Dwarf Fortress in 2013. The authors talk about the development process and future plans.
“We created a framework for version 1.0 — we have a huge plan and a bunch of different ideas, something goes into it, something doesn’t” - Tarn Adams and his brother Zach have been developing a procedurally-generated fantasy fantasy game Dwarf Fortress for 11 years, if taking into account the work on DragSlay and Slaves to Armok, which greatly influenced the game at the beginning of the development, you will get all 13 years. Although you can download the game for free right now , version 1.0 will appear very, very soon. Tarn Adams said recently that 1.0 can be waited in about 20 years, although most likely it will appear even later “because I always underestimate the time it takes to complete the work”.
But whatever the time frame, the Adams brothers have a clear goal. They understand that they have already been stuck at various stages of development more than once, so their way forward is to spread out all the ideas in front of them and choose where to go next in the near future. “We try to stay within the plan,” says Adams, “when we execute it, we’ll get version 1.0. After that, you can add a lot of different things, but we will be more than 50 years old - there are a lot of life decisions that need to be made at that age, so we are unlikely to stick to this plan for another five years. ”
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However, the basic idea is unchanged - to stick to the plan, not too much stuck in small details. "In a sense, we want to make a skeleton, build some flesh on it, but not add curly hair, as we did in the first version of the game, when curly hair was on every part of the body and we accurately calculated the temperature of their fire and you could teleport someone's nose somewhere and so on - although apparently we are doing just that in Dwarf Fortress.
30 year plan
The most interesting (and dubious) moment of the more than 30-year-old Adams plan - how does the designer plan to remain enthusiastic about a project that can take his entire adult life?
I regularly communicate with developers who tell me "It was very pleasant to work on this game, but I can't wait to leave it behind and do something new." How does Adams retain enthusiasm for Dwarf Fortress? Isn't he distracted by other projects?
"No, no," he answers, "I mean, if we didn’t take such things into account, my plans would not be realistic. But I have been doing this for many years and understand about where I am. I know that some of my time is spent on outsiders projects, even if, since I started working on Dwarf Fortress, I only released projects that were related to Dwarft Fortress ... for example, Cobalt Quest, a port on a Mac, and the like.
In fact, says Adams, he has seven more major projects that he is working on in some sense, but “they all require a lot of time and effort that I don’t have enough,” he says - “Sometimes when my brother and I Watching stupid programs on TV in his room, where I have another laptop, I work on these games for a little rest. "
Tarn and Zach Adams
“We don’t like to talk about them and don’t tell anything else,” he continues, “We don’t want to make a fuss, because most likely they will never be born. It's just nice to know that we still have other ideas that we can work with, a lot of interesting things to experiment with. ”
There is another reason why the Adams brothers are not afraid that they will ever get tired of the development of Dwarf Fortress - the incredible scope of the game and the amazing amount of development directions available at any given time.
Adams says that when he gets bored with some part of the game, he simply puts it aside and does something completely different. “If I get tired of geology, I can simply not do it for the next 10 years, can I?” He laughs. “You can just do something else.”
That is why the development of Dwarf Fortress is fundamentally different from the development of an average AAA or mobile game. An ordinary team of developers can spend months and years debugging the game, inducing gloss, making it “ready for the start of sales,” according to Adams, this could lead to a loss of inspiration.
“You study new ideas in the interactive development process, it’s more dynamic and not so exhausting” - he notes - “In my case it looks like this:“ Wow, I need to look through all medieval crops and learn everything about plants! ”I recently learned a lot of new things about bananas. You can explore whatever you want. At Dwarf Fortress, you can only get tired of research. ”
But Adams is still not sure that he will be able to fulfill his 20-year plan, regardless of whether he retains his enthusiasm or not. The fact that the developer is sitting at a computer all day (or nights, which may be more accurate in this case) affects him, in addition, he is not sure that the world will change in the coming decades.
“I’m sure that at some point we’ll start losing strength, not because of a loss of inspiration, but simply because our bodies start to fall apart,” he says, “And I don’t know if the game will remain interesting by this point, what operating systems will be, what strange things people will wear on their heads, allowing them to see strange things with their iPhone - by then Dwarf Fortress may be dead for a long time. ”
“Who knows what will happen then,” he adds, “But if we are still alive and we need to transfer work on the game to others, we’ll rather think about opening the source code so that people can do whatever they want. We will add our notes and the like to them. But this is just idle speculation, is not it? Although in general we think that way. ”
He sees the future of Dwarf Fotrtress is about the same as that of Nethack or Dungeon Crawl , which new development teams continue to work on.
“We will try to hold the game in our hands as long as possible,” he says, “but we cannot do it by ourselves forever. She will keep afloat until someone keeps her afloat, right? ”
Unavailability
In Dwarf Fortress is very difficult to understand from scratch, largely due to textual ASCII graphics and the complete absence of manuals. But an outsider looking at this game, which has been under development for so many years, has such a huge set of features and styles of play, you can confidently say that getting to know Dwarf Fortress can be one of the most exciting experiences the computer gaming industry has to offer.
“It seems to me that, compared to 2006, the game has become easier,” says Adams, “It's not about the mechanics, most of the Dwarf Fortress mechanic is still hidden. A large number of updates also do not matter - what I mean, so I spent a month on beekeeping, but you are not at all obliged to study beekeeping. Although if you want to get honey and wax, you will have a new direction for research. ”
The designer claims that there are different types of inaccessibility and it all depends on what exactly interests the player.
“There are basic problems with the interface, like using non-sequential keys,” he explains. “Then there is graphics, which is not graphics [laughs]. All this is improving rather than deteriorating. ”
“But when it comes to things like ambiguity - weak goal setting or demands from players for self-goal setting - then most likely you can say that more opportunities worsen the situation. But in fact, the basics of survival have not changed very much. "
“The more time passes, the better the wiki ( Russian ) becomes, the manual, more videos appear, the community becomes more and more friendly. Dwarf Fortress is easier to understand now than ever. But not easy! ”
When the game reaches the aforementioned version 1.0, Adams is going to add manuals to it, a more consistent interface, context-sensitive help — all of this is in his diagram, but he is not going to include two-dimensional, isometric or three-dimensional graphics in it, although the Dwarf Fortress community has already done a huge work on the visual part of the game.
In fact, Adams was already trying to start working on the manuals, but found that this could seriously slow down the development process.
“Graphics also slow down development and that’s why we don’t have it,” he says. “The guidelines are similar, as they need to be constantly updated. But I am definitely ready to make these sacrifices, since the presence of manuals will radically simplify the game for beginners. ”
So far, he is quite happy that the Dwarf Fortress community is doing this work for him. “A huge number of people help others to understand the game and if I become one of them, this is unlikely to improve the situation,” he laughs, adding, “I’m not laughing at other people's problems, it’s hard for me and only I am guilty of that. Just when you talk about something for many years, you become somewhat frivolous. ”
I asked Adams if he believed in the possibility of creating a game, not less deep than Dwarf Fortress, but more accessible to the average player.
“Of course,” he replies, “It will have faster access to depth. I mean something like Sims - how many copies did they sell? This game can not be called simple, but it is played by millions of people. Sims are a good example of a game that is both complex and affordable. ”
“I have never played Minecraft, but apparently it is deep enough if you want it, don't you?” He adds, “And despite this, eight-year-old children can play it. So I think that such games already exist. ”
Loss of audience (Fan Drought)
God sent so enthusiastic fans to the Adams brothers that they not only enjoy playing and helping new players, but donate tens of thousands of dollars each year just to keep the brothers afloat. But what if in the following years the number of players begins to decline and with this money it becomes impossible to live?
“Then I’ll most likely become unemployed,” Adams laughs, although he is well aware that this is not likely to happen. “Probably we are already known enough for our new project to attract attention.”
“We can always sell our reputation on Kickstarter,” he adds, “Nowadays there are so many different opportunities and I don’t think that I’ll have to get a job and practice Dwarf Fortress in my spare time. There are alternatives. But we still want to practice Dwarf Fortress. ”
Adams does not like to think on such topics, and this is not surprising, considering all the depressive thoughts that people will forget about the work of your whole life.
“In that case, you can’t do anything, right?” He says. “So the world is arranged. Some games remain popular, take a look at the rogue-games. But their communities were destroyed and rebuilt millions of times. So, how to know. "
The long-term prospects of Dwarf Fortress help that the Museum of Modern Art in New York recently chose it as one of the historically important games - this event really inspired Adams.
“It gave us confidence that the earth would not leave us under our feet if donations were exhausted,” he notes. “It also gave confidence that the game’s support would not stop. It was an important milestone. Such events help us to feel confident in the future, which is very pleasant. ”
There are, of course, ways that the Adams brothers can make their future more secure. One of them is to place the game on Steam, in front of the eyes of millions of possible players. For this you will need to go through Steam Greenlight.
“Things like the Steam Greenlight make the world less understandable to us,” says Adams. “Our policy is like the film Field of Dreams / Field of Dreams with Kevin Costner - if you build it, they will come. Everyone came to us themselves, all the press - we never advertised, never went to conferences, did not do anything like that. ”
Adams notices that he does not want to seem selfish or arrogant - they just did not think about popularity when they started developing the game, so when she began to attract attention, they just took it for granted.
Therefore, he is not sure that Greenlight will be a good idea for Dwarf Fortress. "When we deal with things like the Steam Greenlight, I’m not quite sure that they will fit in our situation, that it will be something like a fruit hanging on the bottom branch and we can just reach out and say," OK, we will be distributed through Steam “- he says.
“I’m not good at it, we lived peacefully for many years and we don’t have business instincts that would say“ We need to get there. ” If enough people start to bother us, because they want Steam to track time spent on the game or something else, if our current fans want it, it will interest us much more than increase the audience. "
That is, placing Dwarf Fortress on Steam will be a service to current fans, and not an attempt to attract new players?
“I think yes,” he replies. “Maybe it sounds very selfish, as people spend a lot of effort to put their games on Steam and show them to people. But I can’t say that we got everything for nothing, because we worked a lot on the game before people started talking about it. But now it doesn’t really bother me and I’m not sure that it will be a meaningful waste of time. ”
Platforms
Rather, we began to discuss attracting new players, I asked Adams if he was going to move the game to new platforms like mobile or PS Vita.
Mobile platforms did not make sense for a very long time, since Dwarf Fortress is a very processor-demanding game — even without taking into account possible problems with the interface, the power of mobile devices was simply not enough for a huge amount of computations that the game was constantly running. However, Adams admits that “the parameters come closer to our requirements,” so the likelihood of the appearance of Dwarf Fortress on the tablet increases.
Regarding PS Vita, he notes that "under no circumstances will we give anyone the code, so we should be able to compile it ourselves."
“In porting to Vita, there should also be meaning for us,” he adds, “Now I do everything myself, compile code under Windows, compile under Linux, compile under Mac, everything manually. The porting guy went through real hell, since I didn't give him all the code. He never received it, although I have worked with him for many years and trust him completely. I mean, one error is enough and we will have a lot of problems with the code in the wrong hands. ”
The ability to use NDA to prevent such a possibility does not matter to Adams. “I should be able to compile it and I have absolutely no idea how to do it on other platforms,” he adds, “Probably you should download their SDK. If Sony wants to go through all this nonsense with me, and I don’t think she wants, for the sake of another game ... but for this you need just such persistence. That is why the porting is usually done by fans who care about it and who are willing to go through the whole nightmare of working with me. ”
“So we have nothing against other systems, but they have to fit into our development process and our limitations,” he says.
Obviously, at this stage of development of Dwarf Fortress, Adams and his brother were supposed to receive a lot of offers from publishers — both about publishing the game and about finding employment. Adams tells me that although he never considered the possibility of working for someone else (“we want to work on our projects, and the money does not matter”), he considered the possibility of signing a contract for Dwarf Fortress with the publisher.
"We were offered to use the name Dwarf Fortress - in the spirit of Dwarf Fortress: A subtitle or something like that - they wanted to call it one of their games." - he says to me - "We were offered a six-figure sum."
He adds, “After a good deal of thought, you will understand that this has both pros and cons. Whether the brand will depreciate? Will you not deceive people? As long as they clearly understand that this is not Dwarf Fortress and Dwarf Fortress with graphics, as they say a lot now, while you are open and honest, there are no technical difficulties in this - after all, this is our brand and we can do everything with it want. "
For current fans, signing a contract with a publisher or transferring rights to Dwarf Fortress can also be useful, he says. “What do I mean, if we suddenly have enough money to be financially independent and no longer worry about paying for health insurance, we’ll be working even harder on Dwarf Fortress — wouldn't someone like that?”
He thinks, “To understand this will require a person who is very well versed in the philosophy and ethics of human behavior. We definitely discussed this and considered various implications. ”
The consequences did not allow Adams to conclude such a deal - they are sure that in reality they would not have earned money, but would have lost it.
“If people see another game, we are talking about the worst-case scenario, their donations will run out and we will stay with the amount for which you will not live for 10 years. Do we suddenly want to create a new intellectual property? Our names are well known to enable us to do something similar, but this is a very risky business. ”
On the other hand, it is impossible to say that the authors of Dwarf Fortress are afraid of risk - as Adams notes, “to put everything on one project, as we did, is a very risky decision, isn't it? Another game can destroy it all. No copyright will help. ”
Orc fortress
Since Adams started talking about the fact that such a game could harm Dwarf Fortress, I asked why, in his opinion, no one has yet succeeded in successfully cloning the game. There were many notable games inspired by Dwarf Fortress, but none of them could copy the depth and visual style.
Adams is sure that one of the main reasons for the uniqueness of his game is that other developers very quickly realized how much time and effort they would need to invest in a similar project.
“We don’t know if that awareness stopped them or they weren’t going to do anything like that from the very beginning,” he adds on projects like Towns , Dwarfs and Game of Dwarves.
"Under development games like Clockwork Empireslook more ambitious. Apparently, they will be a lot of interesting. But I’m not at all sure if it makes sense to completely copy Dwarf Fortress, because you can’t call our market big. It is unlikely that people look at our $ 50,000 a year and say "Hey, I want a piece of this pie." Rather, they are looking in the direction of Minecraft with its hundreds of millions of dollars. ”
Speaking of Minecraft, Adams is very grateful to Markus Person (Markus Persson) and his colleagues who say that their game is inspired by Dwarf Fortress -“ half of our fans found out about the game from them! He laughs.
Returning to the possible cloning or even the emergence of an improved version of Dwaf Fortress, Adams says that someday this should happen.
“We are happy that we were able to stay afloat for so long,” he says. “I’m surprised that no one has yet cut our wings. It just hasn't happened yet. ”
Free-to-Survive
“ I read about the ethics of shareware games and things like monetization and Skinner Boxes on Gamasutra, ”Adams tells me,“ we were very lucky that we were able to avoid everyone these difficulties and somehow make a living. ”
Without any doubt, the Dwarf Fortress financing model — a completely free game that survives through donations from players — is radically different from the business models used in the modern video game industry.
Adams believes that he knows exactly why such a business model works in his case and will not work in many others.
“We didn’t try to make a hit for millions of dollars, but I’ve got the impression from communicating with other people that they are pursuing just such a goal, releasing the game on the iPhone and so on.” But we no longer need to work on this and think about ways to monetize. ”
“I saw what people go through,” he continues, “ Rocketcat Games (Punch Quest) live next door and sometimes we meet with them. It’s very difficult to decide on your shareware model, isn’t it? Their model was too generous and It did not work. We were very lucky that we didn’t have to do it. "
People interested in Dwarf Fortress know that Adams sends money made with colored pencils to the donated money and adds them to the “List of Champions” - this is very different from what other modern game developers offer.
“Extremely bizarre, isn't it?” He laughs. “But, fortunately, our requests are not great, we do not need a lot of money and we earn enough to continue pouring from empty to empty. 50,000 dollars a year for two. "
“It probably sounds like shareware,” he says about his own monetization technique. “We were not guided by anything. Someone said, “Why don't you hang the PayPal button on your birthday so I can send you $ 50?” For the next four or five months, we received $ 300. I was still working then, but Dwarf Fortress was not out yet. Then we released the game and in the following months received $ 800 and $ 1,000. And we thought, "It looks like we do." Now we get about 4,000 a month and this is just amazing. ”
When I learned that the authors of Dwarf Fortress earn $ 50,000 a year solely through donations, I asked how donations are distributed. I assumed (as it turned out later that was right) that it is unlikely that everything comes down to small amounts from many people and most likely Dwarf Fortress has its own “whales” - people paying unreasonable, non-binding amounts.
“The subscription system is now working, simply because people asked her to do it,” he told me. “Some people translated four-digit numbers. But we did not ask them about it - they all sent the money themselves and they all knew exactly what they were paying for, because everyone had been playing for a very long time - in some cases for years - before they sent something. They got nothing but moral satisfaction from it. ”
“They probably have common features with whales,” he continues, “but these people regularly send large sums of money. Some have donated computers. Some of their time - a lot of volunteers work with the bug tracking system and answer user questions. One guy ported the game to Mac and Linux - everything is absolutely free. ”
Everyone just wants Dwarf Fortress development to continue, he says, so if they like the game, donations are in their own interest.
“Probably ordinary whales are interested in receiving gifts,” he adds, “There are very different types of gifts — types of ethical behavior. I know too little about the other markets, to make any conclusions, but a lot of other people to talk about it. "
Hey, party people (Hey Scenesters)
It is noteworthy that although the Adams brothers are unambiguously indie developers, they very rarely communicate with other developers and almost do not participate in the life of the indie community.
“This is not a purposeful decision.” - Adams tells me - “I just have such a character. In childhood I had few friends and I did not consider it necessary to spend time with someone. So I do not see the point even now. I never liked Twitter / Facebook. It is interesting for me to watch other people talk to each other, but I have never had a desire to participate in this. ”
It cannot be said that the brothers are nowhere at all. As I said earlier, they met with the Rocketcat Games and tried a variety of mobile games, which are usually not interested. This year they went to EVE Fanfest in Iceland, where Adams gave a talk - “we agreed because it was cool!”.
But in general, Adams is not particularly interested in communicating with other developers. “Something like GDC is not the place where we are invited,” he says. “This is the place for which you pay. The same with exhibitions. Networking has never made sense to us, this is how things are going with us. ”
“We are unlikely to start looking for work if we don’t succeed with the current game - we don’t want to work in someone else’s studio,” he continues, “We are not interested. And there is no special need, although most likely it would be very profitable. We have no desire to talk about game development or something like that. It seems to me that we have a fully mature process, since we have been doing this for 13 years. ”
Although Adams received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Stanford University and worked in mathematics for a short period of time, he says that his dislike of communication hampered scientific work. At times, mathematics turns out to be an extremely social field, he says.
“You probably think that mathematicians lock themselves in a bathroom and solve theorems in darkness and solitude, but in fact everything is tied to co-authorship in scientific work, taking into account other people's interests and working together on problems that are too complicated for a loner.” “I guess I'm just a
non- communicative person.” But despite the lack of social skills and the lonely work on the game of life, Adams is completely satisfied with his life and future prospects.
“I’m completely satisfied with the current state of affairs,” he explains. “Having spent 13 years developing it you don’t look like an idiot, talking about another 20 years. We perfectly understand that in two decades anything can happen. At this age, health problems can begin. The economy can go into a dressing. ”
“But I feel calm. Being engaged in mathematics, I never felt anything like that. I have never had such achievements. Although no one knows what will happen in the future. ”
But whatever the time frame, the Adams brothers have a clear goal. They understand that they have already been stuck at various stages of development more than once, so their way forward is to spread out all the ideas in front of them and choose where to go next in the near future. “We try to stay within the plan,” says Adams, “when we execute it, we’ll get version 1.0. After that, you can add a lot of different things, but we will be more than 50 years old - there are a lot of life decisions that need to be made at that age, so we are unlikely to stick to this plan for another five years. ”
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However, the basic idea is unchanged - to stick to the plan, not too much stuck in small details. "In a sense, we want to make a skeleton, build some flesh on it, but not add curly hair, as we did in the first version of the game, when curly hair was on every part of the body and we accurately calculated the temperature of their fire and you could teleport someone's nose somewhere and so on - although apparently we are doing just that in Dwarf Fortress.
30 year plan
The most interesting (and dubious) moment of the more than 30-year-old Adams plan - how does the designer plan to remain enthusiastic about a project that can take his entire adult life?
I regularly communicate with developers who tell me "It was very pleasant to work on this game, but I can't wait to leave it behind and do something new." How does Adams retain enthusiasm for Dwarf Fortress? Isn't he distracted by other projects?
"No, no," he answers, "I mean, if we didn’t take such things into account, my plans would not be realistic. But I have been doing this for many years and understand about where I am. I know that some of my time is spent on outsiders projects, even if, since I started working on Dwarf Fortress, I only released projects that were related to Dwarft Fortress ... for example, Cobalt Quest, a port on a Mac, and the like.
In fact, says Adams, he has seven more major projects that he is working on in some sense, but “they all require a lot of time and effort that I don’t have enough,” he says - “Sometimes when my brother and I Watching stupid programs on TV in his room, where I have another laptop, I work on these games for a little rest. "
Tarn and Zach Adams
“We don’t like to talk about them and don’t tell anything else,” he continues, “We don’t want to make a fuss, because most likely they will never be born. It's just nice to know that we still have other ideas that we can work with, a lot of interesting things to experiment with. ”
There is another reason why the Adams brothers are not afraid that they will ever get tired of the development of Dwarf Fortress - the incredible scope of the game and the amazing amount of development directions available at any given time.
Adams says that when he gets bored with some part of the game, he simply puts it aside and does something completely different. “If I get tired of geology, I can simply not do it for the next 10 years, can I?” He laughs. “You can just do something else.”
That is why the development of Dwarf Fortress is fundamentally different from the development of an average AAA or mobile game. An ordinary team of developers can spend months and years debugging the game, inducing gloss, making it “ready for the start of sales,” according to Adams, this could lead to a loss of inspiration.
“You study new ideas in the interactive development process, it’s more dynamic and not so exhausting” - he notes - “In my case it looks like this:“ Wow, I need to look through all medieval crops and learn everything about plants! ”I recently learned a lot of new things about bananas. You can explore whatever you want. At Dwarf Fortress, you can only get tired of research. ”
But Adams is still not sure that he will be able to fulfill his 20-year plan, regardless of whether he retains his enthusiasm or not. The fact that the developer is sitting at a computer all day (or nights, which may be more accurate in this case) affects him, in addition, he is not sure that the world will change in the coming decades.
“I’m sure that at some point we’ll start losing strength, not because of a loss of inspiration, but simply because our bodies start to fall apart,” he says, “And I don’t know if the game will remain interesting by this point, what operating systems will be, what strange things people will wear on their heads, allowing them to see strange things with their iPhone - by then Dwarf Fortress may be dead for a long time. ”
“Who knows what will happen then,” he adds, “But if we are still alive and we need to transfer work on the game to others, we’ll rather think about opening the source code so that people can do whatever they want. We will add our notes and the like to them. But this is just idle speculation, is not it? Although in general we think that way. ”
He sees the future of Dwarf Fotrtress is about the same as that of Nethack or Dungeon Crawl , which new development teams continue to work on.
“We will try to hold the game in our hands as long as possible,” he says, “but we cannot do it by ourselves forever. She will keep afloat until someone keeps her afloat, right? ”
Unavailability
In Dwarf Fortress is very difficult to understand from scratch, largely due to textual ASCII graphics and the complete absence of manuals. But an outsider looking at this game, which has been under development for so many years, has such a huge set of features and styles of play, you can confidently say that getting to know Dwarf Fortress can be one of the most exciting experiences the computer gaming industry has to offer.
“It seems to me that, compared to 2006, the game has become easier,” says Adams, “It's not about the mechanics, most of the Dwarf Fortress mechanic is still hidden. A large number of updates also do not matter - what I mean, so I spent a month on beekeeping, but you are not at all obliged to study beekeeping. Although if you want to get honey and wax, you will have a new direction for research. ”
The designer claims that there are different types of inaccessibility and it all depends on what exactly interests the player.
“There are basic problems with the interface, like using non-sequential keys,” he explains. “Then there is graphics, which is not graphics [laughs]. All this is improving rather than deteriorating. ”
“But when it comes to things like ambiguity - weak goal setting or demands from players for self-goal setting - then most likely you can say that more opportunities worsen the situation. But in fact, the basics of survival have not changed very much. "
“The more time passes, the better the wiki ( Russian ) becomes, the manual, more videos appear, the community becomes more and more friendly. Dwarf Fortress is easier to understand now than ever. But not easy! ”
When the game reaches the aforementioned version 1.0, Adams is going to add manuals to it, a more consistent interface, context-sensitive help — all of this is in his diagram, but he is not going to include two-dimensional, isometric or three-dimensional graphics in it, although the Dwarf Fortress community has already done a huge work on the visual part of the game.
In fact, Adams was already trying to start working on the manuals, but found that this could seriously slow down the development process.
“Graphics also slow down development and that’s why we don’t have it,” he says. “The guidelines are similar, as they need to be constantly updated. But I am definitely ready to make these sacrifices, since the presence of manuals will radically simplify the game for beginners. ”
So far, he is quite happy that the Dwarf Fortress community is doing this work for him. “A huge number of people help others to understand the game and if I become one of them, this is unlikely to improve the situation,” he laughs, adding, “I’m not laughing at other people's problems, it’s hard for me and only I am guilty of that. Just when you talk about something for many years, you become somewhat frivolous. ”
I asked Adams if he believed in the possibility of creating a game, not less deep than Dwarf Fortress, but more accessible to the average player.
“Of course,” he replies, “It will have faster access to depth. I mean something like Sims - how many copies did they sell? This game can not be called simple, but it is played by millions of people. Sims are a good example of a game that is both complex and affordable. ”
“I have never played Minecraft, but apparently it is deep enough if you want it, don't you?” He adds, “And despite this, eight-year-old children can play it. So I think that such games already exist. ”
Loss of audience (Fan Drought)
God sent so enthusiastic fans to the Adams brothers that they not only enjoy playing and helping new players, but donate tens of thousands of dollars each year just to keep the brothers afloat. But what if in the following years the number of players begins to decline and with this money it becomes impossible to live?
“Then I’ll most likely become unemployed,” Adams laughs, although he is well aware that this is not likely to happen. “Probably we are already known enough for our new project to attract attention.”
“We can always sell our reputation on Kickstarter,” he adds, “Nowadays there are so many different opportunities and I don’t think that I’ll have to get a job and practice Dwarf Fortress in my spare time. There are alternatives. But we still want to practice Dwarf Fortress. ”
Adams does not like to think on such topics, and this is not surprising, considering all the depressive thoughts that people will forget about the work of your whole life.
“In that case, you can’t do anything, right?” He says. “So the world is arranged. Some games remain popular, take a look at the rogue-games. But their communities were destroyed and rebuilt millions of times. So, how to know. "
The long-term prospects of Dwarf Fortress help that the Museum of Modern Art in New York recently chose it as one of the historically important games - this event really inspired Adams.
“It gave us confidence that the earth would not leave us under our feet if donations were exhausted,” he notes. “It also gave confidence that the game’s support would not stop. It was an important milestone. Such events help us to feel confident in the future, which is very pleasant. ”
There are, of course, ways that the Adams brothers can make their future more secure. One of them is to place the game on Steam, in front of the eyes of millions of possible players. For this you will need to go through Steam Greenlight.
“Things like the Steam Greenlight make the world less understandable to us,” says Adams. “Our policy is like the film Field of Dreams / Field of Dreams with Kevin Costner - if you build it, they will come. Everyone came to us themselves, all the press - we never advertised, never went to conferences, did not do anything like that. ”
Adams notices that he does not want to seem selfish or arrogant - they just did not think about popularity when they started developing the game, so when she began to attract attention, they just took it for granted.
Therefore, he is not sure that Greenlight will be a good idea for Dwarf Fortress. "When we deal with things like the Steam Greenlight, I’m not quite sure that they will fit in our situation, that it will be something like a fruit hanging on the bottom branch and we can just reach out and say," OK, we will be distributed through Steam “- he says.
“I’m not good at it, we lived peacefully for many years and we don’t have business instincts that would say“ We need to get there. ” If enough people start to bother us, because they want Steam to track time spent on the game or something else, if our current fans want it, it will interest us much more than increase the audience. "
That is, placing Dwarf Fortress on Steam will be a service to current fans, and not an attempt to attract new players?
“I think yes,” he replies. “Maybe it sounds very selfish, as people spend a lot of effort to put their games on Steam and show them to people. But I can’t say that we got everything for nothing, because we worked a lot on the game before people started talking about it. But now it doesn’t really bother me and I’m not sure that it will be a meaningful waste of time. ”
Platforms
Rather, we began to discuss attracting new players, I asked Adams if he was going to move the game to new platforms like mobile or PS Vita.
Mobile platforms did not make sense for a very long time, since Dwarf Fortress is a very processor-demanding game — even without taking into account possible problems with the interface, the power of mobile devices was simply not enough for a huge amount of computations that the game was constantly running. However, Adams admits that “the parameters come closer to our requirements,” so the likelihood of the appearance of Dwarf Fortress on the tablet increases.
Regarding PS Vita, he notes that "under no circumstances will we give anyone the code, so we should be able to compile it ourselves."
“In porting to Vita, there should also be meaning for us,” he adds, “Now I do everything myself, compile code under Windows, compile under Linux, compile under Mac, everything manually. The porting guy went through real hell, since I didn't give him all the code. He never received it, although I have worked with him for many years and trust him completely. I mean, one error is enough and we will have a lot of problems with the code in the wrong hands. ”
The ability to use NDA to prevent such a possibility does not matter to Adams. “I should be able to compile it and I have absolutely no idea how to do it on other platforms,” he adds, “Probably you should download their SDK. If Sony wants to go through all this nonsense with me, and I don’t think she wants, for the sake of another game ... but for this you need just such persistence. That is why the porting is usually done by fans who care about it and who are willing to go through the whole nightmare of working with me. ”
“So we have nothing against other systems, but they have to fit into our development process and our limitations,” he says.
Obviously, at this stage of development of Dwarf Fortress, Adams and his brother were supposed to receive a lot of offers from publishers — both about publishing the game and about finding employment. Adams tells me that although he never considered the possibility of working for someone else (“we want to work on our projects, and the money does not matter”), he considered the possibility of signing a contract for Dwarf Fortress with the publisher.
"We were offered to use the name Dwarf Fortress - in the spirit of Dwarf Fortress: A subtitle or something like that - they wanted to call it one of their games." - he says to me - "We were offered a six-figure sum."
He adds, “After a good deal of thought, you will understand that this has both pros and cons. Whether the brand will depreciate? Will you not deceive people? As long as they clearly understand that this is not Dwarf Fortress and Dwarf Fortress with graphics, as they say a lot now, while you are open and honest, there are no technical difficulties in this - after all, this is our brand and we can do everything with it want. "
For current fans, signing a contract with a publisher or transferring rights to Dwarf Fortress can also be useful, he says. “What do I mean, if we suddenly have enough money to be financially independent and no longer worry about paying for health insurance, we’ll be working even harder on Dwarf Fortress — wouldn't someone like that?”
He thinks, “To understand this will require a person who is very well versed in the philosophy and ethics of human behavior. We definitely discussed this and considered various implications. ”
The consequences did not allow Adams to conclude such a deal - they are sure that in reality they would not have earned money, but would have lost it.
“If people see another game, we are talking about the worst-case scenario, their donations will run out and we will stay with the amount for which you will not live for 10 years. Do we suddenly want to create a new intellectual property? Our names are well known to enable us to do something similar, but this is a very risky business. ”
On the other hand, it is impossible to say that the authors of Dwarf Fortress are afraid of risk - as Adams notes, “to put everything on one project, as we did, is a very risky decision, isn't it? Another game can destroy it all. No copyright will help. ”
Orc fortress
Since Adams started talking about the fact that such a game could harm Dwarf Fortress, I asked why, in his opinion, no one has yet succeeded in successfully cloning the game. There were many notable games inspired by Dwarf Fortress, but none of them could copy the depth and visual style.
Adams is sure that one of the main reasons for the uniqueness of his game is that other developers very quickly realized how much time and effort they would need to invest in a similar project.
“We don’t know if that awareness stopped them or they weren’t going to do anything like that from the very beginning,” he adds on projects like Towns , Dwarfs and Game of Dwarves.
"Under development games like Clockwork Empireslook more ambitious. Apparently, they will be a lot of interesting. But I’m not at all sure if it makes sense to completely copy Dwarf Fortress, because you can’t call our market big. It is unlikely that people look at our $ 50,000 a year and say "Hey, I want a piece of this pie." Rather, they are looking in the direction of Minecraft with its hundreds of millions of dollars. ”
Speaking of Minecraft, Adams is very grateful to Markus Person (Markus Persson) and his colleagues who say that their game is inspired by Dwarf Fortress -“ half of our fans found out about the game from them! He laughs.
Returning to the possible cloning or even the emergence of an improved version of Dwaf Fortress, Adams says that someday this should happen.
“We are happy that we were able to stay afloat for so long,” he says. “I’m surprised that no one has yet cut our wings. It just hasn't happened yet. ”
Free-to-Survive
“ I read about the ethics of shareware games and things like monetization and Skinner Boxes on Gamasutra, ”Adams tells me,“ we were very lucky that we were able to avoid everyone these difficulties and somehow make a living. ”
Without any doubt, the Dwarf Fortress financing model — a completely free game that survives through donations from players — is radically different from the business models used in the modern video game industry.
Adams believes that he knows exactly why such a business model works in his case and will not work in many others.
“We didn’t try to make a hit for millions of dollars, but I’ve got the impression from communicating with other people that they are pursuing just such a goal, releasing the game on the iPhone and so on.” But we no longer need to work on this and think about ways to monetize. ”
“I saw what people go through,” he continues, “ Rocketcat Games (Punch Quest) live next door and sometimes we meet with them. It’s very difficult to decide on your shareware model, isn’t it? Their model was too generous and It did not work. We were very lucky that we didn’t have to do it. "
People interested in Dwarf Fortress know that Adams sends money made with colored pencils to the donated money and adds them to the “List of Champions” - this is very different from what other modern game developers offer.
“Extremely bizarre, isn't it?” He laughs. “But, fortunately, our requests are not great, we do not need a lot of money and we earn enough to continue pouring from empty to empty. 50,000 dollars a year for two. "
“It probably sounds like shareware,” he says about his own monetization technique. “We were not guided by anything. Someone said, “Why don't you hang the PayPal button on your birthday so I can send you $ 50?” For the next four or five months, we received $ 300. I was still working then, but Dwarf Fortress was not out yet. Then we released the game and in the following months received $ 800 and $ 1,000. And we thought, "It looks like we do." Now we get about 4,000 a month and this is just amazing. ”
When I learned that the authors of Dwarf Fortress earn $ 50,000 a year solely through donations, I asked how donations are distributed. I assumed (as it turned out later that was right) that it is unlikely that everything comes down to small amounts from many people and most likely Dwarf Fortress has its own “whales” - people paying unreasonable, non-binding amounts.
“The subscription system is now working, simply because people asked her to do it,” he told me. “Some people translated four-digit numbers. But we did not ask them about it - they all sent the money themselves and they all knew exactly what they were paying for, because everyone had been playing for a very long time - in some cases for years - before they sent something. They got nothing but moral satisfaction from it. ”
“They probably have common features with whales,” he continues, “but these people regularly send large sums of money. Some have donated computers. Some of their time - a lot of volunteers work with the bug tracking system and answer user questions. One guy ported the game to Mac and Linux - everything is absolutely free. ”
Everyone just wants Dwarf Fortress development to continue, he says, so if they like the game, donations are in their own interest.
“Probably ordinary whales are interested in receiving gifts,” he adds, “There are very different types of gifts — types of ethical behavior. I know too little about the other markets, to make any conclusions, but a lot of other people to talk about it. "
Hey, party people (Hey Scenesters)
It is noteworthy that although the Adams brothers are unambiguously indie developers, they very rarely communicate with other developers and almost do not participate in the life of the indie community.
“This is not a purposeful decision.” - Adams tells me - “I just have such a character. In childhood I had few friends and I did not consider it necessary to spend time with someone. So I do not see the point even now. I never liked Twitter / Facebook. It is interesting for me to watch other people talk to each other, but I have never had a desire to participate in this. ”
It cannot be said that the brothers are nowhere at all. As I said earlier, they met with the Rocketcat Games and tried a variety of mobile games, which are usually not interested. This year they went to EVE Fanfest in Iceland, where Adams gave a talk - “we agreed because it was cool!”.
But in general, Adams is not particularly interested in communicating with other developers. “Something like GDC is not the place where we are invited,” he says. “This is the place for which you pay. The same with exhibitions. Networking has never made sense to us, this is how things are going with us. ”
“We are unlikely to start looking for work if we don’t succeed with the current game - we don’t want to work in someone else’s studio,” he continues, “We are not interested. And there is no special need, although most likely it would be very profitable. We have no desire to talk about game development or something like that. It seems to me that we have a fully mature process, since we have been doing this for 13 years. ”
Although Adams received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Stanford University and worked in mathematics for a short period of time, he says that his dislike of communication hampered scientific work. At times, mathematics turns out to be an extremely social field, he says.
“You probably think that mathematicians lock themselves in a bathroom and solve theorems in darkness and solitude, but in fact everything is tied to co-authorship in scientific work, taking into account other people's interests and working together on problems that are too complicated for a loner.” “I guess I'm just a
non- communicative person.” But despite the lack of social skills and the lonely work on the game of life, Adams is completely satisfied with his life and future prospects.
“I’m completely satisfied with the current state of affairs,” he explains. “Having spent 13 years developing it you don’t look like an idiot, talking about another 20 years. We perfectly understand that in two decades anything can happen. At this age, health problems can begin. The economy can go into a dressing. ”
“But I feel calm. Being engaged in mathematics, I never felt anything like that. I have never had such achievements. Although no one knows what will happen in the future. ”
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/199358/
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