Kitfox and Bay 12 share plans for Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode update on Steam
From kobold portraits to minimaps and much more
Kitfox and Bay12 have struck the earth, manufactured a thousand stone blocks, and laid out a roadmap for the Dwarf Fortress Steam edition's Adventure Mode, together with some forthcoming updates for the existing fortress management mode. Adventure Mode, in case you've been living under a rock (which I guess you probably have, if you've been playing Dwarf Fortress), is the open world roguelike RPG element of the game, which lets you roam the enormous realm you've generated and even tour/loot/disturb the unquiet spirits of your own, abandoned fortress. Alas, there's no word on a release date for the Steam edition's Adventure Mode beyond "not this year".
As with the Fortress Mode stuff, the Steam remaster's Adventure revamp builds on what already exists, though adding the new non-ASCII interface and graphics will take "some months". As detailed in a Steam changelog, the "basics" include overhauling the world map with hundreds of sprites, devising a mini-map and implementing procedural portraits for humans, elves, dwarves, goblins, kobolds and animal people.
Having sorted out the above, the developers will work on individual actions and menus, keyboard and mouse support "for all play styles". The patch notes explain that "actions are challenging because they can be initiated by clicking the play area, through buttons and hot keys, or by accessing a full list. There must be several ways to perform the same action based on context, play style, and input method."
After that Kitfox and Bay 12 will work on the "major features" or "biggest risk items", which will "hopefully" take a few weeks apiece, "but it's hard to say since they each have multiple sub-systems and open design questions to be solved between code and art". Here's a list:
- Inventory - equipping items and containers are the trickiest parts here. You can wear multiple shirts and nest containers as deep as you like, and the new interface will have to handle this with both keyboard and mouse support.
- Combat (striking and wrestling) - wrestling will be a bit of a doozy, as there's a lot of physical/anatomical complexity that we're not sure how best to communicate
- Conversations - this includes supporting the current Adventure Mode system of interleaving speech and actions, and having three or more participants in conversations
- Character generator - you can make a whole party in Adventure Mode and the character creation options are complex. We have to update this system.
And then there are the "fiddly bits": status screens that display character wounds, skills and needs, a journal screen which the developer may integrate with Legends Mode (a kind of Dwarf Fortress Doomsday Book that lets you view the doings of characters and groups over many decades of generated history), and powers like crafting. "Adventure Mode is highly moddable and we need to support vast menus of magical powers and other abilities," the developers add. "Pet any animal!"
The developers are also working on various menu or action "widgets" for stealth, tracking, odours, party controls and so forth, audio integration ("we'll be adding a whole new soundscape for Adventure Mode") and cabin-building, which the developers feel "wasn't properly feature-rich" in classic Dwarf Fortress. "We'd love to expand on it, but it's definitely more optional to the Adventure Mode experience than the above features and systems," the patch notes continue. "We have the new Fortress Mode interface which will help a lot, but we may do it after launch if it becomes too complicated."
The price to pay for all this Adventuring goodness is that the game won't get either Mac support or Steam Achievements till after Adventure Mode's release, "at the earliest".
In terms of more general features, the Dwarf Fortress devs also plan to roll back to an older version of the game's bug-reporting system, "in the hopes that we can rejuvenate the bug-hunting community like days of yore". This is partly in response to the game's expanded audience on Steam. "We have double the code resources that we used to, but also ten times the bug reporters, so we're still finding our feet to figure out how best to maximize this power."
Lastly, there's the extremely thorny question of translating and localising a game littered with such procgen literary marvels as "it menaces with spikes of fluffy wambler fluff". The developers are experimenting with auto-translation tools for on-screen text, and are investigating translation options behind the scenes, "but it's very early stages".
Have you been striking the earth much lately? I've not touched it since reviewing the Steam edition, and am curious to know whether the game has kept ahold of its expanded audience. In RPS's Dwarf Fortress review, Caelyn summarised the Bay 12/Kitfox collaboration as "Dwarf Fortress as we know it, but much more approachable for both new and returning players", praising the new interface while noting that "there’s still a huge amount to learn and the game isn’t great at teaching you".
A couple months after the Steam release, Sin went long on the game's broader achievement and legacy. "Now more than ever it’s an influential design, a cultural touchstone, and a philosophical inspiration," she wrote. "Not just selling a lot of copies but engendering its own bizarre culture and language, and one that’s remarkably lighthearted and positive despite all the talk of catskin boots and berserker children."