What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups
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What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups
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Re: What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups
#2What'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.
Re: What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups
#3Interesting analogy.
I'd guess that the average Dwarf Fortress erm, Fortress, and the average startup fail at about the same rate. For, basically, the same reasons: too many unknowns, random events and morale.
Re: What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups
#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 keep growing the fortress. Sadly, the performance cliff is steep.
Re: What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups
#5I'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.
Re: What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups
#6OT, 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.
Re: What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups
#7OT, 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.
Depends if they like starting at ASCII. KSP has a much more familiar interface and would probably be the better route to go.
Re: What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups
#8OT, 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.
Having played both Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft, I think that there are a lot of different people who enjoy many different things about Minecraft. Dwarf Fortress doesn't fulfill all the same roles, so depending on your preferences, you might like it more or less. I don't really see it as progression personally, although they do share a subset of their audiences.
Re: What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups
#9OT, 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.
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).
Re: What Dwarf Fortress Taught Me About Startups
#10> 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…
There is of course a certain extent to which you can adjust how difficult the game will be for you, such as where you embark or just restricting your playstyle, but ultimately coming up with goals is necessary to keep enjoying the game. I never last very long myself...