4/1 = Fooled?

I'm writing this in advance, so I'm unsure of the reaction to my leading you down the garden path to a mythical land of CGI dwarves. I hope you've enjoyed the process - I certainly had fun putting the story together, weaving together fortunate coincidences with real world personalities and outrageous lies. If you've read this blog long enough, you should recognise my penchant for mixing reality and mythology: my personal highlights have been reviewing an alternate reality World of Goo and projecting Eve: Online into the near future - but any review I've written has launched from a sudden thought into faraway fantasy. As the Toady One put it when I ran the idea past him, it's been 'intense'.

One regret I've had with this blog has been I never remember April 1st early enough: should I do so in the future, there are some well planned sucker punches taking advantage of the fact Australia is 16 hours ahead of anywhere interesting. But I'll leave the details until another day.

I've always found the art of hoax an enjoyable and fascinating experience. The best hoax I've been swept along for the ride with is Peter Jackson's Forgotten Silver - an underrated docudrama which for a magical moment on a Sunday evening captured the hearts and minds of most New Zealanders. My mum pointed out the flaws first: there are few lost cities on the west coast of my homeland, an island which has been inhabited for all of 600 years, but even once you've figured out the plot, a good shaggy dog story should throw you enough in-jokes to keep propelling you forward. I didn't have a Colin McKenzie dying on camera to finish up with, but a mashup of Team Fortress 2 and Dwarf Fortress provided enough ideas to keep me moving to a semblance of a conclusion.

The typical reaction to falling for a hoax is outrage. I want you to put aside that emotion as much as you are capable of and celebrate another - imagination. If you fell for my story, it is because the seeds I planted fell on the cherished soil of fertile and optimistic dreamworld. This should be something you should be proud of. You have the capability to rise above the mundane and cynical, escape the clay around your boots and float away on boundless escapism. You are a gamer.

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part eleven)

PS: Frender, I really miss you. BFF?

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part ten)

I've got plenty more design notes, but I think you should just get over to the official announcement where you can register your interest.

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part nine)

Everyone starts with the camera beard hat unlocked. You may have guessed that we're going with a steam punk theme, and there is nothing more steampunk than a camera beard hat. I'll say it slowly for you. Camera. Beard. Hat.

If you've linked to this announcement from Boing Boing, you may need to get some tissues now.

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part eight)

Rather than being skill based, we went with a class based system which is much more representative of the original Disney movie. The classes are Heavy, Scouty, Snipy, Engy, Demi, Soldy, Pyree, Spyee and Doc. To create minority interest, we've left hints that Demi is possibly female, transgendered, sexually ambiguous, straight, gay, black, Amerindian, Hispanic, Scottish, one-eyed, dating Ashton Kutcher and Republican. Luckily, with the full facial and forehead beard, you'll never be able to tell.

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part seven)

DF2 is entirely first person view with the fuzziness at the bottom of the screen being a Hollywood cinematic effect used to represent the size of your dwarf's beard. Hideo liked this idea immensely when we showed him the alpha in a private alpha at GDC, but I suspect there were translation issues as he went on to implement a side beard in Metal Gear Solid 3.

You should attempt to increase beard length for additional unlocks, like a sandwich and a jar of urine. And in the game.

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part six)

There are some other radical changes that you should be aware of before you download the beta client. One of the first suggestions Tarn came up with when I asked him what he wanted in Dwarf Fortress 2 was 'More dwarves', so you now start the game with 9 dwarves instead of seven. That's been the basis of the viral marketing ARG that we've been running, so if you see 7+2 =9 anywhere, you should strip search anyone nearby who is unusually short of stature or has a beard so you can find the next clue. My next few posts will also have sequences of letters randomly underlined, which should be used to send morse signals across an old Atlantic telephone cable we found to unlock a stenographic photograph of Scamps. And Microsoft have kindly reprogrammed Windows to randomly include a blue screen of death featuring an ASCII rendition of Gabe Newell which will haunt your dreams.

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part five)

We were confident enough at this point to open up DF2 to a select group of beta testers and put feelers out to those we knew would take an interest in a multiplayer procedurally generated kick ass fantasy world. It was one of these, Randy Pitchford who was ultimately responsible for the radical change in direction of the visuals for DF2. Randy was concerned that the look of DF2 was 'too shit brown': mostly because he kept locking the doors to the washroom in the fortresses he built, so his dwarves would work overtime. We brainstormed this over Skype - and during the chat, it was almost like a light bulb went off above both our heads at the same time. There was a power cut in my house, and Randy was turning off the lights to save on power bill costs since the light from the monitors was enough to keep his developers awake while they worked overtime. When we reconnected, we were both babbling 'how about red and blue'. I made Randy promise that we'd get to use the look we discussed for our game, not his, and started revising the engine.

What you see in the open beta of DF2 is the original engine ultra-realistic graphics, which are then rotoscoped and painted using another algorithm Chris came up with. Overall, the look was well received by our beta testers, except Eskil Steenberg, who suffers from a rare visual condition that means everything he sees looks like an impressionist painting and who found the new appearance 'derivative'. I'm telling you this story now, ahead of you playing the game, so you don't blame Chris for cartoon like appearance.

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part four)

With Chris on board, the pace of development improved considerably, and we were able to include version 2 of the procedural animation system that Spore used, translating the Dwarf Fortress raws that Tarn was building into life like models complete with advanced moves like floppy legs and crab walking that hadn't been possible with the original engine.

Prior to Chris joining, we had done some experimentation with mo cap through a contact of mine at Weta Works. While this didn't pan out, we did use the Battle of Dagorlad from the first Lord of the Rings movie as a reference for DF2 fortress invasions:



Apparently the reason there are no dwarves in this battle is that Peter Jackson wasn't happy with the CGI animation at the time: he felt it couldn't capture their natural grace and athleticism.

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part three)

Chris had spent half of 2008 personally replying to every abusive email he had been sent by disappointed purchasers of Spore - including the ones I was procedurally generating using the DF2 Markov chain code. I've not included my original email because removing the more extreme expletives renders it unintelligible, but here's the remaining correspondence, for your edification:

It's clear that you have a passionate love of games. It's just you don't understand the pressure we were under, and you have to admit the final result is still impressive.

-- Chris

[text removed]you, you piece of [text removed]. I could do better. In fact I have: [link removed]

Regards,

Andrew Doull

Wow. I don't know what to say except: how can I get involved?

-- Chris

I would like to apologise now unconditionally for anything mean I've said about Chris, or anyone else who worked on Spore. He is an incredibly hard working and talented individual, and I've learned over the intervening years that in any large software project, compromises have to be made. It turns out that Will was right, and was ultimately responsible for the decisions that led to Spore being a less than completely hard core reinvention of every game genre that ever existed. It's just a shame he wasn't involved in DF2, like Chris was.

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part two)

Sam had an agreement with Intel to allow him to license the Offset engine as open source, much as John Carmack had made available earlier iterations of the Doom and Quake engines, and he was willing to make the engine available as an alternative front end for Dwarf Fortress, provided Tarn opened up the DF code.

While Sam's suggestion was appealing, Tarn and I had both moved on considerably from the original Dwarf Fortress concept, and we decided instead to branch the DF code base, and split the work three ways. Tarn would continue to maintain the DF1 code, while I would work on the DF2 code with Sam consulting after hours as time was made available.

Why did I end up being lead developer? Real Life had thrown me a curve ball, in the form of the global financial crisis, and I had lost my job and had to move into my parents basement with my wife. The situation was highly embarrassing - why is why I've not mentioned anything about my personal life on my blog - but it meat I was able to spend a considerable amount of time integrating the code, and building a front end using the Offset engine. The visuals were so impressive that it made the only other 3d Dwarf Fortress viewer available at the time, 3Dwarf look like Populous.

I want to show you this segment from Sam McGrath's demo of Project Offset on Attack of the Show - mostly because I spent about 18 months with the dwarf render Sam shows off to start with. We ended up calling the model Frender because we used him so often as a place holder. He used to get pretty messed up by some of the AI bugs we encountered - if you've read the Dwarf Fortress development logs you'll have an idea of the kind of situations he found himself in.

With the procedural character generation algorithms we use in the beta, you'll have a 1 in 63,000,000,000 chance of running into an exact copy of Frender in the final game:



You don't see it on camera, but a friend of Sam's who was at the filming of the show says that he did an incredible double-take when the host mentions another game with the word Fortress in the title. He recovers by the time they cut back to him, but I wonder if this is where the seed of the idea was first planted.

We knew even from early game play testing, that we had something special, and Tarn started devoting his special project days at the end of the month checking in his 'downstream' Dwarf Fortress changes into upstream DF2 improvements.

It was about this time that Chris Hecker became involved.

Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part one)

After Dwarf Fortress won the Ascii Dreams Roguelike of the Year 2007, Tarn Adams and I started corresponding by email, discussing our shared love of the roguelike genre and where we thought the genre was going in the next few years. I believed then, and still firmly believe, that I saw procedural content generation replacing the need for level designers, which meant that we could throw aside the shackles of tunnel like level design and replace it with roaming open worlds, generated on the fly as you explore the landscape. Tarn aka the Toady One was drawn to the idea of having a 3d graphics engine based fantasy world and that he'd made significant architectural mistakes in going with a tile based design and would need to start again from scratch to met this goal. For a while, that is all that Dwarf Fortress 2 consisted of: a long email chain brainstorming ideas and filled with blue sky thinking.

The release of Spore was like a body blow. That so much impressive developer talent that ultimately been wasted creating a universe filled with curate's egg worlds left us both feeling devastated and at a loose end. I particularly had high hopes for the game, and felt Will Wright had betrayed both himself and his team by deciding to go with cute, instead of (r)evolutionary.

It was about this time that Tarn was contacted by Sam McGrath, of Project Offset fame. Offset Software, as it is now known, had been acquired by Intel, and Sam was concerned that much of the original concepts for the project would be delayed or diluted by the corporate culture that Intel was imposing. Project Offset, for you not familiar with the concept, was an engine designed to allow rapid prototyping and development of 3d art assets using procedural techniques - which Sam had turned into an impressive set of technology demos with the intention of building an open fantasy world. I've included one demo below, just so you can see where we were starting from with DF2: