Tilting at Windmills

So, I’m at my new job, and things are going well. As per usual, though, I have to ramp up very quickly on a number of new things. So when I’m not focused on work, my free time is consumed with play instead.

But let me take a moment to plug a very good book just released by a fellow CRPG enthusiast, Matthew Barton, “Dungeons & Desktops”.

Matt spent a considerable amount of time researching the different CRPG’s over the various eras of computing, and this book provides a comprehensive look at many titles, both popular and obscure, and how they affected the industry and changed it.

And yes, 99′ers, Tunnels of Doom is in there. Although he got one small fact wrong (there are no thrones in ToD like there are in Telengard), the write-up is very well done and very complimentary. And you’ll also find a small contribution from yours truly, a screenshot of Ultima 9 that I provided.

About the only real flaw of the book is the very small color insert that only has about a half-dozen shots, and the relative darkness of most of the photos.

Also, he forgot Jade Empire. Normally I wouldn’t nitpick like that, since there’s likely plenty of obscure titles he missed because, frankly, they’re obscure! But JE is different in that it’s a mainstream game, it was an exclusive hit on the XBox console for some time and was recently released for the PC, it’s one of the first original settings designed by Bioware, and it even featured a unique artificial language patterned after East Asian languages. I was a little surprsied it was overlooked!

If you like CRPG’s and want to see how they came about and potentially where they’re going, this book should definitely be on your shelf.

Dungeons & Desktops at Amazon.com

Huzzah, I have a new job lined up, two weeks short of my doomsday “end of contract” period. And it’s a good job too, no fill-in while waiting for another contract, this one’s a keeper!

CRPG work’s fallen to the side for the moment, as I’ve been gaming more with friends. There are times when you just need to charge the battery back up, and not lose focus of why you’re working on a game in the first place, because games are fun!

Well, most games are. Stu (of Stu’s Rusty Bucket, see links in prior blog entries) has been working on playing through Gates of Delirium, an Ultima-clone written for the TRS-80 Color Computer back in the 80′s. He’s been keeping a live blog journal on his adventures over at Armchair Arcade.

In many ways, the experiment has, in my opinion, illustrated the real difference between designing a game and designing a game engine. The creator of the game did a very good job replicating the engine of Ultimas II-III. Close enough that had Origin ever taken notice I’m certain that he’d have gotten in trouble.

However, the gameplay stinks. Stu’s experience has been one of sheer lack of information on anything, even the actual goal of the game! He eventually deduced that he must unlock the seven gates in a given location, marked by large keyhole tiles. He further deduced that the keys were only located in dungeons. But in-between these discoveries there was a lot of empty and fruitless conversations with NPC’s who offered little or nothing.

Another problem was the presumed lack of a “cure” spell in the game, to remove poison states. Poison in the game is lethal and permanent, and curing it was only possible at towns with healers. He eventually discovered that a particular letter-key for a spell turned out to be a Cure spell, NOT documented in the manual. Seems like a clever secret, but it isn’t. It’s a meta-secret, having to do with the controls. Fighting games on consoles use such ideas for secret moves, but they do let you know about them beforehand so you can experiment. CRPG’s should NOT do these kinds of things.

On the subject of the manual, it’s pretty simplistic, mostly focused on describing the mechanics of gameplay. Ultimas II-IV featured very detailed story-like manuals that really evoked a feeling of being something more than pixels and mechanics in motion. The map looks like something I could draw up with pencil and a piece of copy paper in a few minutes.

Fortunately for all of us, Stu’s got the strength of will to see the job through, as terrible as it has become. He’s certainly stuck with it longer than I would have.

Links:

Gates of Delirium Live!

No news on CRPG development… I’ve a month to go now before my contract expires, so I’m more focused on job interviews.

I just discovered last week a real gem of a game called Dwarf Fortress. It was written by two brothers over a four-year period and released as an alpha-state game in August 2006. It can be played for free, but it is donation-ware, so if you like it, send them a few bucks.

Dwarf Fortress is a dynamic sandbox-type game with an 80×25 ASCII text display. It uses random procedural generation and creates an entire world using fractal techniques, then lets you pick a spot to found a new dwarven fortress with a starting colony of seven dwarves. (Yeah, I get the joke.) All names are also randomly generated, using a dwarvish-english dictionary to create unique (and sometimes hilarious) names for the Fortresses, regions, and individual dwarves.

For that matter, each dwarf is an individual. Your starting dwarves are a decent bunch with less hang-ups than the forthcoming immigrants that usually arrive once a year. (Be ready, the first wave is usually 10-20.) They have relationships, children, go into fey moods where they want to craft things and the lack of materials or workshops can cause them to brood and go mad, and even throw tantrums or go into berserk rages.

You begin by digging out a home for your dwarves, creating stockpiles for various necessities. The location you pick for your fortress greatly influences the needs and wants of your fortress. The lack of trees would mean, for example, that you must trade for wood with the human and elven traders who occasionally visit.

At a glance, the game looks both simple and insanely complicated. The controls are daunting, to say the least, and the graphics would be, to most modern console gamers, laughable. I didn’t think I’d be into it at first myself, until I read over the Wiki. It gives you a lot of good information on starting out your colony and the different elements of the game.

The game is also doing some serious computations behind the scenes. A z-axis exists; which means you can build rooms in three-dimensions, something that was recently added, I think. There’s also fluidics movement simulation; if you dig a channel you can redirect ponds, lakes, and rivers of water and magma to different places. It may LOOK like you could write this for a vintage platform, but trust me, not even possible! It even can slow down a fairly fast dual-core desktop machine.

A very fun Dwarf Fortress site is the “Boatmurdered” thread, which was collected onto a series of web pages. A group of players each took turns with the same world (shared as zipped up files) running their Fortress “Boatmurdered” to see how it would shape up being run by multiple people. And hilarity ensues, including accidentally flooding the outer areas with an underground river, and fixing it by flooding it with magma to vaporize the water! (Leaving a burnt wasteland outside the fortress for quite awhile.) The game was played with an earlier version of DF, I believe, since there’s a lack of multiple levels.

The most serious flaw with the game is a lack of tutorials and an incredibly confusing UI. The designers have admitted it is not finished. A great deal of playing the game is just learning HOW to do things, and usually through failure rather than success. Unless this can be rectified, I highly doubt the game would ever be commercially viable.

Another problem is the “Adventurer” mode; this is meant to allow you to wander your world and explore the “dungeons” left behind by various dwarven colonies; namely, the ones you created yourself. This part of the game is clearly a “work-in-progress” and the developers have been focusing more on the Fortress aspects, which have proven to be of greater popularity.

Anyway, a very fun game, and quite time-consuming. Consider yourself warned.

Links:

Dwarf Fortress Main Page

Dwarf Fortress Wiki

Boatmurdered Thread Archive