Tarn Adams GDD Partial transcript

GDD (00:09):
Okay. Hello everyone. So we are back with our final speaker for the day. I'm super excited. I think I don't need to introduce them, but still just to drop the name. Tarn Adams is with us today. I'm super excited. It's such an honor. And such a pleasure to have you here today. Yeah. Can we have a hype and virtual applause for Tarn, please? Who are joining us for the first online edition of the game lift days, please. And yeah, I, yeah, I made a a pretty proud, I made a fireside conversation chat with a problem.

Tarn Adams (00:46):
Good,

GDD (00:48):
Ron, welcome. How are you doing?

Tarn Adams (00:50):
I never know. Okay. I'm doing okay. I've been sleeping through most of the conference just because that's how time zones worked out. I caught the intro and the music at the beginning at 3:00 AM, went to sleep and got up and was able to catch the game, Jan. And the Jean's talk after that. And now I'm here. I'm going to stop looking at the Twitch because it's a little behind, I will look at the little squares on the screen. Okay.

GDD (01:24):
Mentioning this fire. You sorta all the effort put into this with the board.

Tarn Adams (01:28):
No, that's excellent. And yeah, no, that's good. I'll pretend it's the evening here as well. And chat about things, I guess. Yeah.

GDD (01:38):
So just also for the, for the chat. So this is a very like informal conversation, a Q and a we're having with, with Tarn, we collected a couple of questions beforehand on the one hand. Also, if you have pressing questions you can put them into, Oh, there's already a lot of noise. You can try to put them to this court to Twitch. Sorry. Yeah. And I think we're just going to stop start off with a little bit of a yeah. Warm up for things which are happening now. And, and then we can go a little bit into the details. Yeah. So, so it's a turn. How are you doing these days? How it's such a weird time, isn't it? How are you coping with that? How, what, what did it change for you?

Tarn Adams (02:26):
So yeah, I mean, we'd, we'd already, like, I mean, the, the, the, the, depending on how your particular indie dev lifestyle works, you're already endorsed quite a bit and so forth and isolated in that, that kind of thing. Which was certainly true for us to some small extent. And then you discover all of the other things that you can be isolated from when you're actually you know, quarantining properly, no longer eating. And I mean, I'm eating, but I'm of course eating

Tarn Adams (03:00):
At my own place all the time and I'm not seeing anybody. My parents live not far away from us and of course we can't just go visit them the way that we used to. And of course the, the thing that had happened that really vise spice the early month up here the last few months was my brother broke his ankle falling down the stairs. And when we were trying to get some art supplies for these, these cran rewards were, were finishing up. And so that's, that's made things very complicated in terms of securing food and just generally taking care of each other. But he got the cast off a few days ago and is recovering well is he's able to walk again. And yeah, so that's, that's, that's the one side of it. And then of course there's the the black lives matter protests. I don't live in Seattle. I love West of Seattle in the, out, in fairly small town. So it's, it's not, it's not quite been, you know, how you might have seen things on TV, but yeah, no, that's, that's, that's, that's been a whole, a whole, a whole other whole other side of things and that's ongoing and hopefully will something will change.

GDD (04:27):
Yeah. Yeah. We hope so. And it's something like, in terms of like also how you've worked change. I mean, in terms of, I mean, I assume your work, you sort of use already to work remotely, but still, I mean, things got a little bit more complicated, did something for you change because I mean, I heard from many people that nothing basically changed and we're sort of prepared for that if someone is it's it's us, but yeah. How was it for you?

Tarn Adams (04:58):
I mean, for us, we've been, we've been switched gears over to this work on art for the steam and itch version of the game. So if, if we had been in our old mode where I'm working on the, the features of door fortress for the ASCII version, there really would not have been a significant change at all. But now that I'm working with a couple of artists Mike and Patrick who live both of them are in Europe. It's it was already remote work then obviously, but there's been some tumult and things there as well. And the, the that was not I mean, there, there has been just some basic disturbances where people would have to leave for a couple of weeks and, and, and so forth just over all that's going on. So it's, I mean, it's been

Tarn Adams (05:59):
I mean, it's not, not not uneventful, but and, and we have to just continue to see how quarantines go and how it does go and, and everything to see how it's essentially just playing it day by day, week by week with events as they arise. And obviously that's going to keep going as we lead toward the the election here and thing else that's going on.

Speaker 4 (06:26):
Yeah. I mean, now you're in the middle of putting draw for trust to steam and I mean, certain situations, a situation, slow things down, or are you still sort of where you want to be, or,

Tarn Adams (06:43):
Oh, no, it's good. I mean, we, we, we we we've had we saw enough artwork. I mean, I'm always behind the artists, so it's, it's not a huge problem if they, if they have to take some time, cause I, I have to code up the sort of identifiers and also do in, in, in game layering and shading and so forth. And it's, it's obviously not a hundred percent my area of expertise given what I've been doing with text graphics for the last 20 years. So I, in my, I'm the one who's a little bit slow here but we're still, you know, make making good progress. I mean, I did not expect or fortress to have a 16 frame animation for a Brook, a mountain Brook, a river at all like, like we had squiggly tilt us before and now there's transparent water with rocks dipping in and out and so forth. And as it's farther than I ever expected, we would, we would, we would go with that and, you know, the trees look amazing. There's, it's, it's really cool. So I think we're, we're, we're still in good shape.

Speaker 4 (07:52):
How is it working now that you're working with so many external people did this?

Tarn Adams (07:59):
Yeah, I mean, I, I never, never thought I would be. I mean, I, I ha I would hesitate to call myself an art art director. Cause I think the artists have to take that role more than I do because I don't owe anything about what makes a good picture. So I, but it's, it's, I mean, there, there are now people, right? I mean, we, we had that to some extent for we have six volunteers on the bug tracker. We've done a port of the game that a number of people helped with and people have helped us with testing before. There's, there's, there's quite a few people have been involved in the course over the, over the years. But never in this kind of direct hands on pasty sort of day in, day out. We, we making it more like a normal studio than it

Tarn Adams (08:56):
Had been at this point. And I, yeah, I mean, I've definitely learning on the job there and I'm not convinced I'm particularly good at it, but I think because our, our artists are also maters of the game that had done tile sets previously they they've been able to take up some of the Slack in terms of my management deficiencies. And I haven't had to know exactly how to present, you know, this is, these are the thousands of titles I need. This is, I mean, they already kind of know how instruction and that's been very helpful.

GDD (09:38):
I swear, I'm not making up the following question. This is already one. I just, I just saw, which was just ask, and I swear, I'm not making this up. But especially since you're now like have a bigger team working with more people, the question is how do you not get insane with your current version of source source versioning?

Tarn Adams (10:06):
Yeah, we didn't bring our more programmers. So that, that situation hasn't changed at all. Aside from aside from the fact that there are now there, I mean, we do have a branch that's, that's all new all dude or scratch because we have a version of the game that can be updated. We haven't done it yet. It's a, we've just been working on the graphics version in earnest for three months now or so, but we have the sort of classic branch that we can update for bug fixes and so forth. There, there are issues right now over in the ASCII version that I released before we started working full time on the steam version with say, necromancers coming to the Tavern that were not supposed to come there. They're supposed to be the sort of these enemies that live in towers, but now they occasionally will just drop by for a visit and get a drink at your fortress.

Tarn Adams (10:57):
And if something happens to happen, I guess like them being around a refuse pile with dead animals in it or something, then the dead animals may come to life and the zombies and kill people so forth. So there's lots of things that need to be fixed and that's one branch and then incorporate making sure of course that we're incorporating those into the steam branch. Well, it means a whole new world for me to actually have sort of a, an experimental version in a, an a stable trunk or whatever. And, and, you know, and complicating that with the, with the graphical changes as well. So yeah, maybe, maybe I'm in a whole new world.

GDD (11:44):
Hmm, cool. Cool. Are you, yeah. Guess this is something which you can get used to, or is this yeah. Are you,

Speaker 4 (11:54):
Are you looking back to the good old days?

Tarn Adams (11:59):
Oh no, no, this is, this is going to be, I have to, I have to get used to the new, the new normal, right. This is how it's going to be for the rest of the project as far as we can tell. And it may get more complicated than that. So I really do have to, to be to adapt to the new situation. And the, of course, this is this is, yeah, this is necessary, right. I mean, that's basically what, what passes for healthcare in America is figuring out how to secure your your, your treatment money in any way that you can. So we're, we're just going to have to make, do with the new situation. I mean, obviously not the decision I would've made because I had been doing it for so long the other way, and it's kind of used to that and it was working fine but this will work too tough to adapt.

Speaker 4 (12:52):
And, and would it continue on steam? Like if, if you want to talk about this also as this like lifetime project are you like separating the two projects now or are you ready?

Tarn Adams (13:05):
No, no, they're really the same. The, the the idea is that the, the, the branching won't actually be so difficult because the, the features are all the same between the versions. It's, it's the, the graphics and the sound that, that come with the steam release and then the door fortress classic or classic or fortress that where we're have over on the webpage is still a free game. But it, it will continue to be in line with the steam version. So it's not, it's not, it's not so bad as having two completely separate games. It's not like a remaster or a sequel. And we'll just keep updating it. Yeah, if you, if you grab it on steam then the magic release and the economy release the boats and things that we're all planning to have over the next five or six or seven years. That'll just be something that, that comes to you on that version. And if you've been playing the free one and like the text graphics, like a lot of people do you can just grab it there and enjoy, enjoy everything that we've been doing.

Speaker 4 (14:20):
Is there a tendency, what people prefer, like the ASCII or the, the graphics version, like do you, do you have like feedback from the community about the new graphics version compared? I mean, that's a huge step it's

Tarn Adams (14:37):
Yeah, it has. It's anecdotal. I mean, I have, I mean, I've, well, I'm sure there've been some polls, cause you can set up anybody, anybody can set up a forum poll, but, but yeah, no, there's a lot of people that have strong feelings about either version. Some people insist on the text graphics because it doesn't have sort of an artist's rendition of what a troll or a dragon looks like, and they can imagine what they're, they're seeing their themselves. And on the other hand, other people can't play the text version at all. I've talked to a dyslexic people, for instance, that cannot play games on an ASCII grid. It, it just does not work. So I think yeah, no, it's going to be a good to be supporting both versions. And of course it doesn't, it doesn't take too much work on my part to keep the text version in line with the other one, because I just need to come up with a few new character and doing, if I need a squiggle or a letter, then I can just put that in when I put something new and, and the trickier part, which we'll get used to is, you know, when I'm starting a new feature, for instance, the upcoming red magic release you know, what, what is the set of tasks that the artists need to know?

Tarn Adams (15:55):
And how do I assign that set of tasks without slowing down the development too much compared to how I would just normally just throw some letters and it's, it's going to be a different kind of set of planning and I'm, we're just going to have to do the best that we can to make sure that people can work parallel with each other rather than sequence

Speaker 4 (16:20):
There. There's another interesting question. Which, which sorts of unfolds out a little bit. Do you play your game yourself? Do you do or do you mainly develop it?

Tarn Adams (16:33):
Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't get a chance to play for very long. I mean, you, you try and sit down and play a game that you're working on. Something will come up that you won't change within about 15 minutes, some little thing you want to tweak something it's, I mean, that's not the experience of every developer. Some people can sort of play their games in as a separate sort of persona play at, play them for hours and enjoy their, their games. I have difficulty doing that, which is is kind of unfortunate because one of the reasons that we set out to make this game in the first place was that it was a game we wanted to see in the world that will, we would have wanted to play ourselves. But it's, it's enjoyable enough to work on it that I don't feel too, too put out by that.

Speaker 4 (17:27):
Here's the thing now. I mean, now that the graphic is changing so much and now that other people are having such a huge impact on your game does it feel differently for you playing or trying out that rush and compared to at a version which you were involved fully?

Tarn Adams (17:45):
Well, we'll have to see the, the, the game is not far enough in the graphic version

Tarn Adams (17:50):
To really sit down and play it yet. I mean, it's, it's cool to see the, the, the little critters running around and the items being stacked up in the water flowing and you know, maybe there will be a different sense to it when I, when I sit down and try to play it myself, but I suspect the the issue will be, will be the same inevitably, and now there'll be more things to want to change and yeah, we'll see.

Speaker 4 (18:18):
Yeah. So something I'm always super interested in in terms of project management, do you use any tools or specific techniques and for instance, and this is also a question we, we to Scott are there any like priority lists for features how you, which features you would put in next, or is there any certain structure around that?

Tarn Adams (18:45):
Not, I mean, there's just a lot of TXT files mainly. Just, I, they are structured a little bit, fortunately there's near term and things that we want to get done before the steam release things that we want to get done before we leave off and do the big map, rewrite and magic version, which is going to take things that we want to accomplish during that period. And those are just written it as, as text lists, but there's some indexing that goes on. A lot of those text notations will also have a a certain Mark that I use. It's either a bunch of asterixis or a bunch of ampersands with a label after it, and those are code tags. So I can go find, just do find in files and go find all the relevant snippets of code to a given thing.

Tarn Adams (19:37):
And then those comments will have further details about what the issues were, what kind of a surprise might be waiting for me at that location. That's relevant to the future. And but I, I don't have a piece of software that, that organizes it any more than that. I have. I've tried before, I've tried to code something up. I tried to use pieces of a third party software to, to organize but it just feels like having a pair of gloves on in the end. It's just better just to work in comments and comments and texts for me just things change rapidly. And I don't want to fight with in her face pretty much.

Speaker 4 (20:27):
There's one very, very specific question. Like how did master works or the community would inspire you?

Tarn Adams (20:38):
So I missed the first part of the,

Speaker 4 (20:40):
How did master works? Yeah,

Tarn Adams (20:46):
[Inaudible] enough of what just said. Yes. Okay. So that's, that's that's Patrick's my God. In, in, in particular, I, I gather if I'm, if I'm understanding the question correctly and I mean, that, that's something that I didn't, I didn't know a lot of the details of, but of course now, Patrick, do you want us to all this fun the game? So the, the you know, the, the, the that the inspiration is kind of flowing into the game directly now and the community is, I mean, the community more broadly was part of the question and that's, you know, that's, that's just been awesome. The the stories we never would have seen the fact that you can make computers out of fortresses was something that was for us. Hadn't been following that one. It had happened in other games previously.

Tarn Adams (21:38):
So as sort of a shock to us when people started making the first water computers and the first vampire computers and the first animal theater out of pressure plates and flood Gates, and to make logic Gates and make playable versions of space invaders and calculators with seven segment displays made out of drawbridges and all that was, was, was mind boggling, but then there's also just all the art and stories. Back when we were younger, we, one of the things that we, we kind of remember fondly my brother and I is playing really game star flight, which had these very short kind of three to four sentence procedural creature descriptions for the life forms on the planets, but we would fill notebooks of pictures of these. And so when we made our own procedure of preachers in door fortress, I began with the forgotten beasts that live underground.

Tarn Adams (22:38):
It's kind of these giant creatures with random descriptions. We, we were sort of inspired by that experience, but then when we started seeing people draw them online, and if you go with like, to do a Google image search for, for fortress forgotten beasts, you'll see hundreds of examples of people that have drawn their creatures. And it just reminded us of these notebooks that we had, and it was amazing to see that. And we also, when we were planning games, wrote stories, and you can see a few of those in the three toe story section, we have online as well. And then people started telling stories and illustrating them and support them. And it's just been, been fantastic.

Speaker 4 (23:19):
Is there something which inspires you specifically, do you draw inspiration from books or from, from movies or from like playing other video games? Is there something which is your place of inspiration?

Tarn Adams (23:34):
Not, I mean, there's no, there's no, no one, one, well, that we draw from my thing. I mean, obviously the game is a morass of pop fantasy stuff, right? It's it's that, that, that part kind of it's, but that's, that's almost a, kind of a, just a paint gloss on the game to what's happening underneath. And that that's the sources of inspiration come from, just everything we'd encountered and then kind of read on, I mean, people, people have jokes that Wikipedia is the design document for door fortresses to go and look things up. When we want to look up, look up the effects of alcohol or the the gemstone classifications and everything else that we've, we've gotten biome classifications just went straight from the kind of scientific differentiation straight into the game. But also just horrible, horrible shows that occasionally will come on TV, my brother and I would relax and just watch those animal reality shows.

Tarn Adams (24:46):
I remember very specific example was a very, very tacky show called I was bitten, which was about people who had been bitten by animals. And that included an elephant, an elephant that bit somebody but, but there was a snake snakes are very popular for biting people. And that's when we learned about compartment syndrome and fasciotomy and so forth when you, the swelling gets so bad that you have to open the skin and tissue to let it, let it not kind of jam up with so much pressure that the blood vessels get constricted tissue dies and so forth. And we just put that in the game. I, so the wounds that it tracks have a kind of opening score, how open they are and, and that decreased swelling from steak bites and so forth. It's, it's, it's deeply silly in a way to focus on that when there are so many other issues that the game has, but it's in terms of inspiration, really anything, we're just kind of like sponges more or less anything that we see has a potential to go into the game.

GDD (25:54):
I got a follow up question, which sort of fits this, what you just described. This is also from the, from the chat, wherever did rod line of how detailed you wanted to simulate stuff fit snow.

Tarn Adams (26:09):
No, it's important, actually. It's, it's funny, it's funny how the game has turned out. And part of it is just because of the time that we've spent on it now that it has a lot of detail in it, but it's one of the things that you have to learn, especially when you're starting out as a, as a game designer to not put in so much detail as you like when you, when you, when you're going to simulate. I mean, I remember speaking to somebody who is making a racing game and had made a list of 50 variables that they wanted for the tires,

Tarn Adams (26:44):
And some of them weren't going to change the game at all. And it was just a, one of these cases where the planning had far outstripped what was going to happen and what was useful. And it's really important to not get stuck in that, that planning phase, it just start working. And of course, there's a whole flip side of that, that if you start working with that plan, you're obviously going to end up in trouble as well. So for us, I mean, we've, we've gotten comfortable with a certain amount of detail and obviously violate our own rules sometimes when it comes to adding details. But for the most part, we, we haven't been stuck and that's why the game is moved forward. So it's there there's lines everywhere about how much detail we have all kinds of corners have been cut in the fluid simulation, all kinds of corners have been cut in the body parts simulations.

Tarn Adams (27:37):
I was just talking about it's, it's, it's, it's important to, to draw the line for sort of planning and production purposes. And then there's also the, the matter of sort of what you're going for in your game, in terms of the player interaction for us, emergent narrative is the most important thing. And in order to have an emergent narrative, you need the player to see and understand some extent what's going on. Not everything it's funny. It's actually good to have a little bit under the hood that they don't understand to allow them to spin their gears a bit when they're writing their own stories. And that's another kind of our artistic sense, more or less, you have to develop about how much to expose to the player, how much underneath we kind of just, I mean, it's not really a useful heuristic, but we sort of say that you, you want to have a one layer deep underneath the surface that they can't see, but not to. It's like, don't go too far with that. And there's, there's a, there's, there's quite a few examples of, of, of that in the game of, of hidden systems that helped move things along and help kind of keep the it's sort of like grease for the gears that are spinning. So, so yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's a, there's a lot, there's a lot that goes into planning features for your,

GDD (29:15):
I mean, one, one question was which just all sort of connected. I don't know how we ever drawing the line here. But basically one, one thing which I heard off newest, like people are always excited. When you tell buck stories, do you have like a top list of your favorite box or your most interesting box, like you told through you one or the week?

Tarn Adams (29:39):
Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's

Tarn Adams (29:42):
I mean, I I've, I've, I've talked about them a lot, sadly, so it may not be, it may just be old news to people. The I mean the, the cat bike has to be the best bug that we've ever had, the Tavern cats. And that one was the the there, there was just a, if you go look up the the no clip, the no clip video, the most recent one that came out where we talked about that just look up no clip door fortress will be the top video there that, but that one was that one was music that was, the cats were going into the bars, getting alcohol on their feet and licking it, ingesting it. There was one bug there that caused their blood alcohol content to shoot up a little too high, and then they would get drunk and then pass away on the fortress, Florida was just a really, really complicated series of events.

Tarn Adams (30:44):
Now the one that we had before that, which was kind of our go to for complicated series of events, not nearly as complicated was the the hammer, which is a kind of dwarven executioner that just hits people with a hammer vampires and such that that happened convicted by the player. We had a hammer that wood that, that lost both their arms, I believe, and still went and, and chain somebody up, but didn't have a hammer to hit them with. And so bit them, because it was just calling the combat code, but then there's this piece of the combat code where severed limbs get torn away and are retained in the mouth because it was something that the giant spider would do back in the beginning of the game and that they kind of spit them out. And it's just sort of this gory thing, but the hammer took off a prisoner's arm with their final bite when they were missing their arm, they couldn't go get their hammers.

Tarn Adams (31:50):
So they just started biting. Cause it just uses the attack code. It's like use your default attack. And the default attack would have been a hammer, but they didn't have it. And so they bit the person's arm off. And then, because there were no more hammer strokes, they didn't spit it away. And so they just kept this arm in their mouth for year. And that was the bug report. The bug report was like, here's my hammer and they have an arm. And that was, that was a, that was, that was very strange. And then another one is this is, this is this just kind of, this is not a complicated videos I'm using to me for some reason is someone had a dwarf just walk over to the furniture, stockpile, pick up a bed, which is normal. You, you drag the bed and place it in someone's bedroom that our future bedroom and the dwarf, just one over to the, the furniture stockpile and picked up a bed and walked over to the farm plot and planted the bed, just plant. And then it was just sitting there like a seed on not hatching and just, just intriguing, just sitting there. And there, it's not a very interesting bug, but just the music. And now I'm sure we could come up with more of a, that that's three

GDD (33:08):
That's grand. That's great. That's great. One question was, which is awesome. I want to ask some things, so that's something different. Was that ever something which was so severe and so rich or ridiculous, or maybe political anchor or I don't know, for some reasons, and you wanted to take it out of the game, so something which you removed later.

Tarn Adams (33:30):
Yeah. I mean, there've been a few things. I mean, I have to rack my brains a little bit, but the when I certainly remember was the, the sort of demon underground we had previously was, was, I mean, it was just kind of, kind of disgusting.

GDD (33:54):
Okay, I'm looking forward to this one. Now.

Tarn Adams (33:58):
It was not good. We had, yeah, no, there were various D we had this kind of hellish place, underground and sequenced with people chained up catatonic and so forth being tortured by, by demons that, that, you know, it was just, it was just, it was not quite edge Lord territory, but it was pretty bad. And we, we cut it out. We replaced it with procedural demons with nice it's good to have procedural creatures that just come up and kill people instead of chaining them up and toward torturing them. Not that we will return to that later, but we have to be a little more tasteful about it. The, the I'm sure there's other things though. Other cuts. Yeah, we had the, Oh yeah, there was the whole economy. Of course we used to have an economy in the game.

Tarn Adams (34:47):
Isn't that nice [inaudible] economy. They had, they had points and things, and they had to pay at some point when you got Nobles in your fortress, like you have, Oh, I've got a Baron now. Then it started up the economy and dwarves would start being paid for their jobs. And they'd also have to start paying rent on the little bedrooms. And they, the problem of course, was that if you don't balance that perfectly, then a lot of your dorms end up miserable, evicted from their bedrooms. And it was, it was just a sort of miserable thing. It, it will.