Yummy fun Interweb spaceships.
Some notes for the next fortress in this same location:
- Digging in and walling off the entrance is a good start. It keeps the Ettin out.
- Bring kittens instead of grown cats. It takes time for them to grow so I can keep the population under control from the start before they take ownership of a dwarf. Also…cages should keep that from happening as well.
- Animal population control. I don’t know what it is about this world, but the pet population seems to explode. The cows were popping out three calves by the end of the first season! Same for all the other animals. It was crazy. The good news is that with the dogs there should be plenty of war and hunting dogs later on.
- Get that damned farm going ASAP. As well as a kitchen and butcher shop. Meat will not be an issue. All plant matter will be used for brewing.
- I still don’t know if there’s goblins. But I should plan accordingly. Traps and cages will be essential. The ranger should have plenty of experience with animals by the time they show up so trapping will not be an issue.
- Lock down the fortress when the elves show up. The Ettin has killed them off and left me a big load of loot. Still unsure about whether they’ll send another trading party.
- Miners make excellent warriors against the Ettin. :)
Dwarves are where it’s at!
Dwarf Fortress is an insanely complex game, but very simple at the same time. It could be classified as a roguelike game in that it’s entirely text based (nb: unless you download a tileset).
Before you can even start playing you need some place to play in. DF starts out by generating a completely random world. This isn’t your daddy’s world that is a bunch of simple rand() calls either. The world generation engine does a pretty good job of copying mother nature. My understanding is that it starts by generating levels of stone. Different layers contain different types of stone depending on climate and other factors. Then it dumps water on top. The water does what nature does. It eats the surface away until mountains and other features form.
Next you choose where you’d like to build your fortress. You can choose a relatively safe plain area, haunted forests, glaciers, volcanoes, you name it it’s there.
Now you build your party. You start with seven dwarves. You get points to spend on your party. Skills cost points, as do items. You can even choose to start out with completely unskilled dwarves.
Once you’re dumped into the world you’re on your own to do whatever you wish. Stay out in the open too long and you’ll die. Digging a safe area is the first step in any fortress game. But you can’t just leave it at that. Nasty creatures roam the lands in a lot of areas. An Ettin has been tormenting me on my current game. Your defenses come in several forms. The first is to build up a small army of dwarves.
The second method of defense is where the game can get extremely interesting. You’re able to build trap items. The two basic trap components are spikes and spiked balls. Boring! There’s magma built up under some areas. Why not build a set of obsidian pumps, floor grates, and flood gates. Link these to a set of steel pressure plates and you’ve got yourself a lava waterfall to reign down on your enemy.
Who is the enemy? Goblins. Not all worlds contain these beasts. I haven’t gotten far enough to have to defend myself from their sieges, but I hear they can be nasty.
To keep things short, I urge everyone reading this to take the time to play this game. It’s really complex to learn, but once you learn it you realize how much fun it is.
I recently found a site that gave me a really good idea for a game I’d like to attempt to create once I get a few newbie games finished. It’s good, trust me.
All I’m willing to say right now is the idea is for a Sci-Fi based game. I love space ships. Oops, too much.
It made me want to try Sins of a Solar Empire again. Grabbed the full version this time. It’s fun, I’m trying to get used to it. But so far it’s been exciting. I got an awesome starting area. There’s a nice choke point with 4 planets behind it. The downside is that there’s a pirate planet next door. I really need to find a way to knock those guys out.
Final note: Elisa’s computer has been shipped to me. At least part of it has. I’m hoping the system itself will arrive this week. If it does, expect to see me pew-pewing in Eve to try out the shiny graphics.
Get the Spore Creature Creator at http://www.spore.com/
Pre-orders are now available for the game as well.
Firefox 3 has been unleashed upon the Earth. I have to say I’m unimpressed. I don’t see the big deal. Things look and feel weird now. What was wrong with the old interface? I bet within two days people change FF3 to look like the old.
Maybe it has something to do with Opera 9.5 being released. It feels strange too, but at the same time it’s not. My Vista installation is hanging on to its last life threads so I’m trying Opera in a portable version that doesn’t require an install. And oddly enough I’m enjoying it. I had so many tweaks done to Firefox that I doubt anything short of a full-reinstall of that software will fix it. I was blaming Vista for all the oddness happening, but I think it was really Firefox now. I do have to say though if you haven’t, try Opera 9.5.
Opera, Firefox and Spore have taken the Internet by storm in a matter of days. And I suspect they will not let up any time soon. The Spore Creature Creator demo was released today. I installed it skeptically. I thought for sure it wouldn’t run on this laptop. But it does! If you thought Spore wouldn’t run on your system, give it a chance. The creator is fun, but a little limited at the moment. After creating my first little test creature—a four-legged monstrosity with arms stuck between legs and a neck longer than a giraffe—I made an attempt to find a way to unlock the rest of the creature bits. It has been said that the full version of the creator will unlock them. But as far as I can tell there’s no way to get the thing right now. There are three versions listed on the website’s store. The PC download is somehow stuck in pre-order mode, and there appears to be a boxed version ready now. It makes no sense. I guess EA doesn’t want my $10. Kind of odd for a company bent on wrecking the video game industry and taking over the world. Maybe they’re too busy formulating their plan to nuke the Google nation to unlock the download.
For a very, very, very long time I’ve attempted to create my own game. Time and time again I’ve failed. The closest I ever came was back in my MUD days. And in hindsight I know that it was doomed to failure. But the almighty Microsoft Empire has given me some hint of hope. First they unleashed Express editions of their development tools. Specifically Visual C# 2005 Express. Although for the life of me I can’t figure out where they get Visual from. Visual C# appears to be a very powerful tool. The language is easy as pie to pick up. I haven’t written serious code in almost two years and I picked it up in a few hours. Now let’s throw in XNA. I honestly can’t explain what XNA did for me. It appears to have broken some sort of barrier I didn’t know existed. To make it short, I’m about a week’s worth of lazy work getting a fully functional clone of Breakout finished. My very first full game. It’s just crazy.
To finish up I must apologize. The theme for this Tumblog sucks, I have no links in my text, and I probably sound like a rambling village idiot. That’s what happens with 8 hours sleep in ~60.
