Dwarf Fortress Update – Tutorials and Tooltips
kitfoxgames.com
kitfoxgames.com
It answers the question: what if you had a great product, but the user experience was the worst possible choice in every single way, but all functionality still existed and worked?
It turns out some people will still use the product.
I'm excited to see what happens when the UX is also reasonable.
Now, the fact they skipped working on the UX until now allowed Tarn to implement very difficult crazy features Z-level fortress layers and Fluid Dynamics.
Underground river -> Chasms -> Magma -> Bad Things(tm)
The real trouble I had with the old versions was the inability to build walls. As I recall, once you dug something out it was dug forever.
I don't know the minimum off hand but it is probably around 6 normal stone or cave levels, minus the levels used for open sky space and magma sea which I don't know the minimum for. Trees are multilevel now and I don't know that they will grow on a single layer.
All these fixed elements gave the game a specific progression of increasing rewards and challenges, and a guaranteed story arc for the whole fortress.
Not sure how seriously this was meant, but I unironically agree. I learned, while still in college, never to mock up a "working" polished UI lacking all the complex backend, just to show the client how it'll look when it's done. To the non-computerati, the metaphor is a tradesman working on renovations. If you don't make development versions look and feel like crap, the normies won't accept that it's not "almost ready".
Tarn's priorities here drive away most people, and filters for the sort of person who thinks "modern graphics library" means "ncurses".
And how did you come up with that 50 million USD number? Is it multiplayer? Can a major corporation use it to target a young audience demographic? Will there be a mobile version or micro transactions?
If Dwarf Fortress was able to be more than an inspiration and took the "we're selling it" instead which then would allow a different cycle time on features with different priorities, a 50M number isn't unreasonable at all for what the game would be worth today.
Which are sort of effective ways of “outsourcing” the UI development on projects where you don’t have the funds (or the talent) to make a great UI.
However, there are additional tools that let you do "bulk actions" by directly editing the Dwarf Fortress memory while it is running - these are technically a UI bypass.
The actual UI is just difficult to learn but once you do it's surprisingly easy to use - it's consistent in its own inconsistent way.
edit: In that with dfremote, df itself runs in a docker container on a server somewhere, and the UI is running entirely on your ipad.
This "sell it on steam with a GUI" is actually brilliant, because lots of people will buy it and some will play - but it gives those who like the idea but don't actually want to play an excuse to give Tarn money.
The game is kinda gimped because he doesn't know how to multithread it.
Other aspects of DF are now technically multithreaded if I recall correctly, but that's for sound and graphics and stuff that doesn't really remove the pathfinding processing.
Lots of the newer features like burrows, etc, are to allow the player to help the pathfinding algorithms.
I feel like that's a stretch. Just look at how many people play Rimworld, which has a fundamentally similar concept but much, much easier to understand UI/UX.
I feel like this describes every Bethesda game.
The blog updates have been amusing, things like dying cats from soaking up too much beer in the pubs. Various bugs and non-bugs that result in crazy events. Many amusing stories, etc.
I love the idea, but didn't want to invest that much time in learning the UI.
- DF is still a great game, so good UX in games doesn’t mean anything.
- DF is still a niche game, so good UX in games is essential.
Caveat: I’m a UX designer who absolutely loves DF and is saddened by how many people may never find out how great it is.
The one sin I can't forgive, though, is that he movement keys aren't the same as the home row keys. jkl; would have been so much better. Everything else I'm willing to chalk up to preference -- I prefer the chording of emacs, but I can understand it's not for everyone. To me it feels like vi was written for hunt and peck typists.
I may be more suited to chording just because I have very large hands and will use either pinky, or the palm of my hand to hit the control on either side.
Both do things very differently, both are complex and require time to learn. The difference is in consistency.
Vim is mostly consistent and that's where its power comes from. Learning the underlying rules is an investment which allows you to intuit most of its functionality. DF is wildly inconsistent and a lot of its difficulty is in learning the quirks of its interface which offer only tedium and no advantages in themselves.
DF is like that too, every command is basically a single keystroke. Every menu option has some key assigned. So once you know what you're doing it's not too hard to do a lot of complicated things quickly, but you may have to study to understand what you should even be doing.
It's kind of up to you to create the whole fortress from nothing and it's not always clear what you need to do to, say, make soap. You have to set up (and learn) entire production chains for items, get people to do the labor, etc.
There is huge interest in the game but the barrier is stopping people from playing.
I played a good amount of DF as a student. Never built things too complex cuz it is hard, but after reading some wikis and playing around with it, I ended up getting it.
There is obviously something about how the UX is foreign, and that with other choices it would be more accessible. But I found that the initial hump is the main thing, and that afterwards it's fine? But I am the kind of person who enjoys Dwarf Fortress!
It is great when people can design things that are understandable out of the box, but I feel like it is OK to design something that requires a bit of upfront learning, if those different designs are serving purposes.
The bad metaphor: it's OK if a bus driver has to take some classes to figure out how to operate a crane.
Worse than not following any conventions is that it is deeply inconsistent. It is inconsistent in how it presents the same information in different places, in how you navigate different seemingly similar menus, even in what key is used for the same action across menus.
For instance, searching in a list is done with q, S, or f depending on in which menu.
A good video game teaches you what to do, it doesn't demand you learn yourself. Then it tests what you've learned through gameplay.
Comparing DF to Mario is like comparing a kiddies first play car with an F1 car.
Accessibility matters so much more than feature count for success financially and by popularity.
The learning curve itself IS the feature.
I'm scared to ask this, but what is worse?
And I say this as someone who has lost hundreds of hours to Dwarf Fortress.
I'm not sure those qualify as worse than DF though. Depends on your definition of worse, I guess.
It is understandable enough given it's a personal passion project that they've happened to make public, works fine on the devs own system, and as I understand properly handling windows scaling is a LOT of work, but it does make it very frustrating to see this tantalising game but not being able to play it without non-trivial amounts of screwing around.
So, in my experience, the Dwarf Fortress UX is definitely complicated and isn't easily discoverable, but at least it does what it's supposed to. It doesn't infuriate me the way that some things (especially truly poorly designed things) do. This is why I claim it's far from the worst.
DF is also occasionally listed as a contender for "best game ever made" - but the fact that it's inaccessible will always force it to be obscure and nearly mystical among gamers. I'm also convinced that the modding community in rimworld has overtaken its DF equivilant, meaning that modded rimworld is probably more filled with content (and therefor, emergent possibility) in 2022 than DF-with-mods is...
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I always thought that Dwarf Fortress should be compared to Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (CDDA) on the UI/UX front.
I think CDDA is the gold standard for ASCII/CLI/TUI style of control - and I find that I can extremely quickly do things in that game all on my keyboard, almost like a tiling window manager.
I'm sure this sort of nirvana is possible with Dwarf Fortress (with the LNP) - but I was unable to achieve it, despite having sunk over 500 hours into rimworld and nearly as much in CDDA before playing DF.
The Napster UI was terrible - almost completely incomprehensible. And everyone I knew, including my least technical friends, was using it. Because getting music for free was worth dealing with any UI.
Second time was MySpace customization: you had to paste your own CSS into the "about me" profile box! And people figured it out, because having a custom profile was desirable enough that it was worth it.
Of course I completely recognize that improved software increased these markets by orders of magnitude, but to this day I remained fascinated that regular people managed to use such primitive tools for so long.
Many boomer types find MSDOS to be simpler than windows. I would argue that in many ways html/css/javascript is simpler and more intuitive than wordpress.
Text is such a simple way to organize information. I am still amazed how much information and precision you can pack into text that would take a 10 hour youtube to match.
I see Dwarf Fortress as outsider art:
"Outsider art is art made by self-taught or supposedly naïve artists with typically little or no contact with the conventions of the art worlds. In many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Often, outsider art illustrates extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds."
Other than the fact that the game was not discovered after his death, every other element of Wikipedia's outsider art intro paragraph fits to a T.
Found after James Hampton's death in 1964, he'd spent the previous ~14 years meticulously constructing more than 180 separate pieces from discarded material.
https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/throne-third-heaven-natio...
http://www.spacesarchives.org/explore/search-the-online-coll...
Keystrokes that work in one place don't work (or worse, don't work the same way) in another, menu options that are very similar are ordered differently in different places etc. If you learn how to work one aspect of UI (say the millitary menus) you can't transfer that knowledge to working another (say the minecart UX) most of the time. Except sometimes you can, which makes it even more confusing.
My real gripe with the UI is that it exists in different state of growth, so hospitals are zones but dorms are rooms; I can guess why hospitals were crammed there, likely because the hospital has a stockpile of items and the room menu didn't have the code for that while zones, which handle stockpile, did, but still.
But yea, since all (well, most) of the keys you can press are shown on the screen when you need them, learning them should not be very difficult. Getting fast and fluid with them takes some practice, but a lot less practice than the violin or piano.
For example the distinction between "Rooms", "Zones", "Stockpiles" and "Locations" which are all just variations on "area marked for some purpose" but that all exist as their own independent concepts and are specified in different ways.
Replacing the steering wheel of a car with the DF UI, for example, will literally stop everyone from driving it.
Or most of Microsoft's Azure portal. Have you used Intune?
But I just cannot get into DF in the way I would like. Even with Dwarf Therapist, custom tile sets and so on it's still a management nightmare. I am told some people just have a lot of idle dwarves. It always struck me as there were too many dwarves before you've created any sort of structure.
I got to a point where I needed a militia to defend against some monster and that was going to be a whole new system I'd heave to learn, assign dwarves to, suplly and manage and I was like "this is too much".
I know failure is the default mode (and some consider inevitable). It's a cool feature that if you play again on the same world you can find your old ruins.
I wish this were in a form where a community could contribute to and build this out because I think it could really help. I understand these guys derive an income from it and I support them in that. It just seems like there's so much missed potential here.
Some good iconography would go a really long way. If dawrves were wandering around with symbols above their heads showing they were hungry, thirsty, sad or whatever without having to inspect them you could communicate a lot of information. You might be able to see you have a food shortage problem or why dwarves have wnadered off looking for food. Or even that they're just bored.
If you were looking at dwarves you could see that they're your militia or your farmers or your miners. Not visually conveying information just seems like a massive missed opportunity.
[1]: https://www.eurogamer.net/why-dwarf-fortress-started-killing...
I believe the dwarves now will flash some various icons (in the text mode they'd flip between the dwarf character and a downwards red arrow, for example) but it's usually when they're almost dead of whatever it is.
Agreed, which is why the first thing I build in any new fortress is a giant wall around my fortress with only one way in: a long retractable bridge over a giant pit of death. When new migrants arrive before I'm ready, I flip the switch as they're crossing the bridge. Rather gruesome, but I do get all their stuff and my fortress gets a reputation for being dangerous, so fewer migrants show up.
It seems my fortresses start to break down at around the 30 dwarf mark, but after 10 it already starts to run not-optimally.
Had better luck with Rimworld as generally it takes a while to build your numbers.
Give dwarf therapist a try if you haven't already, it makes changing jobs a lot easier.
There will be always idle dwarves. For example you will want your critical dwarves (manager) free unless you need them. And you will want specialized dwarves (say one just for wood cutting) that only does one job and will be free and available the moment that job is needed.
Also a trick I use for handling new migrants, there is a useless job (alchemy? can't remember). I toggle that on for all my dwarves. And when a new wave joins in, I can easily find them by looking at dwarves with that job toggled off. Assign them jobs and then I toggle alchemy as well.
For example, it will enable hauling as a job on any otherwise idle dwarves.
Incidentally, the dwarves _do_ get symbols over their heads when they are hungry, thirsty, wounded, insane, etc. Also, the appearance of each dwarf is based entirely on that dwarf’s profession. The fact that all of your suggested improvements are basic features of the game and have been since the beginning is telling.
Your dwarves need many things in order to stay happy and emotionally balanced. They need rest, relaxation, socialization, friendships, relationships, family, music, dance, worship, knowledge, culture, art, beauty, competence, alcohol and nostalgia. (And possibly several others that I have forgotten.) One or two of these things can be gained while they are working, but the rest all require that they not be pursuing tasks dictated by the player, which means that they are counted as “idle”.
And most of the updates in the past few months have been around UI and UX.
But there is, they flash various status icons. Except idle. But you can find idlers at the gathering zone
The only thing that misses in the flashing status that I can recall is "waiting for a party to start" and they all just sit in the dining hall until everyone scheduled for the party arrives. That threw me off s little sometime as they just stand, while normal idlers at least wander a little.
Just seal yourself off and/or use dfhack to kill enemies.
Donations from the beginning in 2007 through to 2021: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf//index.php?topic=179406.0
Donations in 2022: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf//index.php?topic=179926.0
I understand that they might want to polish it but I'm not sure if polishing is actually worth. The original game has been continuously getting updates IIUC, so it might be totally OK to release sooner and then use the same model in Steam.
I think the platform shapes the user's expectations of what is acceptable though. If I buy a game on Steam I expect a certain degree of polish when I download it. If I were to buy the same game on Kickstarter I might not even expect to be able to download it for a few months/years. If someone donates to Dwarf Fortress, they probably already like it in it's current state and want to see where it goes.
Maybe it changed lately, but plenty of astonishing games came out of "Early Access" while being rather unimpressive (though promising) at first.
Any game that's not fully legit would have bad reviews follow them until after a full release and revamp
In the years before Steam got in on early access, I bought a few early access games, and the attitude was "Keep at it! Hopefully this will pan out," not "Now you owe me a finished game."
For example, I blew $50 on a starter ship in Star Citizen in 2015, when I already felt it was extremely likely Roberts would burn out before his vision could be realized. I saw the purchase as a charitable contribution toward people putting effort toward a niche I wanted to support.
If the project collapsed, there were dozens or hundreds of developers who had spent years honing their skill at crafting a MMO space sim. If they have to move on to the next thing, certainly many of them are going to take on similar projects with a narrower, more deliverable scope.
Also I felt it was useful to signal to the industry that there was unmet demand for this sort of intricate space simulation.
When Steam got into EA, expectations shifted from charitable encouragement to placing a pre-order and getting a partially playable demo to tide you over.
The one ~9 months ago was a speculation that was later denied by the developers (https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/poyqir/comme...)
If someone could simply combine the two it'd be amazing.
Sigh Another pipe dream because of the insane difficulty involved.
The pig is the game.
In the end, the city-building aspect quickly became rote for me, I find the direct overhead view disorienting and unnatural, and the game didn't have a lasting hook that pulled me in (opposite of Factorio, which maybe had TOO MUCH of that).
There comes a point where you just can’t play anymore because everything is way too fucking slow.
Talking as someone who knows nothing from the codebase here, of course.
I think there's still a ton of room to go moving foward, UI/UX design is really hard and the problem of keeping a system flexible and configurable while also easy to use is no simple task.
There's a lot of stuff simulated - you can wrestle with someone and throw them down some stairs, where they break a rib, and that rib punctures their heart and causes them to bleed to death. But from a UI perspective, you're still just throwing someone down the stairs.
I think it's a good choice for only game too, because once you're used to having so much agency in a game, it spoils you for many other games.
I've played DF since just before the massive z-level update (2008?) - I was living in a girl's college dorm with my girlfriend and her roommate's boyfriend that was living there turned me onto DF and Fallout, etc.
DF has been the one thing I have turned to over the years as a therapeutic device when I'm in deep depression and meds/therapy doesn't feel like it's doing it: the function of procgen obscurity, guided freedom of choice, and even the simple repetitive mundane nature of it that doesn't feel like it (even the looped guitar track) helps me really get through some dark days.
I'm worried seeing the steam updates like Tarn is begrudgingly making UX/UI changes for "the people in our community that can't handle ASCII" when he is obviously NOT a UX/UI guy (evidenced by the product of DF itself). The textbox styling look like he's just adding bland graphics as #goodenough.
If they patreon'd a $100/month tier where I could support a team to help translate his brilliant spaghetti into clean, streamlined frictive processes (militia workflow having broken defaults, navigation, etc), and maybe even some devs to optimize his legacy code so embark can handle larger complex sites and maybe CO-OP (come on I can dream). So much of the flow has always felt like I have to do this because this is how it is done in DF.
tldr: I am worried Tarn is not a UX guy, begrudgingly building UX for DF, when he (and WE) are missing out on a massive opportunity to build something with less friction and more [FUN].