms of our exposure and education, we were quite spoiled, computer-wise. Yeah, yeah, we're really trained for childhood, for babyhood, how to do this. Do you write this and see?

That's generous. I mean, some sort of horrible C++ hybrid amalgamation that doesn't like know what the standards are. I like when they brought the auto key word. That was cool. So for your code base, I know at one time I'd read something like it was part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Did I get that right? Or was there some interaction there at some point? Well, they download every copy of the game, but we haven't sent them the code. We promised that when we pass away or stop working on the project, they can have the code. But I expect that, you know, in those cases, assuming we're not murdered or whatever. Yeah, there's a murder clause.

That everybody gets it. It's not just the museum. In fact, we're trying to think of ways that we can open up. pieces of the game prior to passing on it's difficult because of the way that like if you just open source it and then especially when you're when you've got a game up on steam or whatever people will put the game onto like other storefronts and not update it and then your bug tracker is destroyed forever there's there are reasons not to open source things that go beyond, you know, just the kind of ideological stuff or, you know, open access stuff

versus commercial viability or copyright, but they're just kind of practical or technical issues with how things work. But we're trying to think of how to circumvent some of that. Like, for instance, and this is totally not a thing that's necessarily going to happen in this form but if if we release like a world generator right just the world generator that doesn't have any of the dwarf logic or whatever um then that's that's the kind of feasible sort of thing that you could actually do right just think of how that that could be released and then used by people and people get to check it out and it would also let people see all that invisible so it's that kind of thing we're yeah we don't have any any concrete plan but um yeah i don't know if i've totally lost

the i think you got it i don't think i'd want to see the source not because like whatever but i just it's like sort of learning how a magic trick is done i don't know if i want those spoilers look there's a difference between a game or a piece of entertainment that you want to keep the mystery in and a, you know, a Libra Office spreadsheet project or some utility that you're using to traverse the network. Those things, you definitely want to be, I mean, it's great to have those things open source so that the community can contribute to them and make them more solid pieces of software. But if this got open source, I mean, I mean, look at NetHack.

There are mysteries that aren't in NetHack anymore because, you know, of course, not that it was ever not open source, but you can just. deeply go into NetHack and find out all about the, for example, the wells. Yeah, but if you don't, if you don't spoil yourself on NetHack, you don't even have a chance. Yeah, that's a good point. And not that I've, I haven't, I mean, how far did we get? We just got to, well, we got past Medusa. We got to the vibrating square.

We didn't have any of the things we needed for the vibrating square, but we got to the vibrate. Yeah, no, we're no good at that game. good at most games. It's true. Did you guys actually expect the game to become as big as it nowadays is both

in complexity and the playofface? No way. No, we did not think it would get at all. We were surprised when people picked it up at first, and then, like, when something awful took hold of it, that was when it really started.

And, yeah, we had no... Before that, we had no band base. Even slaves to Armach, we had, what, like, 20 people that were even interested in it, really. Yeah, yeah. There were maybe 200 total forum accounts, and not all of those were active at the time. And, yeah, just a... This is, like, in the early 2000s, when there wasn't stuff like Reddit and something awful before that. So there wasn't really a way to get a fan base, the thing where there was after that 20 years ago.

Yeah, I know all the... I mean, we were around, like, like, we had... had our internet forum before like the rise of fortune and stuff so we we watched all of that happened um on our forum uh and it's it's been intriguing watching internet culture develop and stuff and uh but yeah we had no idea what was even remotely possible uh in terms of like um yeah the number of people that would be exposed to the game play the game and so forth and um you on the complexity side, yeah, I mean, I guess if you had told us, oh, yeah, you're going to be working on this game another 20 years, then we would have, we would have been like, okay, it'll be about that complicated. But, yeah, we didn't, we didn't have any idea. We'd be, we'd never had a game kind of go that long. So, that was surprising. do you know what the next release number is going to be

um is it still holding that toward the uh toward the idea of this is kind of a percentage of what is the you know mythical version one uh yeah yeah yeah i still have a piece of software uh on the computer here that has a list of all the things that long ago we thought would be the uh the core features of the game and that list is still good enough that we can plug the new features in there and the version number goes up what feels like an appreciable amount I think at some point that that list is going to have diverged too far from yeah we're we're kind of thinking maybe yeah yeah I mean it feels a little weird releasing especially because steam can get a little picky about this like releasing

a version zero point thing on Steam and not being an early access. So we may have to go to a different system for that, but another classic version might keep the old number for a longer time. Zach broke up there a second, and I think that we might have missed a very important part. Did you say that you're thinking about going to version one?

Or version something, yeah. I mean, it could, I mean... Just, yeah, just for Steam. But this is all kind of the same. or this is all under we haven't decided anything yet we're just we're just

because they're there you know how there's a window that pops up and says this is only an alpha and we're still working on it like they want it they will not let you yeah they don't want that

we all get it you know it's no no no I mean if you're in early access that's fine but but you yeah you shouldn't and and it's not like the game is not like a game right

so it's really complicated like and there are other games on Steam that are not as finished as this game is. So, yeah, we're kind of a strange, unique project, so like early access doesn't work for us because if you put

Dwar Fortress in early access, it's never going to leave early access, right? And so we just have to, why not call it now then? So that's the discussion that's ongoing. So how do you guys decide, you know, like,

okay, we're going to take a pause here, we're going to release it, and then we're going to go in, like, how do you look at the code and just be like this will be, this will work? Based on our original, like, thoughts for the release usually, like, this was

the villains release. So we want to check off certain number of boxes for villains, and it's been a really circuitous, strange ride along the way. Yeah, it's really not about villains. It's not even about villains really anymore. That's like a small part of the release now. But,

still those core checkboxes and you also just have to kind of feel like how long is it how long has it been since the since the last release you just we always go a little too long like the world activation release was 26 months this release is now at what 17 months and not too much longer, hopefully on this one, especially because we have the, um, this, this is a new kind of experience for us because we have these, uh, steam deadlines that kind of come about from having artists, um, like artists that want to work. And they're, they're, they're still working, but they're a little bit blocked now by us not being able to dedicate our time fully to like doing the new display and stuff. Uh, so we really just have.

to get out of this release. So this one will be a little bit unusual, I think, released a little early, and some features delayed more than the infamous Tavern Games release, perhaps. But we're still figuring out exactly what we're going to push off. And we'll just get back to that stuff after Steam. Hopefully, unlike the Tavern games, the infamously delayed Tavern games, been delayed for what 10 years now or something. We'll just get to this stuff

after the steam release, anything that we push off, but we will have to push some stuff off. I always ask myself, how did you come up with the different and quirky animals? I showed law fortress to some of my friends and they would be surprised about the amount of weird animals in your world?

So the, if you're talking about the animal people, and this is what I always think about fantasy games, it seems like most of the weird races in fantasy games, you just pop the head off of a human and put an animal head on it and called a different race. So we have animal people for every single animal in the game. And so we could call those different races. but we don't we just call them animal people and the weird animals we came up with we came up with in one day we decided to just draw pictures of weird animals we wanted in the game and we made a whole bunch of them and then that's how the magic was born yeah we got dronians and rotherers and the creeping eyes and magma crabs those were all in the same tablet where we were just sitting in some chairs drawing pictures of weird animals and then we

decided what they were after the fact and then the final possible part of the question is like all of the real world animals because there's a couple hundred of those and they they came mostly from the animal sponsorship drive we had a list of 400 I think or something that and I could be getting these numbers off by quite a bit a lot of them but um the the we just wanted kind of species coverage like I mean there's so many species Obviously, you're not going to get species covers, but like a fair coverage of like families and orders and things. So we looked up all the orders or something and a lot of the families within the more popular orders and picked some representative animals and animals that we personally liked stuff and put him in this giant list and then said, you know, if you if you contribute $10, you can pick an animal. and you are Fortress fans being interested in in things that are practical like bees got like

I don't remember what it was like 70 votes or something some ridiculous number of votes because they want to beekeeping and then the next the next one after that was also completely practical I don't remember what it was there was a series of practical votes and then yeah then we finally started getting the capabaras and things that you like like like other popular creature but we ended up putting in it was a very popular thing we ended up getting like you know several hundred votes

and ended up putting in like 213 animals something like that I don't quite recall and that's how we got all of the real worlds yeah we really wanted to do another animal sponsorship drive for like extinct animals or ice age animals or something like that

but we decided to be greedy yeah it was the yeah it reminds me of some of the animals that we put in where people are like putting in links to like conservation organizations. I think the golden lion tamarin maybe. Those are still alive. I don't know that we've lost any of the dwarf fortress species yet, but yeah, we may be the last place where some of these animals exist. I recall we had a pretty at-length discussion on the podcast about how you would package mosquito brains and if you would have mosquito brain flowers.

Would you sell barrels of mosquito brain to elves, right? Yeah, they must get upset at you for that. But, but, yeah, it's deeply silly. There's not enough checking and safety in the code for dissections and things. But, you know. Oh, and that reminds me. Crug smash brought up whenever we had him on. He said that you guys must have a deep down,

you know, animosity toward the idea of elves. So how did elves end up becoming so, um, so, uh, offensive? Well, the, the elves, we don't really have a, a dislike of elves, but it's just, they're so annoying with their, with their,

uh, their love of trees and stuff like that where it just they're, the way that they, they're annoying, let's put it that way. But I mean, we made them into cannibals. We, we, uh, we, uh, we, uh, we, you know, we have our own elves. And I guess they're just kind of a nemes. Dwarves like industry, elves like nature.

You're at each other. So. Yeah. I mean, I mean, some of, I mean, I remember we were writing the, the dialogue for the, the, the trade, like the negotiations about how many trees you're going to cut down and stuff. And I think it was right at that point. We're just like, you know, well, we have to make this antagonistic. And so we just made them as annoying as possible through the lens of like what they would say. They say all these stupid offensive things to the dwarves, right?

And I think that happened before they became cannibal. So they became kind of more interesting afterward. Like with the original release, they were just annoyed. Although, I mean, there was a time when they also animated trees and stuff. And the trees would turn into monsters and attack. and they had arrows that they shot at you was this ever in a released version maybe not with the arrows that they shot turned into spiked wooden balls

and blew up and a little chunk flew out of the dwarf we used to have we used to have yeah that would have been only on the no no you know it happened I mean no no no we had we had spike balls that's why there's a spiked ball trap is because the spike ball was an item that was originally a wooden arrow that turned into a spike ball

but yeah i don't think that made it to release i think we had to cut the because there used to be like the undead invasion used to always happen on year five the way back when the the map was 2d and went to the right like it went water chasm magma as you dug to the right there was always always like an a undead invasion on year i don't remember five six seven and there was always a wizard that came before the the invasion and ask for one of your dwarves to be their apprentice and if you sent off the dwarf

which meant losing one of your good dwarves then the invasion wouldn't happen and if you refused then you would get the invasion I was just these really strange little things before the game really turned into like the full on

sort of history simulation that it is so after so long every fortress had its billbo yeah it's exactly what we were thinking it's like this is this is the the billbo slash Frodo moment of the of the universe

that's not a copyright that's going to do it for this episode of Dwar Fortress Roundtable I'd like to thank Tarn and Zach Adams for stopping by again we'll have the rest of our interview with TOTI 1 and 3-Tow on the next episode of Dwar Fortress Roundtable

I'd also like to say that we sure do appreciate everyone tuning in listening to our podcast. We're starting up a second year now of the program, and we are really looking forward to having some really great guests and some great conversation, and we're really looking forward to trying out the next release of Dwarfurtress. So until next time, this is Dwarfortress Roundtable, the podcast for All Things Dwarfee.

We'll talk to you later. This has been Dwarfortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. 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 skykew ellen composed by kevin mcclod you can find kevin mcleod's music at incompatac.com you can find a link in the show notes this is a nice podcast all craft store ship is of the highest quality

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