Space Base DF-9 - Dwarf Fortress in Spaaaace?

[Quinton]

http://www.spacebasedf9.com/

In Spacebase DF-9, you’ll build a home among the stars for a motley population of humans and aliens as they go about their daily lives. Mine asteroids, discover derelicts, and deal with the tribulations of our distant future: meteor impacts! Explosive decompression! Unbearable loneliness!

Intro/Tutorial video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZX6PXN1G_E

It's on Steam Early Access ($20), and I'm tempted to give it shot -- the UI looks like it might be significantly better than most of the DF-alikes.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/246090/

Or you can pre-order directly for slightly (or a lot) more, but with extra goodies: http://www.spacebasedf9.com/buy

Screenshots:
Other DF-In-Space contenders:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tynansylvester/rimworld
http://maiagame.com/

[Ingmar]

I thought RimWorld was Dwarf Fortress in space? Sure are a lot of these popping up lately.

[Quinton]

Hadn't heard about RimWorld.  There was *another* build a spacestation/colony thing I saw recently too, now that I think of it, but I'm totally drawing a blank on the name.

edit: Ah, yeah, Maia: http://maiagame.com/

V I'm with Rasix, people are welcome to keep building these until they make one that's AWESOME.

[Rasix]

DF-alikes and survival sims everywhere.  Some with zombies, some without. 

It's a trend that I'm OK with.  One of them might actually be decent.

[Quinton]

First Impressions:

- These guys actually get UI!  Nice clean menus.
- Hotkeys for menu traversal next to each option/icon.
- Game pauses when you enter the menu system.
- Clear, readable text.
- Hint systems helps you get started (avoid the "wtf do I do first" issue with these games)

UI screenshots:

[Trippy]

Was interested until I saw this was a Double Fine game. Going to wait till it's released (if it ever does).

[Quinton]

It's pretty early too.  Waiting probably advisable.  If they keep going in the direction they've started it could be pretty nice.

[Yoru]

It's pretty early too.  Waiting probably advisable.  If they keep going in the direction they've started it could be pretty nice.

How far into development are they? A quick look at their roadmap seems to indicate that it's at the "ten minutes with Unity" tech demo phase.

[schild]

Double Fine needs to stop acting like a shitty indie studio.

[Quinton]

It's pretty early too.  Waiting probably advisable.  If they keep going in the direction they've started it could be pretty nice.

How far into development are they? A quick look at their roadmap seems to indicate that it's at the "ten minutes with Unity" tech demo phase.

A liiitle further than that, but not a lot.  I think much of my enthusiasm is due to them starting with some reasonable UI (including a list of all units, which for some reason the other DF-alikes can never be bothered to implement).  What's there that I've seen:
- room construction
- zoning
- object construction (doors, beds, refineries, oxygen generators, etc)
- very simple resource system (just mine asteroids for material)
- unit work assignment (miner, builder, security, barkeeper, etc)
- new units arriving
- unfriendlies arriving

[UnSub]

To cross the streams: Double Fine have announced Spacebase DF-9 is going into full release simply by cutting all the features they were talking about, adding a tutorial and then leaving it up to the playing audience to keep working on the game's open source.

Fabricated mentioned it; RPS has a bit of a write-up. People on the Steam forums are very unhappy that a month ago it was "we'll be more communicative and we've got big things planned" and now it's "sorry, the Early Access money coming in wasn't enough so the game goes out as is".

Pre-funding is a terrible model that's ripe for abuse, not matter the reputation of the studio doing it.

[jakonovski]

Someone on gaf dug up this choice quote from a month ago:

[Quinton]

They say they're going to release the "full lua source code", which likely implies no native/engine source, so even if the "community" wanted to run with it and try to make it a more complete game, unless their lua bindings to the engine are extremely general/open-ended there will likely be things that are simply not doable.

Early access is definitely problematic in a lot of ways.  From a consumer standpoint, unless you don't mind possibly throwing money away, the obvious thing is don't pay for anything that's not delivering sufficient gameplay for the price asked -- realistically almost any project could evaporate the next week or month under this model.

Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program are great examples of "the paid alpha / early access was a bunch of fun -- future updates have just been icing on the cake."  But there's a *lot* of stuff on kickstarter or steam early access where even basic gameplay is pretty nonexistent.

[Thrawn]

No Z-Axis? Casuals.

[Rasix]

DoubleFine is a shitty studio.  Stop giving them money.

[jakonovski]

TotalBiscuit chimes in. That Bobby Kotick quote is pretty amazing in retrospect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAd8Ls8Mwl4

[Thrawn]

TotalBiscuit chimes in. That Bobby Kotick quote is pretty amazing in retrospect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAd8Ls8Mwl4

Very not kind to them.  Ends by pretty much saying "If I were Steam I would no longer allow Double Fine to use the early access system after this."

You keep hearing more stories like this, but I doubt you're going to see enough people scared off to stop spending money on them and fully discourage the early access business model.

Don't think I saw this linked yet - http://steamcommunity.com/app/246090/discussions/0/613936673464943075/ Tim Shafer answering some questions.  Gems such as -

But we continued to sell the game, and will continue to sell the game, because we feel that based solely on its own merits, Spacebase DF9 is still a fun, clever, hilarious, beautiful and complete game.

[Trippy]

Don't think I saw this linked yet - http://steamcommunity.com/app/246090/discussions/0/613936673464943075/ Tim Shafer answering some questions.  Gems such as -

But we continued to sell the game, and will continue to sell the game, because we feel that based solely on its own merits, Spacebase DF9 is still a fun, clever, hilarious, beautiful and complete game.

That man has no shame. On the other hand there's no point in pulling the game now and Steam is happy to sell Early Access abandonware.

[Kail]

DoubleFine is a shitty studio.  Stop giving them money.

Well, I know that NOW, but DF9 was one of their first early access titles.  I honestly thought they were better than this.  I mean, Psychonauts, man!  Br-umlaut-al legends!  Even Iron Brigade / Trenched was fun for me.  Sure, since then they've just been a stream of half formed shit, but they haven't actually fucked their customers over on this level before, as far as I've seen.

Lesson learned, I guess.

[Strazos]

I am so fucking sick of Early Access ads flooding my Steam feed.

Why the fuck would I want to pay to be a beta tester? 

[HaemishM]

Why the fuck would I want to pay to be a beta tester? 

This. This is entirely why I haven't Kickstarted anything and anytime I see an interesting title on sale that's Early Access, I just don't buy it. At times, I've regretted the money I've spent in the Hex beta because I'm just not sure if the finished product will ever manifest itself. People with more money than me can fund a dev's pipe dream. Let me see what it's like and what it costs when you can unashamedly say "it's done" even if "it's done" is a lie like this product.

[jakonovski]

The dev of Project Zomboid asks a good question: why were they developing an Early Access game, continued development dependent on sales, in one of the most expensive cities on Earth? The project was doomed from the start. You can't fund a San Francisco lifestyle with a niche game.

http://theindiestone.com/binky/2014/09/21/alpha-funding-early-access-is-not-an-alternative/

[koro]

Don't think I saw this linked yet - http://steamcommunity.com/app/246090/discussions/0/613936673464943075/ Tim Shafer answering some questions.  Gems such as -

But we continued to sell the game, and will continue to sell the game, because we feel that based solely on its own merits, Spacebase DF9 is still a fun, clever, hilarious, beautiful and complete game.

That man has no shame. On the other hand there's no point in pulling the game now and Steam is happy to sell Early Access abandonware.

That quote is a bald-faced lie. Not only is Spacebase nowhere near resembling "complete", the game as it currently stands is just shy of quite seriously unplayable.

According to a friend who played it, problems include:

- Nonexistent pathfinding. Dudes will walk out of airlocks, but can't come back in, leading to everyone dying in space.
- Security forces are useless, as they are guaranteed to panic and flee at the first sign of any enemy.
- Enemy raiders have perfect accuracy and weapons equal to top tier researched items that you can make.
- If a citizen flees for any reason (raiders, hull breaches, low oxygen, etc.), they will never stop fleeing for any reason. So if/when your O2 filters start failing because the game will eventually reach the point where it will be impossible for any number of technicians to keep them fixed, the game essentially ends because all your dudes will go into panic spirals until they die.

Granted, all of this stuff could be fixed in some form of miracle patch, but I doubt it will.

[Kail]

Yeah, it's still super sketchy and glitchy. 

AFAIK there's no way to have multiple games going at once, you start the game and it auto loads your save, so you can't make a new base without abandoning your current one.

Pathfinding is indeed borked, generally guys can find their way to where they need to go but they don't choose the optimal path.  This is problematic because if they're outside the station, they're running on limited air, so you lose a LOT of miners who turn back to the station when their air gets low but don't head to the nearest airlock, instead floating across the map to the airlock on the far side of the base.

There's also the issue that builders keep building themselves into inescapable rooms.  In this game, you designate rooms to build by click-dragging a box, and that tells the construction guys to build that room and surround it with a wall.  Unfortunately, they tend to seal themselves in to these rooms, so you have to immediately get a door built or your guy won't be able to get out of his suit and will suffocate.

The bigger problem, IMO, is that there's only maybe an hour worth of content in this game.  In Dwarf Fortress, you've got tons of complex systems like dwarf politics, trade, and crafting to keep you busy for days.  In Gnomoria, there's still stuff like crafting and traps to give you something to do once you've settled in.  But in Spacebase, there's nothing, you build five or ten rooms, and you're done.  You can make your colony larger, but you're just making the same thing you just made, again.  There's no crafting system, no workshops, no special resources to track, no social relationships, no trade, nothing.  It feels like the skeleton of a game with no core to keep you moving.  It's like playing From Dust in sandbox mode, there are game systems there and it's a fun sandbox for a bit but those systems aren't very deep and there's nothing else to do.

[Ginaz]

Maybe people will now spend their money on more worthy early access games...like Serek Dmart's new MMO.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/266620/

[KallDrexx]

Maybe people will now spend their money on more worthy early access games...like Serek Dmart's new MMO.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/266620/

LOLOL

New To The Game
so im in the spacestation....what should i do need im not able to click on anything or select

In this early access build, the big thing is to check out the two current areas (Starguard and Heatwave). See if there are collision issues that cause you to fall out into space or through the terrain, make sure you can't run through buildings, use the Wingsuit and Wingchute (fall from really far up, like the buildings in the Mining Facility on Heatwave), and use the chat function to talk with other early access adoptors. The only things you can interact with at the moment is the DJP to teleport between Starguard and Heatwave and the T-Shaft which teleports you within an area (like to other areas of Starguard).

Interacting with terminals, vehicles, buildings, weapons, combat, and many other aspects will be added in later early access builds.

From the site's FAQ:

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

An early Beta of the full game which will be “stagger” released in order to facilitate focused testing.

A staggered release is one in which not the entire world, features, items etc are enabled. Instead, depending on what we need tested, those aspects will be enabled in subsequent builds.

For example, the first Early Access Build (internal: EAB01) unlocks one planetary scene (Heatwave) and all three decks of the GCV-Starguard carrier. Since this is a world testing build, no weapons, vehicles, aircrafts, inventory items etc are player usable. You will be able to explore both of these massive areas and carry out various actions. So we would be looking for feedback such as player movement speed, found a hole in the game world, I went swimming – and drowned, I moved from Starguard deck 1 to deck 2 and the game froze etc

Then with EAB02 and subsequent builds, we will fix bugs, make tweaks and suggestions based on feedback from EAB01, enable new scenes, features, enable weapon classes, items etc.

Rinse. Repeat.

By the end of the Early Access period, we hope to have covered all aspects of the game, the world, fixed bugs (fatal and otherwise), tweaked weapons and items, tweaked flight and vehicular dynamics etc.

Doing it this way allows us to “focus test” each aspect of such a massive game, rather than unloading everything at once and then not getting quality feedback because everyone is running around with weapons of mass destruction and waiting for someone else to do the playtesting. :)

People actually paid $40+ for this.....

[Margalis]

I've disliked DoubleFine since Brutal Legend. They are dishonest pieces of shit. Their primary business is not making games, it's in moving from one scam to the next. They ran out of publishers to scam so they moved on to scamming consumers directly, first with KS then with Steam EA.

The lead developer of Spacebase has "fights for the users" as part of his Twitter profile. What a fucking joke. Tim Schafer is busy blabbing on Twitter about social justice wank while actively scamming people. What about the simple justice of not selling people early access for a game you have no workable plan for completing?

These guys are scammers, pure and simple. "It was outside our control." Bullshit. You make the budget, you make the promises, you make the decision to sell the game as Early Access. Every day you looked at how much work there was to do and how much money and time you had to do it with and knew they didn't match up.

Spacebase didn't fail because of some unforseeable act of god, it failed because they planned only for the best-case scenario. The only way Spacebase was going to be finished was if they won the lottery and it became one of the best selling EA games. That's not acceptable planning. A plan that leads to people being ripped off 95% of the time is a scam.

It genuinely makes me angry and I'll be glad when they go out of business. "But but but developers will lose their jobs!" Good. These aren't 16-year-old kids who bit off more then they can chew, they are supposed professionals who are paid to know better.

TotalBiscuit chimes in. That Bobby Kotick quote is pretty amazing in retrospect.

People need to stop assuming that big evil publishers are the bad guys. Publishers do some dumb shit but plenty of developers are capable of huge fuckups without any help.

[schild]

False Equivalency. Big evil publishers are the bad guys. Incompetent and awful developers aren't the bad guys, they're just assholes that don't deserve your money.

[rk47]

mismanagement and scam are not the same things.

[Margalis]

If you refuse to come up with a workable plan to deliver the product you've sold people that is more than mismanagement.

It's not like they made an honest mistake. They sold people early access to a game they had no feasible way to deliver, knowing full well they had no feasible way to deliver it. You can say "well they tried their best" but that's bullshit - trying your best involves coming up with a budget and a way to deliver the game.

Planning to scam people and coming up with a plan you know will end up scamming people is a distinction without a difference. The plan they came up with was almost guaranteed to rip off customers and they knew that. They also gave buyers no warning that the game had no budget set aside for it and was planned to fail unless a sales miracle happened.

This is a pattern of behavior with DF.

[jakonovski]

They had $400k, or 40 person-months, to make the early access husk to put on Steam. From that they needed around 25 000 sales to pay off the investors, and for every 7 000 sales after that they could employ one developer for a year.

Seems to me like the project relied entirely on name recognition to make it a disproportional success.

The only thing that makes any of the above possible is that the consumer acts as consequence free money. So I guess that means early access is a legalized scam?




 

[Margalis]

At least with Kickstarter the dev doesn't collect the money until there is enough money pledged to theoretically fund development. These guys treat EA as Indiegogo.

We wanted to keep working on Spacebase for years. But Spacebase spends more money than it brings in, and that’s just not something we can afford to do any more

It's like these guys have never heard "you have to spend money to make money." Eat a short term loss for potential long term gain? Why, what a novel, completely unheard-of concept!

These guys have no idea WTF they are doing. Publishers gave them money that they spent irresponsibly, now that it's not publishers giving them money they're totally lost as to how to run a business. They took out a $400,000 loan from IndieFund that they had to pay 100% total interest on to make Spacebase - it's like taking out a payday loan.

Once the game is released, you first pay back the investment and then share 25%of the revenue, until we double the initial investment, or until 2 years after the initial launch date, whichever comes first.

WTF! 100% of your revenue goes to paying back the investment! And then 25% until they've doubled their money. So basically IndieFund is screwing DF and DF is passing that screwjob onto consumers.

If they needed 400k why not do a Kickstarter, or take out a good old-fashioned loan or some shit? Who the hell takes out a $400,000 loan agreeing to pay $400,000 in interest? I laughed typing that - they agreed to not recognize a penny of revenue until they'd paid back the $400k loan in full then to pay back another $400k in interest.

No wonder these guys have money problems - they're getting 50 cents to the dollar value on the money they're spending.

[Cyrrex]

The least cynical way of looking at this kickstarter/early access trend is that it is a way of putting all the risk on the consumer.  Any company going this route either has been told to fuck right off by real investors, or are so risk-averse that they aren't even bothering to attempt to secure real funding.  At worst, it is a license to lie to people and print money.

As such, I am trying to make a point to only fund early access stuff were I am reasonably sure I will get the 20 dollars (or whatever it costs) of enjoyment out of the current product, not the promised one.  So far this strategy has worked for me.  The only actual semi-regret so far is Rust, which actually my oldest boy probably got 10 hours or so out of, and to be fair it only fails because I felt similar alternatives were better executed.

[Quinton]

I'm definitely a believer in "don't pay for it if it's not delivering most of the value now," though I've bought a few early access type things that were a mistake from that standpoint.

I prefer the kickstarter model for projects that have more work to do before they're ready -- at least with that the project has to prove that it can raise its minimum total amount of cash before they get my money and I can reason a bit about if the money they're raising makes sense relative to the scope of the project.  No guarantees of course, but it's at least a bar.

Early access stuff makes much more sense to me for tiny team / shoestring budget projects -- if the team's burn rate is just a couple thousand bucks a month because they're living on top ramen or in their parents' basements or whatever they need a lot fewer ongoing sales to keep things going.  Of course they probably don't have health insurance or are working a second job or something so any number of catastrophes could interfere with development beyond the usual complexities.

The best evidence of ability to deliver in the future (which is no guarantee but is better than nothing) is "have they delivered so far?"  The early access style stuff that has gotten my money with little reservation so far has:
a. had a playable free demo so I can check things out before handing over cash
b. was in a state where even if further development doesn't happen I feel like I got my fun out of it.

Best examples of this:  Minecraft,  Kerbal Space Program,  Factorio,  Don't Starve.  All of which not only easily were worth the price for the initial version I got but have been updated many times since then with all kinds of goodness.

These days seeing a movie at the theater is about $10 for 2 hours of entertainment.  $10-20 for a game that gives me 5-10 hours of fun is a pretty reasonable deal.

[jakonovski]

And then 25% until they've doubled their money.

So it's actually 9k post-investor early access sales per year per salaried employee. I tried to be all cynical and turns out I was too optimistic.