Posts Tagged ‘Dwarf Fortress’

Update on Daily Writing Goal

Wednesday, November 9th, 2011

A little while ago, I stated a new goal to stay off the Internet until I had 1000 words written or noon, whichever came first. This goal, as intended, helped a lot; while I haven’t always stuck to it, it’s nonetheless served me well, and I’m getting better at not accidentally opening Google Reader. (I tripped, and my faceplant typed reader.google.com in the address bar. Honestly! Would I lie about something like that?)

For a few reasons, though, I think it’s time to update my goal. 1000 words is rapidly ceasing to be a significant challenge. There are a lot of reasons for this. One is NaNoWriMo (not that you’d know it from my current word count). One is perseverence. One is 750words.com. One is this blog. When looking back at my goal, I realized that its original definition was a bit shaky. Scalzi specified pay copy, and for a good reason: he does a lot of blogging, and sometimes writes some very long posts, but his goal was put in place to force him to get professional writing done. I put in my goal for a slightly different reason: I noticed that I wasn’t doing enough writing, and I was forcing myself to write at all. I should mention that I actually quite like writing; I just happen to be easily distracted by things like Dwarf Fortress, good books, and raising my daughter*.

Well, as it stands, I’m writing plenty. It’s time to update my goal. Now, I like 750 Words – I waxed eloquent about it yesterday for almost half as long as I waxed eloquent about Wordpad – but I’ve come to realize that finishing my daily post to it and marking off one of my 500-word tasks in Remember The Milk isn’t very satisfying. Apparently, my goal was to force me to write publicly, and my brain didn’t bother telling me because it didn’t think it would come up. 750 words is unfiltered journal-style writing, which is good and useful and everything, but is also something completely different from a novel or blog post. The only people who will see it are myself, my wife if she reads over my shoulder, and anyone who hacks into my account. This blog post, on the other hand, will be seen by all five of my subscribers (hi, guys!) and approximately seventeen million of my adoring fans when I publish a best-seller. I thought about dividing my new goal into 1000 words of pay copy** and 1000 words of public*** copy, and allowing them to overlap, but then I realized that anything that qualifies as pay copy is by definition public, so I wouldn’t actually be changing much. Sooo . . .

New goal: 1500 words of public copy before noon, only 1000 of which have to be pay copy. No internet for me**** until I finish it up (or noon). That sounds good.

Current Music: Pandora station based on Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer. Right now it’s playing Hurts So Good by John Mellencamp, which isn’t really my favorite song. I don’t dislike it, but I’m looking forward to the station getting back to the really good stuff like Summer of ’69 and Message in a Bottle.

*There’s a balance to be struck here, obviously.

**Pay copy is anything that I might eventually manage to get paid for: novels, short stories, and . . . well, that’s it for now. I need to get a column somewhere or something.

***Public copy is anything that is, or might eventually be, public. This includes pay copy, blog posts, lengthy comments, and more!

****Obviously not no internet. I can’t very well publish blog posts without it, for instance, and I check my email in the mornings to make sure I’m not missing anything important. Pandora is pretty important to my writing process, some days. Mostly I’m just trying to keep myself out of Google Reader, I guess.

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Oh. Oh, no.

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

I thought I’d kicked the habit.  But now there’s a new release.

Well, I guess I’ll see everyone in a few months.

Current music: The default DF music.

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Programming a roguelike

Friday, October 9th, 2009

The other day I decided to sit down and do some programming on a roguelike I’ve been meaning to make forever.  A roguelike, it should be noted, is generally not a small project; it is usually a multi-year thankless task in which you produce an indy game which, for free, will delight a relatively small audience.  But I enjoy programming, and so program a roguelike I might.  I also might decide, a week from now, not to work on it for a year or two.  My hobbies are funny like that.

It should be noted that time spent programming does not necessarily translate to time spent not writing.  If anything, my inspiration for Derelict is the highest it’s been in months since I started on this roguelike.  I think it helps to have another creative task to switch to from time to time.

So about the roguelike.  I’m aiming a little to the side of what roguelikes normally do.  In a typical roguelike, you descend into a random dungeon, fight monsters, and take their stuff, and that’s certainly planned for this one.  But I’m also planning on implementing a more social side of things.  You can have characters that never go into the dungeon at all, spending all their time building relationships and social skills on the surface.

The town, randomly generated when you roll your first character, remains persistent between characters — and your characters can improve it.  Found a mage’s guild, and wizard characters you create will have higher starting skills.  Spawn a heir and leave an inheritance, and you can play them as your next character.  Tick off the neighboring hobgoblin civilization, and they will do their level best to knock your town back to the stone age, destroying your hard-earned improvements unless you can stop them.

I’m aiming high, but that’s the point.  One of the advantages of roguelikes is that, without the need to create and maintain pretty graphics, you can create a game with incredible depth of play.  The best example of this is Dwarf Fortress, the one example (to my knowledge) of a roguelike that’s also a full-time paying job for its creator.  It’s also probably the closest thing to what I’m attempting here.

Don’t get your hopes up about this game.  Just because I’m starting it doesn’t mean I’ll finish it — it’s a lot of work, and I’ll keep doing it as long as I keep having fun.  That’s the beauty of doing it as a hobby as opposed to professionally.  (Derelict, for instance, necessitates my attention whether or not I’m having fun on a particular day, since I hope to someday go pro as a novelist.)

Current music: Mozart, various

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Blocked! Or, I’m not churning out 1K words a day right now.

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

Right now, I don’t have a standardized writing process.  What I have is a mashed-together mess of a process that sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t, but is generally providing gradual forward progress on my book.  Except for the last week or so, and random intervals of time scattered over the last nine or ten months.

Here’s my writing process as it stands right now: Every moment I don’t have free, I think about my writing.  Every moment I do have free, I think, “Gee, I should probably be writing right now.”  On a “good” day, I get a couple of hours of writing done.  On a “bad” day, my dwarf fortress shows marked improvement.  I think there might be a connection back there somewhere.

Scheduling writing time worked great for me for a while, but it’s been running into some annoying problems lately.  You know the type: the ones that you know you should have expected, that you kind of did expect in the back of your mind, but that you set aside as basically unimportant.

In this case, it’s rescheduling.  I understand that I need to be able to reschedule my writing time, sometimes cancel it altogether.  Heck — half the appeal of being a full-time writer is setting my own schedule, and letting it be fluid (or designing it so it doesn’t generally need to be).  Trouble is, sometimes stuff comes up that makes it hard to stick to that rescheduling.  Like dwarf fortress.  It’s a lot easier to stick to the original “I’m writing at 3,” possibly because at 5 I’m thinking, “Oh, I’ve already rescheduled it once today, another hour won’t hurt.”  Of course, it’s important stuff pushing my writing time around.  Yesterday a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time dropped by, and we hung out for a few hours.  Today we got a surprise call we’d been waiting for for weeks and spent the day on a scavenger hunt for all the stuff needed for health insurance, checking out the car we’re getting in the process, and topped it off with hanging out with a different friend we hadn’t seen in a while.  All important stuff.

And then there are the days I sit down and write two thousand words.  (Jay Lake, it should be noted, writes something like 4K a day regularly, over the course of two hours, when he’s on his rough drafts.  I don’t know how he does it.)  Thing is, I love writing.  I really do.  And I don’t feel that Dwarf Fortress, or random visits from friends, are what’s really contributing to my writer’s block right now.  The first is a symptom (I don’t know what to write, I’ll go consign some dwarves to their doom); the second is just a random happy occurrence that happens to interrupt my staring-at-the-screen time.

My writer’s block comes because I’ve waited entirely to long to make some important decisions about Derelict.  Such as which ending, exactly, to use.  Such as how much the story is a space opera, and how much it’s a fantasy in space.  (The two are pretty similar, but the difference is in how I look at it.)  Such as how telekinesis actually works (which might or might not be important to this story, but will definitely be important in the sequel, and I don’t want to lay the wrong foundation.)

The irony is, I’ve written over five hundred words on this blog post, and I’m only really aiming at a thousand a day on Derelict.  Well.  We’ll see how it goes.

Current music: The High Court, Whisper to the Clouds (via Pandora).

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Dwarf Fortress

Friday, June 19th, 2009

Today I decided to boot up a game I haven’t played in a while: Dwarf Fortress.  Dwarf Fortress is one of those beautiful indie games that kind of blows your mind.  It’s a modern game — it’ll use whatever system resources you give it and ask for more, and it’s not because of bad programming — but it uses ascii art.  That is to say, everything in the game is represented by text characters.  (Well, that’s not entirely true; there are a few custom tiles — but the basic concept holds.)  All that processing power goes to simulation.

Now, I’m not going to tell you that Dwarf Fortress is a fun game.  I will tell you that it’s eleven thirty PM and I just took a break after starting at eleven . . . in the morning.  I was a bit sad because all my dwarves died of thirst.  This seems to have been due primarily to two factors:  First, my cook baked all the alcohol into biscuits: and second, I didn’t explicitly tell my dwarves to drink from the three ponds on the fortress’s front lawn.  I learned I had problems when they all threw tantrums and dropped dead.  Ironically, I didn’t notice sooner because I was building an underground reservoir to get them through the winter . . .

But in situations like that, one must always remember the game’s mantra: “Losing is fun.”  And in this game, it really is.  Of course, I’ve been a fan of roguelikes for a while, and that may skew my perception — one feature of the roguelike genre is that when your character dies, it’s gone.  No loading a saved game.  Your little fifteenth-level venom mage gets a spot on the high score table, and that’s it.

Dwarf Fortress is, in many ways, a very advanced roguelike.  Its adventure mode, in fact, is a roguelike.  But to me, fortress mode is where it’s at.  You take control of a group of dwarves and build your fortress from the ground down in a procedurally generated world.  You dig out the floorplan, manage the resources, and find clever ways to solve problems (or die).  In my opinion, it’s the best sandbox game I’ve ever played.

Unfortunately, it has an even steeper learning curve than most roguelikes.  Expect to devote a while to learning the interface, and read up on getting started in the Dwarf Fortress wiki.  You’ll probably lose your first fortress pretty fast.  You’ll lose your other fortresses too, but it might not take as long.

If you want an idea of just how wacky a game of Dwarf Fortress can get, check out Boatmurdered.  I understand elephants aren’t as homicidal as they used to be, and the carp aren’t as vicious, but I did lose a dwarf to a pike recently, so don’t think the game’s gone soft or anything.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go reclaim a fortress.

Current music: The Cranberries, Linger, via  Pandora.  I love the Cranberries, and Zombie is probably one of my 25 favorite songs of all time.  (Ooh, Otherside.  I love this one too.)

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