RPPR Transcript - Revision history

Silverwing235: build on Anon's spelling work from earlier - run-ons, etc

2026-05-08T09:35:30Z

build on Anon's spelling work from earlier - run-ons, etc

76.78.140.145: Spelling fixes (I made sure to leave the personality in) and added a wikipedia link to the interviewers reference to GNS theory.

2026-05-08T00:19:00Z

Spelling fixes (I made sure to leave the personality in) and added a wikipedia link to the interviewers reference to GNS theory.

Show changes

Quietust at 20:48, 15 November 2021

2021-11-15T20:48:58Z

200.90.69.122 at 16:54, 13 January 2012

2012-01-13T16:54:26Z

Coleste: /* 1:00:00 - 1:30:00 */

2009-05-02T20:26:47Z

1:00:00 - 1:30:00

Coleste at 20:18, 2 May 2009

2009-05-02T20:18:18Z

JubalHarshaw: cat

2008-12-29T20:26:59Z

cat

Mephisto: I've begun proofreading and making corrections, as the original author asked others to do. Feel free to continue in my stead.

2008-08-16T05:41:09Z

I've begun proofreading and making corrections, as the original author asked others to do. Feel free to continue in my stead.

Show changes

Surma: Ahahaha Finally Finished that b.. err.. illegitimate child. 25 pages in openoffice, over 15,000 words. Feel free to break it up if necessary.

2008-08-15T04:05:24Z

Ahahaha Finally Finished that b.. err.. illegitimate child. 25 pages in openoffice, over 15,000 words. Feel free to break it up if necessary.

Show changes

@@ Line 57: / Line 57: @@
 :16:47
-RPPR: Well again if you look at Boatmurdered you can see how each player decided to take on their own projects, and they sort of interpreted like, I mean you call it a very generic sort of reporting of events in the game, but people interpreted them to turn this Saga of these sociopathic Dwarves setting the countryside on fire with lava channels and things like that. And I think there's a lot of interest in, you know, reinterpreting the works for your own amusement. But, one thing that always struck me that was real interesting was the emotional state of each character.
+RPPR: Well again, if you look at Boatmurdered, you can see how each player decided to take on their own projects, and they sort of interpreted like, I mean you call it a very generic sort of reporting of events in the game, but people interpreted them to turn this Saga of these sociopathic Dwarves setting the countryside on fire with lava channels and things like that. And I think there's a lot of interest in, you know, reinterpreting the works for your own amusement. But, one thing that always struck me that was real interesting was the emotional state of each character.
 How do you model the dwarves? Did you just sort of make a sort of basic algorithm or A.I. for it? Or did you look at specific psychological personality profiling or anything like that?
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 :37:05
-RPPR Well, you can only have the voice actors say so much. But in Dwarf Fortress it's obvious that one  of the things about it is its complexity. And not just the dwarves themselves, but you know, smelting ore to get metals and things like that. So what is your philosophy of game design in Dwarf Fortress, in terms of (one of the things I've wondered about is) at what point do you say “Okay this is too much, this is too complex. Let's cut it back. Lets simplify it.”?
+RPPR Well, you can only have the voice actors say so much. But in Dwarf Fortress it's obvious that one of the things about it is its complexity. And not just the dwarves themselves, but you know, smelting ore to get metals and things like that. So what is your philosophy of game design in Dwarf Fortress, in terms of (one of the things I've wondered about is) at what point do you say “Okay this is too much, this is too complex. Let's cut it back. Lets simplify it.”?
 :37:37
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 :44:52
-TA: So the idea here, the cyberpunk was largely inspirational for the wounds system. We've kind of had, we were playing D&D before we were playing cyberpunk, so with D&D and I think  a lot of people experienced this at least, I don't know what the latest editions do, but I know we were up to, we started on first then went to second, I don't know the exact numbers or whatever. But there's these hit points, right? So you get frustrated, right? You're fighting these things, and hacking the crap out of them, you're kind of relying on your DM to say someones arm got chopped off. But you can't really chop his arm off unless he's dead, or something, because there weren't really a lot of rules in place, unless you make them yourself. And so cyberpunk was pretty refreshing we kind of wanted these things; we'd written a few little tiny little baby BASIC games, because we've been programming forever. And these really baby kind of games where someones arm would get blown off or something. But cyberpunk kind of had it; it was in line with how we were thinking, definitely reinforced a lot of that. Because it was easy to roll up a character really fast, and they could get killed in one hit all the time, there was none of this “hit points get higher and higher” type of thing. and easy for them to get messed up, put in the hospital really fast, with no way to stop it. And then you can roll up another character. So this kind of meat grinder effect, that was also how we played a lot of our Roguelike games, these early sort of randomized text games. It's the same kind of thing where you'd run a character, they'd get wiped out, you get a scorelist. This is the kind of thing that came from our, sort of this synergy between these Roll Playing Games, and the Roguelike games we were playing, is this persistence of a record of what you've done, that you have in a roll playing game because you've still got your sheets, and you can talk about your characters and stuff. But with the computer games it's a little more difficult. So you have a record of what you've done, so it doesn't matter if you lose it. And this is kind of an important thing for us, why we have so many things that are records about the game that you're playing. Because in a fixed-plot game, for example, you just kind of race off and do this plot and it doesn't matter if it records if you won or not, you just watch the little ten-second video saying everything is cool or whatever. And that's fine, but if the game is more like a strategy game, or something, then you want to have something that says that you were there, or whatever. and that's kind of far afield from the original topic.
+TA: So the idea here, the cyberpunk was largely inspirational for the wounds system. We've kind of had, we were playing D&D before we were playing cyberpunk, so with D&D and I think  a lot of people experienced this at least, I don't know what the latest editions do, but I know we were up to, we started on first then went to second, I don't know the exact numbers or whatever. But there's these hit points, right? So you get frustrated, right? You're fighting these things, and hacking the crap out of them, you're kind of relying on your DM to say someones arm got chopped off. But you can't really chop his arm off unless he's dead, or something, because there weren't really a lot of rules in place, unless you make them yourself. And so cyberpunk was pretty refreshing we kind of wanted these things; we'd written a few little tiny little baby BASIC games, because we've been programming forever. And these really baby kind of games where someone's arm would get blown off or something. But cyberpunk kind of had it; it was in line with how we were thinking, definitely reinforced a lot of that. Because it was easy to roll up a character really fast, and they could get killed in one hit all the time, there was none of this “hit points get higher and higher” type of thing. and easy for them to get messed up, put in the hospital really fast, with no way to stop it. And then you can roll up another character. So this kind of meat grinder effect, that was also how we played a lot of our Roguelike games, these early sort of randomized text games. It's the same kind of thing where you'd run a character, they'd get wiped out, you get a scorelist. This is the kind of thing that came from our, sort of this synergy between these Roll Playing Games, and the Roguelike games we were playing, is this persistence of a record of what you've done, that you have in a roll playing game because you've still got your sheets, and you can talk about your characters and stuff. But with the computer games it's a little more difficult. So you have a record of what you've done, so it doesn't matter if you lose it. And this is kind of an important thing for us, why we have so many things that are records about the game that you're playing. Because in a fixed-plot game, for example, you just kind of race off and do this plot and it doesn't matter if it records if you won or not, you just watch the little ten-second video saying everything is cool or whatever. And that's fine, but if the game is more like a strategy game, or something, then you want to have something that says that you were there, or whatever. and that's kind of far afield from the original topic.
 :47:52
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 Then there's sort of the Debug type tools or cheating I guess you could call it, whatever that means, tools. Like Regional Prospector, for example, where people want to have more information than I would give them in the sort of stock setting situation. But I don't really mind them having it or whatever. Those kinds of things, as options, those kinds of things can creep in. But adding optional settings is kind of lower priority than stuff that's affects everybody. At the same time there are a few things like that, you know, you can really see the want. People want to have those and the fewer utilities there are, occasionally I'm not sure how many bug reports come out of people using a utility incorrectly, because I don't really know all of whats out there. But even if that's infrequent that's something that's kind of a small issue.
-Then there are things like people making an entire, sort of, 3D visualizer overhead things, and that's when I start kind of feeling just leery about it. Just like “well can I lose control of my project this way” or something, because someones created a whole new interface for it and, you know, if it becomes popular an I going to become beholden to that person, even though it's my game. That kind of thing kind of worries the hell out of me sometimes. But uh, so far that hasn't been a problem. But when you have a game like where it's kind of, I've been working on it for a long time, it hasn't been released with a life substantially longer than a regular commercial game, because it's only been up for a year and something. But if it's still here after five years, that kind of thing will only tend to grow, and so sticking with the same project like that that's kind of a real risk to tying up your livelihood in one project, is that things like that will continue to happen. And it can only become more of an issue. But I'm not that worried about it, I go through fazes of worry on it, but right now everything's okay.
+Then there are things like people making an entire, sort of, 3D visualizer overhead things, and that's when I start kind of feeling just leery about it. Just like “well can I lose control of my project this way” or something, because someone's created a whole new interface for it and, you know, if it becomes popular an I going to become beholden to that person, even though it's my game. That kind of thing kind of worries the hell out of me sometimes. But uh, so far that hasn't been a problem. But when you have a game like where it's kind of, I've been working on it for a long time, it hasn't been released with a life substantially longer than a regular commercial game, because it's only been up for a year and something. But if it's still here after five years, that kind of thing will only tend to grow, and so sticking with the same project like that that's kind of a real risk to tying up your livelihood in one project, is that things like that will continue to happen. And it can only become more of an issue. But I'm not that worried about it, I go through phases of worry on it, but right now everything's okay.
 :05:31

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 :41:36
-TA: So as far as cats go... so yeah there's defiantly problems with optimization. Especially when you get up around 100 dwarves or something, and then you've got 50-60 cats going around, and all sorts of different pets, and so on. There are a number of problems there. Now when you say “an unintentional side effect of cats not eating”, the pets actually used to eat. And there were problems there too, because they'd eat you out of your fortresses. And so having them eat too much is a problem. So I took it out for the time being. And so you know you're going to get this overpopulation problem, but it's just a matter of balancing things out. Having the herbivores just be able to graze on grass for instance, they can't do that now. That would help a bit, although, of course, if they have a lot of grass, then it's not really going to help the population problem. But then if you could feed your cats, they could eat vermin although they'd run out after a time, because they'd eat out most of the vermin on the map. Dogs are another example, if wanted to feed them meat, or something; if you just had to feed them less, or something like that. I mean there are lots of ways to handle this. There's been a bit of discussion about this on the forums on my website (http:\\www.bay12games.com\) and uh, you know like anything it's just an ongoing issue.
+TA: So as far as cats go... so yeah there's defiantly problems with optimization. Especially when you get up around 100 dwarves or something, and then you've got 50-60 cats going around, and all sorts of different pets, and so on. There are a number of problems there. Now when you say “an unintentional side effect of cats not eating”, the pets actually used to eat. And there were problems there too, because they'd eat you out of your fortresses. And so having them eat too much is a problem. So I took it out for the time being. And so you know you're going to get this overpopulation problem, but it's just a matter of balancing things out. Having the herbivores just be able to graze on grass for instance, they can't do that now. That would help a bit, although, of course, if they have a lot of grass, then it's not really going to help the population problem. But then if you could feed your cats, they could eat vermin although they'd run out after a time, because they'd eat out most of the vermin on the map. Dogs are another example, if wanted to feed them meat, or something; if you just had to feed them less, or something like that. I mean there are lots of ways to handle this. There's been a bit of discussion about this on the forums on my website (http://www.bay12games.com/) and uh, you know like anything it's just an ongoing issue.
 :43:00

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 === 0:00:00 - 0:30:00 ===
-[http://slangdesign.com/rppr/2008/05/interview/rppr-interview-with-tarn-adams-creator-of-dwarf-fortress/ Role Playing Public Radio]: This is Ross Paiten for RPPR, and here with me is Tarn Adams the developer and programmer for Dwarf Fortress the Indie cult hit computer game.
+[http://slangdesign.com/rppr/2008/05/interview/rppr-interview-with-tarn-adams-creator-of-dwarf-fortress/ Role Playing Public Radio]: This is Ross Payton for RPPR, and here with me is Tarn Adams the developer and programmer for Dwarf Fortress the Indie cult hit computer game.
 :00:12

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 :21:05
-RPPR: Yeah rifts is kind of cludgy but it's fun especially if you're a teenager and you're like “Ooh robots and dragons and ninas aah great. We're going to blow this shit up”
+RPPR: Yeah rifts is kind of cludgy but it's fun especially if you're a teenager and you're like “Ooh robots and dragons and ninjas aah great. We're going to blow this shit up”
 :21:18
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 :22:34
-TA: you'd have to advertise somehow, probably just need to pay some kind of fee to set up a boothe, or something.
+TA: you'd have to advertise somehow, probably just need to pay some kind of fee to set up a booth, or something.
 :22:47
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 :31:24
 TA: Okay thanks.
 === Links ===

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 :19:58
-TA: Yeah, because they suck karma or something, it's like Karma Vampires. I like it when they cut loose though, because those are the books I like to go buy and then you just read them and let them stew. I think my favorite D&D book was, I don't know if it was 2nd Edition, Manual of the Plains was really interesting. Because they're just kind of, whatever came out of their mind, they're just like “and this plain is filled with Apes and giant bird like creatures” and stuff, and they're just going nuts. And then you read the Manual of the Plains for the later editions when they start getting all \Cutter and Burke\ [need proper names for authors] and Plainscape on your ass and you're like it's not apes and birdlike creatures it's like (ancient English professor accent) “There will be 2d4 Yeti, and 1d2 rocks” I'm like whaat?
+TA: Yeah, because they suck karma or something, it's like Karma Vampires. I like it when they cut loose though, because those are the books I like to go buy and then you just read them and let them stew. I think my favorite D&D book was, I don't know if it was 2nd Edition, Manual of the Planes was really interesting. Because they're just kind of, whatever came out of their mind, they're just like “and this plane is filled with Apes and giant bird like creatures” and stuff, and they're just going nuts. And then you read the Manual of the Planes for the later editions when they start getting all \Cutter and Burke\ [need proper names for authors] and Planescape on your ass and you're like it's not apes and birdlike creatures it's like (ancient English professor accent) “There will be 2d4 Yeti, and 1d2 rocks” I'm like whaat?
 :20:43

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	=== Links ===		=== Links ===
	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_NEO_Personality_Inventory		http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revised_NEO_Personality_Inventory
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		+	[[Category:Game development]]