Source: Ascii Dreams
I've got plenty more design notes, but I think you should just get over to the official announcement where you can register your interest.
Source: Ascii Dreams
Everyone starts with the camera beard hat unlocked. You may have guessed that we're going with a steam punk theme, and there is nothing more steampunk than a camera beard hat. I'll say it slowly for you. Camera. Beard. Hat.
Source: Umbrarum Regnum: The Codex of Eréimul blogs
I'm alive! And coding!
If you were reading my posts from the end of 2009, you might remember that me & Jice started work on a game engine called Umbra. Work was suspended during the last four months, but Umbra will be revived soon. I have already started tweaking things and completing the documentation (which, regrettably, was far from complete).
Source: Ascii Dreams
Rather than being skill based, we went with a class based system which is much more representative of the original Disney movie. The classes are Heavy, Scouty, Snipy, Engy, Demi, Soldy, Pyree, Spyee and Doc. To create minority interest, we've left hints that Demi is possibly female, transgendered, sexually ambiguous, straight, gay, black, Amerindian, Hispanic, Scottish, one-eyed, dating Ashton Kutcher and Republican. Luckily, with the full facial and forehead beard, you'll never be able to tell.
Source: Ascii Dreams
DF2 is entirely first person view with the fuzziness at the bottom of the screen being a Hollywood cinematic effect used to represent the size of your dwarf's beard. Hideo liked this idea immensely when we showed him the alpha in a private alpha at GDC, but I suspect there were translation issues as he went on to implement a side beard in Metal Gear Solid 3.
Source: Ascii Dreams
There are some other radical changes that you should be aware of before you download the beta client. One of the first suggestions Tarn came up with when I asked him what he wanted in Dwarf Fortress 2 was 'More dwarves', so you now start the game with 9 dwarves instead of seven. That's been the basis of the viral marketing ARG that we've been running, so if you see 7+2 =9 anywhere, you should strip search anyone nearby who is unusually short of stature or has a beard so you can find the next clue. My next few posts will also have sequences of letters randomly underlined, which should be used to send morse signals across an old Atlantic telephone cable we found to unlock a stenographic photograph of Scamps. And Microsoft have kindly reprogrammed Windows to randomly include a blue screen of death featuring an ASCII rendition of Gabe Newell which will haunt your dreams.
Source: Ascii Dreams
We were confident enough at this point to open up DF2 to a select group of beta testers and put feelers out to those we knew would take an interest in a multiplayer procedurally generated kick ass fantasy world. It was one of these, Randy Pitchford who was ultimately responsible for the radical change in direction of the visuals for DF2. Randy was concerned that the look of DF2 was 'too shit brown': mostly because he kept locking the doors to the washroom in the fortresses he built, so his dwarves would work overtime. We brainstormed this over Skype - and during the chat, it was almost like a light bulb went off above both our heads at the same time. There was a power cut in my house, and Randy was turning off the lights to save on power bill costs since the light from the monitors was enough to keep his developers awake while they worked overtime. When we reconnected, we were both babbling 'how about red and blue'. I made Randy promise that we'd get to use the look we discussed for our game, not his, and started revising the engine.
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