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What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups

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Re: What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups

#21

Post by PhasmaFelis »

vinceguidry wrote: post #4

> and the gameplay is brutally difficult. Dwarf Fortress is not particularly difficult once you figure out the obtuse interface. It's only a little bit more difficult than Minecraft without the boss fights. I got bored in a few months. Admittedly, much of this was the tendency of the game to slow my machine to a dead crawl. Once you're proficient at avoiding the pitfalls, the only really interesting thing to do is to…

Almost all single-player games are easy once you've had sufficient practice. That doesn't mean they're actually easy by any normal standard.

Re: What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups

#22

Post by Natsu »

patmcguire wrote: post #2

What's great about this analogy is that Unicorns are officially Bad News for dwarfs, and will frequently gore and trample everyone in your fortress to death.

They're also valuable.

"Unicorn products are worth four times as much as domestic animals, making unicorn genocide in the name of profit an attractive proposition."

- DF Wiki http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Unicorn

Re: What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups

#23

Post by Natsu »

dunstad wrote: post #9
vonkow wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends if they like starting at ASCII. KSP has a much more familiar interface and would probably be the better route to go.

There are actually a surprising number of detailed graphics mods you can get for Dwarf Fortress (although not wanting to fiddle with modding the game is entirely understandable).

The Lazy Newb Pack more or less takes care of the difficulty of doing that, though.

Re: What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups

#24

Post by clarkmoody »

rhizome wrote: post #6

OT, but for those of use who know kids into Minecraft, is DF a good thing for them to graduate to? KSP maybe better? Seems like there's a family of games here that have a progression of sophistication.

I would give KSP a shot, since it has direct lessons to learn about physics, aerodynamics, celestial mechanics, etc that many aerospace engineers don't have intuition about. The simulation is good enough that I learned a ton about celestial mechanics as a PhD student in aerospace.

Re: What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups

#25

Post by patmcguire »

yeukhon wrote: post #17
vonkow wrote: post #5

I'm really surprised that the author didn't get into one of the main ways a fortress fails. It's humming along smoothly and then suddenly the population doubles in size when a group of settlers (VC cash) arrives and the whole place goes to hell from disorganization and growing pains.

Would love to hear honest story telling from really successful startup including FB, Dropbox and even some of the smaller players on this. Would it make sense to just go full hacker culture like FB from the beginning without any serious management layer and goes small team instead of big team?

Best you're going to get is a Rashomon-style retelling. Anybody early on has retold the story so many times - pitching new hires, onboarding the next wave of employees, and then the next wave, and then the next wave - that they probably don't really remember the real thing very clearly anymore.

Then there's also the pressure to agree to a similar narrative, not necessarily in a bad way, just like any couple has agreed on a how they met story, they've been telling it for so long and had the arguments about "did that happen?" that the story has been set. Who knows what happened.

You'd have to assemble a collage of The Official Story, some of the weirder first interviews the group gave in the press, early non-hires who interviewed and caught a glimpse of a weird snapshot, the inevitable disgruntled folk (who may not inevitably wrong).

Aside from that, I do like http://justinkan.com/three-stories , it's a good series of disasters.

Re: What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups

#26

Post by HEYGRANDMA »

rhizome wrote: post #6

OT, but for those of use who know kids into Minecraft, is DF a good thing for them to graduate to? KSP maybe better? Seems like there's a family of games here that have a progression of sophistication.

Kerbal Space Program is fantastic, I'll always recommend that. It might be worth checking out Gnomoria too; it's a lot easier to get started with (IMO) than Dwarf Fortress, but still provides a lot of mechanical depth.

Re: What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups

#27

Post by DonHopkins »

vonkow wrote: post #5

I'm really surprised that the author didn't get into one of the main ways a fortress fails. It's humming along smoothly and then suddenly the population doubles in size when a group of settlers (VC cash) arrives and the whole place goes to hell from disorganization and growing pains.

Jamie Zawinski describes it as how a few people who want to work to make a company successful eventually attract a whole bunch of people who want to work for a successful company.

Re: What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups

#29

Post by Joof »

rhizome wrote: post #6

OT, but for those of use who know kids into Minecraft, is DF a good thing for them to graduate to? KSP maybe better? Seems like there's a family of games here that have a progression of sophistication.

Just add mods. Feed The Beast has nice modpacks and I loved watching direwolf20.

Dwarf Fortress is fun, but different. It feels more like a narrative generator to me.

Edit: unsure why this is downvoted. People don't 'graduate' to games, each one appeals to people for different reasons. If you want your kids to play a more educational game, minecraft with mods is that game.

Re: What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups

#30

Post by Joof »

rhizome wrote: post #15
vonkow wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends if they like starting at ASCII. KSP has a much more familiar interface and would probably be the better route to go.

Would you say DF could be a graduation up from KSP, or am I just barking up the wrong tree thinking they're related more than they are (never played MC, DF or KSP)?

Barking up the wrong tree. They are different games with different goals and all 3 can be incredibly complex.
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