There’s a lot of speculation about what my aims are exactly with Goblin Camp, so I’ll try and explain things here.
I’ve played roguelikes for a long time, and as a kid I used to draw cities using ASCII back when PC’s still used DOS. In addition to roguelikes, I’ve always been a fan of the Civilization series, Dungeon Keeper and more recently Anno 1404. When Dwarf Fortress came along I was really excited, it seemed to combine the genres that I’ve always liked. I was content with DF for a long time, but then I got to thinking of all the things I’d like to see done with the genre (genre being roguelike citybuilder, I suppose. Who cares what its called). So I had 3 choices:
- Send Toady my suggestions and hope he does things the way I’d like
- Hope someone else makes a game just the way I’d like
- Do it myself
I’m a bit impatient, so the obvious choice was to do it myself, so here I am.
I want to stress that I’m not setting out to make a Dwarf Fortress clone, it wouldn’t make much sense really. I’m making a game that is inspired by Dwarf Fortress, and there will be certain similarities. Using similar indicators for things like stockpiles and creatures and such that are used in DF, Nethack and so forth is a conscious design choice to make getting into the game easy for people already familiar with DF, or roguelikes in general.
Goblin Camp is going to be more about the broader decisions, and less about micromanagement. You’ll steer your economy by setting minimum production values, and organizing your workshops and stockpiles to ensure efficient hauling. What you won’t care about are who the individual workers are, or who’s assigned to what workshop. Orcs will gain skill in their chosen profession, but assigning jobs to the best workers is left to the game. You the player will want to organize your defences and military in such a way as to keep your working class alive, because the longer they work the better they get. Constant bloodbaths at your workshops will mean that you’ll always have unskilled labor.
This leads to an important point, orcs and goblins (especially goblins) are expendable. An ordinary orcs life is short and brutal, only a select few will survive long enough to become notable individuals.
I’ll expand on all that later, I don’t want this post to stretch too long. As a parting point I want to bring up another big factor in the development of Goblin Camp: Feedback. I want to hear all your suggestions, ideas and critique. I’m not making Goblin Camp just for myself, but for everyone else as well, and as such everyone’s comments are important. Also, Goblin Camp will be open sourced after the 0.1 release, and contributions to the code are encouraged.