Hi!
Continuing on from the shrines and evil areas from the last news post, the main goal this time was to get through the rest of the map work I needed to do. I didn't quite finish off the improved necromancer towers, but the rest is done! Merchant counting houses, guildhalls, mercenary and bandit forts, and monasteries. In fortress mode, these places can be visited by your squads and are also the sources of various travelers and trouble. In adventure mode, you can visit them directly.
This sets us up to begin our in-play interactions with villainous plots. This is the last major push we'll need to get through with this Classic release, so that we can begin adding graphics to the game and get it on Steam! First, we'll be allowing the player adventurers to be villains. For years, the adventurer has had traveling companions. Now you'll be able to intimidate, order, nag and cajole them into doing horrible things for you. This'll be the final look I need at the systems before I begin adventure mode investigations, and then fortress mode counterintelligence.
Speaking of horrible things, in preparation for the necromancer towers we added a few new critters last week. Procedurally generated creatures have always been a big part of the game, whether forgotten beasts deep under the earth, or demons and creatures of the night. Certain necromancers can now summon otherworldly monsters, and other necromancers can perform experiments on townspeople and livestock to create new humanoids and beasts to fight for them. Some of these experiments are intelligent and not wholly evil, and if they escape from the tower in sufficient numbers, can even become playable characters or fortress mode travelers. Finally, necromancers can raise ghosts of historical figures as lieutenants.
- Tarn
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Kitfox's Note
We've gotten a lot of comments asking about the release date, so here's a little explanation that Tanya, our captain, wrote in one of the forum discussions here.
"The problem is that we genuinely don't know. Under normal circumstances (like when we're developing Boyfriend Dungeon), game devs use production methodologies where we count up all the tasks remaining, add some buffer time, and voila, we have a predicted release window that's at least sort of reliable, +/- a few months. This method however assumes the game dev tasks are knowable and finite.
But Dwarf Fortress is different, because DF is so crazy-complex that Toady often couldn't possibly predict the difficulties/challenges of a thing until he's halfway through implementing them. So..... the villains update, for example, will be done when Toady says it's done. I am literally incapable of either rushing him, nor making him predict his deliveries more accurately. And then there will be bugs. I mean maybe there won't be bugs because wow that would be cool, but realistically, there will be important serious bugs to fix.
And THEN once villains is stable-ish, Toady will start serious work on the Steam version, which..... won't be a HUGE ordeal like most big patches (some UI tweaks are much more manageable/predictable than deep system guts), but we also haven't yet defined exactly what should be in-scope versus what is too much/too risky/not worth it. And since the Steam launch is going to be a TON of peoples' first impressions, maybe extra polishing/fixing time makes sense, right? So it might take a bit longer than we'd like, even if the code changes are relatively 'light', compared to villains.
Anyway, that's why we can't give a release window, at least until we're nearing beta testing. We announced it a bit earlier than maybe most people would (sorry) because we wanted to give the sprite artists a headstart, and we were worried about the whole Steam and Kitfox thing leaking and people getting mad without us being able to explain and manage it properly. We were all having nightmares about poor Toady getting tons of harassment. Luckily that didn't happen! But here we are quite far from the finish line."
Hope that helps, everyone!
In other news, I've got some official updates on the Bay12 PAX West plans. I hope you can swing by the booth on Sunday or Monday to say hi to Tarn and Zach. :) We'll be Booth at 6120, on the 6th floor.
Or you can catch Tarn at these two PAX panels, which I'll link below.
I believe the System Design panel will be streamed onto PAX's Twitch channel, but I'm not sure about the other panel. If there are recordings or anything, I'll be sure to update y'all on it.
Also... Happy birthday, Urists! It appears Dwarf Fortress ~officially~ released its first alpha version on August 8th, 2006. :') That's wild.
Whew okay, that's all from me for today. Don't forget to wishlist Dwarf Fortress on Steam - it actually helps out a lot!
- Victoria