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Sep 25th, 2012 at 01:05:59 - Dwarf Fortress (PC) |
Welcome to yet another installment of Hydrall plays Dwarf Fortress badly. In-between being distracted by Planetside 2 (which I'm sadly -not- allowed to do a Gamelog on... I think.) I've begun doing the thing most likely to make me lose hair, gain wrinkles, and get eyestrain in Dwarf Fortress: Playing the game.
Unfortunately, I made a slight mistake last time: Because I didn't make a fort, I lost the position that had looked so good for it. In lieu of something well-off, I chose to go for something more Fun, instead, and selected a freezing evil mountain. Should be amusing.
This took me to the Embark screen. There are four different submenus to this screen.
Before I go into them, I'll explain how it all works- You are given a certain amount of points (1500, if I recall) that you can spend on either skills for your dwarves or equipment for them to use.
For your dwarves, there are a large number of skills available, ranging from Mining to Swordsdwarfship to even unusual skills like 'arguer' and 'liar'. These can all have points spent on them to level them up a maximum of five times, to 'proficient'. These upgrades start at 5 points each, and each level higher costs as much as the previous level, plus one. In addition to this, though, each dwarf only has ten skill upgrades available, requiring even more resource management - Two profience skills, or many novice skills?
Even if you have a proficient miner, he's nothing without a pickaxe. The items tab allows the player to buy food, weapons, furniture, medical supplies and related objects that may (will) end up necessary for a burgeoning fort. One can also buy pets and domestic animals, such as sheep, cows, yaks, and... Giant crocodiles, apparently. It's usually best not to question these things.
That's the end of the resource-using tabs, and the last two are fairly simple but endlessly amusing - Naming your fort and government group. The game lets you use words from its in-universe language to make names, and includes a random generator for when you don't feel clever. This has produced such gems as Lideskilrud (Nudebronzed), Koganusan (Boatmurdered), and Roderlogem (Baldpainted). Hardly a groundshaking game mechanic, but an entertaining one.
In the end, I made my seven dwarves into the usual simple profile- One miner, one woodcutter/carpenter, one mason/stonecrafter, one farmer/fisher, one brewer/farmer, one doctor, and one record keeper/trader. I won't bore you with all the items, but I got food and such, along with some chickens and sheep.
Upon arrival, I'm presented with a screenful of alphabet soup, a massive array of options, seven drunkards lounging around a wagon next to a mountain and a zombie dragon wandering at the map's edge. Gonna be an interesting ride.
I'll leave you with this fun little message that is displayed if you check the list of dead before anyone's died:
"No one has gone missing or died.
The year is still young."
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Sep 18th, 2012 at 07:15:59 - Dwarf Fortress (PC) |
Sorry for the lack of updates to this already- Unfortunately, my laptop encountered problems and thus wasn't exactly able to continue playing Dwarf Fortress. However, it's working now, so I'll move onto the next part of this thing.
The main point of Dwarf Fortress is the Fortress Mode, as I said. It's the game mode that the entire system has been built around, and it's only recently that the developers have begun putting more effort into Adventurer mode.
After selecting it as a new game, you're taken to a map of your world, where there are three levels of zoom shown- Local, Region, and World. Every 'square' on the world map is a roughly 4x4 area on the Regional map, and every square on the regional map is a 16x16 area on the local map (and then it goes even smaller with the actual individual tiles, but at the moment we can't see those). You're given a wealth of information on this screen, able to cycle through it with tab- Information about stone layers, about rivers, aquifers, vegetation, savagery (IE how deadly it'll be), et cetera. You're also told what civilizations can reach your site, and also how 'evil' the area is- An evil biome will have more fantastical, monstrous creatures, while a good biome will have the opposite (but perhaps even more dangerous). Height, both general and cliff height, can also be viewed.
Going into all the different stone types is impossible, since there are as many varieties as there are in the real world, or close. There are similarly dozens of types of metals, alloys, and minerals, and more recently plant varieties have been added.
After a brief search, I have selected a site- On the north it is part of a marshy wetland, with mountains in the center and a river valley cutting through the south. It is an 'Untamed Wilds' area, meaning I will encounter many animals out to kill me, but that's all part of the fun.
Next time, we'll look at the embark profile and actually embark.
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Sep 9th, 2012 at 16:44:17 - Dwarf Fortress (PC) |
So in the interests of my Game Design class and my own boredom, I have begun to log my experiences playing a particularly interesting (and difficult) game; Slaves to Armok: God of Blood - Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress. I've been a long-time fan of the game, watching its development with great interest, and I have this to say:
It has a long way to go.
Dwarf Fortress is in essence a simulation game, but its relationship to the genre is a bit more tenuous than most. Its goal has been summed up thusly:
We don't want another cheap fantasy universe, we want a cheap fantasy universe generator.
—The Toady One (developer), "Adventure Mode Gripes"
And while it's not yet incomplete, it does quite a bit of that. Upon clicking Create New World, you'll be taken to a world generation screen, where you can change a few options- How many cities there will be, the world's size, civilizations, monsters, et cetera, and how long the history will run. Please note that while my computer can run Crysis on the highest graphics settings without lag, it cannot generate a Large world with Very Long history. Take from that what you will.
Then it creates a world, using a random seed to generate the terrain, placing civilizations and such. It runs through a varying number of years of history, depending on your choices- Anywhere from over a thousand to only five. Randomly generated characters will live randomly generated lives and die randomly generated (but usually horrific) deaths while you sit there and watch your computer lag for a few minutes.
The game is incredibly details-intensive; Most worlds have between five and ten THOUSAND characters who exist consistently, and those are just the living ones. That's not counting randomly generated filler characters who only exist once you encounter them. Whole civilizations with histories, governments, religions and economies exist in the game.
The main draw of the game is Dwarf Fortress mode, although it also has Adventurer and Legends mode. Adventurer plays like a standard roguelike- Think ADOM or NetHack, for example- While Legends allows you to read the known history of your worlds.
Dwarf Fortress mode, however, gives you seven alcoholic midgets and a wagonload of supplies, giving you no goal but your own survival.
This is much harder than it sounds, as I'll show next update. There's a reason the game's slogan is "losing is Fun!"
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