To go from $15k to $15M, x1000, in a matter of weeks must feel incredible. Particularly after 15 years of hard work.
The game is made for the love of making it and what little money they made was always just about allowing them to keep doing what they love. The resulting good will from their 20 years of labor and refusing to sell out paid off in the end when they needed it. Honestly, I'd have bet that if they released the "premium" version for free on bay12 but $30 on Steam they'd still make the majority of what they have.
Instead he just hung onto it, and eventually used it for his own bud delivery company, once recreational cannabis was finally legalized.
He was much happier that great three-letter domain name be used for something he loves, strong kind bud, instead of something he hates, weak piss beer.
https://bud.com/history-of-bud-com/
>In 1999 I was contacted by a lawyer Steven M. Weinberg, representing Anheuser-Busch, makers of Bud beer.
>We chatted by phone: “So, you’re a college student!”
>Actually I graduated the year before.
>He continued: “Well, how does $50,000 sound for bud.com?”
>I replied that $50k should be the interest generated by the money someone pays for bud.com. This is a three letter, actual word, dot com domain, and if I’m going to see it on every beer can you make forever, I should at least be well compensated. I remember reading that the marketing budget for Budweiser beer that quarter was $16.1 million. BUD was the company’s stock symbol.
>I wasn’t going to sell lightly, and they weren’t going to bid against themselves, so we didn’t get anywhere.
The story about his fight to register the four-letter domain name fuck.com is also hilarious:
Also it very unlikely publisher get 30% for title like DF. More likely there is some recuperation if publisher invested into new version and then then 10-15%.
PS: I work in game development.
There are other examples like UnReal World [1]. It's a game about surviving in the wilderness in Finland made by a guy living out in the wilderness in Finland. It had its first release 31 years ago, and the dev is still going at it. He's not exactly rolling the dough, but what's better than doing what you enjoy and making enough to get by doing it?
Well sure, making way more than you need! But spending the prime of your life doing something you love with the chance of a nice payday, seems more pleasant than spending the prime of your life doing something you dislike but with a more guaranteed upper mid payday.
[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/351700/UnReal_World/
It is absolutely possible to succeed as a solo indie game developer, even if the likes of Minecraft or Stardew Valley or Dwarf Fortress are pretty extreme outliers. But it's nice when they do succeed.
Still a huge success, though.
I wish them the best of luck, entering a codebase developed by a single dev for 15 years.
My expectation is it's just an absolute mess, but I'm so curious.
Was curious what programming language it was written in, and instead found this: https://www.dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Language
WTF is this game?
But that's not _why_ it is vast. The vastness comes from three main things, I think:
1. the number of distinct procgen systems. Creatures have procgen phenotypes and personalities. The landscape, biomes, and simulated geology/hydrology. Biomes. The civilizations and simulated history. The names of things. Religion, Instruments, cultural songs and dances, masterwork items and treasures, legendary forgotten beasts, and a bunch of stuff that doesn't come immediately to mind.
2. the inter-relatedness of the procgen systems. In many procgen games, the different systems do not affect each other. Systems that affect each other multiply the possibilities. And if they all affect each other, it's exponential. They all multiply each other. It's hard to describe how hard this would be to build in a way that wasn't just a mess of nonsense, but they did it by focusing entirely on the underlying systems and the UI was impenetrable ASCII with baffling UX. That has changed with the steam edition.
3. This game was written by two guys over the course of more than a dozen years funded by donation. It is an exceedingly rare and towering artistic achievement. This game should not exist, and will almost certainly never be surpassed (at least not in the same artisanal way).
One of the goals that was mentioned as a north star was that they wanted this game engine to be able to generate any fantasy story that has ever been told. But that none of those stories would be explicitly coded in, the world was just capable of making it happen.
You know, I probably could have just linked to their roadmap. The game is only halfway complete by the creator's opinion: https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html
That will give you some idea of the INSANE ambition of this game.
Q: What programming languages and other technologies do you use? Basically, what’s your stack? Has that changed over the 15-20 years you’ve been doing this?
A: DF is some combination of C and C++, not in some kind of standard obeying way, but sort of a mess that’s accreted over time. I’ve been using Microsoft Visual Studio since MSVC 6, though now I’m on some version of Visual Studio Community.
I use OpenGL and SDL to handle the engine matters. We went with those because it was easier to port them to OSX and Linux, though I still wasn’t able to do that myself of course. I’m not sure if I’d use something like Unity or Unreal now if I had the choice since I don’t know how to use either of them. But handling your own engine is also a real pain, especially now that I’m doing something beyond text graphics. I use FMOD for sound.
All of this has been constant over the course of the project, except that SDL got introduced a few years in so we could do the ports. On the mechanical side of the game, I don’t use a lot of outside libraries, but I’ve occasional picked up some random number gen stuff—I put in a Mersenne Twister a long while ago, and most recently I adopted SplitMix64, which was featured in a talk at the last Roguelike Celebration.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/12/31/700000-lines-of-code-2...
Seriously, one of the most fascinating games ever.
I'd recommend checking the following articles to get a good overview of the whole thing:
- https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/magazine/the-brilliance-o...
- https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/12/31/700000-lines-of-code-2...
> but this should eventually help with bug fixes, ports
eeeeeeeeee
Congrats to the team on their success!
What features did they streamline? I thought they just replaced the ASCII graphics with sprites and changed some hotkeys?
Instead of painstakingly assigning jobs to dwarves in a very fine grained process through the labor menu for each individual, dwarves are assigned to jobs.
That is, the vast majority of jobs are by default assigned to all dwarves, and the game intelligently assigns work based on dwarf skill and pathing distance. You are free to tweak labor settings from there, for instance by assigning a forge to be the exclusive workplace of a legendary weaponsmith and only making weapons at that forge, or specializing miners to only mine so that they won't find themselves cleaning fish when idle between mining gigs. You can also create custom work profiles more akin to the old setup, enabling or disabling specific tasks and then assign that profile to specific dwarves if you want to get so detailed. However I find the new system works very well.
>the game intelligently assigns work based on dwarf skill and pathing distance
sounds like mostly what happened before.
It's a totally new UI between the two versions: it's much friendlier to a broad population while still retaining the same game mechanics.
[edit] I'll also add my favorite change: performance. Before the steam version I always ended up abandoning my fort because the framerate just became unbearable. In the steam version I have yet to encounter these issues.
It has a simple tutorial, the interface is fully mouse driven, there's sound effects and music, and the tile graphics really do a great job to visualise what's going on in the game.
I've got a decent run on a side project right now, and I've noticed that (no surprise) when I get into a new game, all of a sudden all of my "healthy" hobbies like guitar, weightlifting, and coding go out the window.
Definitely planning to take a run at Dwarf Fortress eventually though.
Everything used to just be in a central massive "press a single letter for this specific submenu" sub-screen on the right third of the screen, with multiple submenus to navigate to what you're trying to do.
In the "the feature is less complex" in the steam version (note most of these are still in the simulation, just missing from the GUI so inaccessible to the player), some examples are:
- Health and body part level damage - Reading historical logs - Ammo - Idlers counter
I couldn't play the game before, now it is a joy.
2)Automining veins is now part of the base game rather than a dfhack thing
3)The military UI is still confusing and counterintuitive but it's a billion times better than before. I've actually managed to effectively train, equip and station troops and deploy them in combat without having to check the wiki. There's no way I could do that in classic and I've played a fair amount of DF
4)Things like the minecart UX and the thing which specifies how bridges open etc are way less confusing than before. Small, but there are thousands of UX improvements like that.
5)Rather than sometimes it's hjkl and sometimes wasd and sometimes arrow keys and sometimes numpad and sometimes you can select a box and sometimes you select the first tile and then the last tile to get a rectangle and sometimes you select the first tile and then use hjkl (or sometimes wasd) to grow your rectangle to the size you want, now you click the first tile, then the last tile. For everything. Building bridges, specifying zones, specifying burrows, building stockpiles etc, they all work the same. (Ironically there is a keyboard cursor if you want that but it is buggy for me at the moment.)
6)The system for worldgen and embark is also a lot better. For example you don't have the 3 weird confusing maps any more, you just have a big map and if you zoom in you get another map where you can pick exactly where you want to embark and the size.
7)Notifications. They all appear on the side in cronological order with an appropriate icon, you can hover to get the basics or click to see more or interact. Right-clicking dismisses them.
I could go on but you get the idea. There are lots of examples like this. It's still DF, but at least playing it isn't some Kafka-esque bullshit nightmare.
Then life took over and I lost all the muscle memory.
Since the Steam release came out I've been playing DF almost DAILY again. It's so much FUN!
Adventure mode will take the world by storm again, so that will probably mean a huge uptick in sales once it's finished.
Anyway, i bought one of the copies and the game is fun, whenever i feel like doing unlimited amounts of micro-management ;-)
My main issue with DF is that the main challenge of the game, combat, is pretty boring and rife with issues. For example, let's say I'm new to the game and want to put some XBow dwarfs behind a few fortifications in my base. Will the dwarfs intelligently do this when a siege happens? Is there a specific way to tell the AI that specific spots are where the Dwarfs should stand to defend? No and No.
Instead I will either have to painstakingly set up individual zones / burrows for each individual defender or the dwarfs will just ignore the fortifications, even if they are in a burrow! And they'll just sit there and ignore invaders breaking through your kill zone unless you specifically micromanage them into 1-wide spaces with fortifications facing the kill zone, and even then they might just run outside your fortress on the other side of the fortifications so they're close to where you ordered them to.
Rimworld on the other hand, (for all of its flaws around random and explosive damage), will at least let you draft a pawn, order it to stand behind a wall, and the pawn will get a significant cover bonus even without fortifications. They're smart enough to lean out and attack on their own too.
I say all this not to criticize DF but to say that the genre has come a long way, and I hope that with this success they're looking at weaknesses like this in the gameplay loop so that folks don't just take 20+ years of goodwill as a replacement for the possibilities ahead.
PS: Fuck cancer
DF things that come to mind that no other colony-sim has:
- 3 dimensions (z-levels) and all of the shenanigans (hydraulics, creative traps, etc) that go with them
- geological and historical civilization simulation
- the inter-relatedness of the game session to the history of the world is a story-generating masterpiece.
- The "zones" (surface, caverns, spoilery places) and how different they feel. Oxygen Not Included does this kinda, but not as deeply.
- Three different games in one using the same procedural engine and world: Adventure Mode, Legends Mode, Fortress Mode (Steam edition is currently missing Adventure mode and it will probably be a while).
- The "flavor" procedural systems: Villain, Religion, Instrument/Music, Literature, Forgotten Beasts. They don't have tons of impact on gameplay, but it makes the lore so much more rich.
- Sub-biome "surroundings" regions (Good, Evil, Savage, Benign) which have large effects on gameplay. Evil areas can be hilarious Fun.
- the pacing feels just right to me. It's not realistic from a simulation perspective (skills increase too quickly, it takes very little time to build complex things, etc), but it "gets to the good parts" in a very satisfying duration in my opinion. The combat takes longer than it should, but then stories can happen.
This narrow view is like claiming Minecraft only has about 2 hours of gameplay, because that's how long it takes to beat the ender dragon. It's perfectly possible to enjoy dwarf fortress in a completely sealed off fortress.
The problem with every game that attempts to be in DF's genre (Rimworld, O2NI, etc) is that, as commercial products first, they lack depth. They're built to be a game first and foremost, rather than than an art project that's fun to to explore. The surface level game mechanics are fun, in many ways improvements over Dwarf Fortress's. But they cannot compete with the incredibly rich simulation complexity that DF has obtained. World generation, history generation, characters with complex feelings and motivations, mechanics that interact with other in myriad ways. DF is a fantasy world simulator first, and a game a distant second.
And that's its biggest strength: compared to other games in the genre, DF is infinitely replayable, because there are an infinite number of interesting things to experience. Kings gaining power thanks to backroom deals with criminal organizations blackmailing their competitors, Necromancers forming towers to hold their book club meetings where they discus "An Analysis of Urist Svolgen's Musings on ovin Gentrout's Review of The Secrets of Life and Death", a werepanther that repeatedly terrorizes not just your fortress, but also all the surrounding sites drowning in a lake because they turned back into a human while trying to swim across a moat.
Can combat be improved? Of course. But I'll take additional mechanics that explode into emergent behavior any day. And I would love to find another game that even comes close, but Rimworld sure as shit ain't it.
It might be the most 'challening' part of the game, but combat is not at all why I play the game, and neither are any specific gameplay mechanics the reason to be honest.
It's hard to put my finger on why I enjoy the game so much, but the fact that the game is about drunken and (mostly) grumpy dwarfs building a fortress inside a mountain in a world with a generated history and lore has a lot to do with it. The same game in a science fiction / space colony setting would be entirely unappealing to me for instance.
Then you can swap them with a couple clicks between training, off duty, and whatever station schedules you need.
Also, generally, it's a way to express solidarity with the reality that a lot of time there's no "hoping for good news", "buck up" is a horrible thing to say, and just... well, fuck cancer.
It's always great to hear of uplifting stories like this.
edit: this
I did manage to get it running with some weird incantation of x86 wine though; it worked exactly once and then not again..
I then just rented a vm from shadow.tech for it instead, which works fine. Also works on linux under proton, if you have any old laptop in a drawer..
I am curious to see how the steam version runs on older hardware. I know they have worked a lot on multi threading and 64bit.
When I last played it It was still single threaded basically entirely and I had to build single or dual core systems specifically for running DF.
So I hope the developers are getting paid handsomely, someone should be, with that level of intense obsession being produced :-)
Congratulations on your much deserved success Toady One and ThreeToe.
I guess I could try running it with Wine but that's not ideal.
Seems like you're not familiar with Proton[0], The "Wine + enhancements" compatibility layer that the native Linux version of Steam uses to run the majority[1] of significant Windows games.
User reports are that DF runs without problems under proton[2,3,4]
Anecdotally, as a thoroughgoing and (evidently) shameless cheapskate, I can report the free "classic" ascii only Windows version[5] works well under stock Wine-staging via apt on my Ubuntu laptop.
Having said all that, I share your sadness that a native Linux version wasn't released along with the windows Steam release, though reportedly it is planned for the future[6,7]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_(software)
2: https://www.protondb.com/app/975370
3: https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/zwk7b8/linux...
4: https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/zsv6fl/insta...
5: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/df_50_05_win.zip
6: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/11/dwarf-fortress-release...
7: References by Tarn Adams to "the ports", e.g.: https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/z82m0g/im_ta...
Plus I'm sure it works fine on Proton
Congratulations on the well earned success!
I hope they keep working on it.
Congratulations!
My mind is trying to wrap my head whether their lives would have been better or worse had they done this much sooner. I'm not sure I have a conclusion.
They can be satisfied that they didn’t start charging until they had a refined product.
They had "slack" (in the slack/moloch sense) to try out weird ideas that may not have been possible if they were relying on sales revenue instead of donations to stay afloat.
I’m sure their chosen way of working has made them a lot happier than launching a half-baked game as “early access” ten years ago. Even though that could have afforded them a much more comfortable lifestyle, I have a feeling the gaming public might have gotten tired of the game and moved on.
I kinda figured that but I wanted to couch my opinion because the last time it came up I got yelled at a lot when I wanted the sprites to face right when moving right.
Granted, I bet the source is.... labyrinthine and will take quite a while to get up to speed.
Now that they have more than one dev they will probably want to use source control...
Me: Are you guys planning on a Linux version? By that I mean a version with graphics, as the one you released on steam. Thanks
Them: Yeah! The existing code for linux was a little too fiddly to update (I'd always been doing symlinks or whatever that just weren't great and we generally want to do a better job). We've already started the ball rolling bringing somebody on. It won't be in December, but with the existing code we're hopefully it won't take forever and ever.
That is exactly how to play DF. There is no winning. Just do what you want, see what happens. I'm working on creating the greatest library in the world, hoping to get elven and human visitors to learn and contribute even more knowledge.
It does get harder as I get older to enjoy this stuff, but I have my moments.
Maybe now is the time to find out. I look forward to buying it!
Congratulations to the devs!
also i recommend a few youtube tutorials on the game.
I’m happy to see them doing well. I remember playing DF a bit in college and just blown away by the devs and their undying love for the game, all whilst doing it for free no doubt.
Polished and free for so many years....excellent!
- https://discord.com/channels/329272032778780672/105023368224...
It's likely they went with KitFox because they already had a relationship. One of the founders of KitFox is Tanya Short, who's edited two books on procedural game design with the DF programmer, Tarn Adams.