"There's absolutely no reason to make a large world." Tarn said 3 years ago. Actually I'd been making large worlds with max history length for 5 years prior, and my reasons for doing so then are unchanged. It produces richer world histories with more active personalities that you can interact with, that you can influence, but will ever be out of your control. These are fundamental building blocks for stories you could not have anticipated, no matter what you're able to do to change the world.

I know nothing about game design yet I can listen to this guy talk all day.

2:03 “In 138, the Torments of Equality accept an offer of peace from the Pregnancy of Rawness” lmaoooo I love this game

In 50 years DF will be taught in schools. We are watching history in the making folks!

This guy is a genius, or an artist, or both..

A small bias of probabilities of rare events happening more often to entities in the game that the user pays attention to would go a long way towards sparking a player's inner storyteller. Dwarf Fortress does this by presenting the player with so many unique permutations of ordinary entities that each unique configuration feels rare and special; statistically, DF sessions are not surprising if you hold all the game mechanics in mind. However, most players aren't interested in memorizing the wiki, so they're in a state of constant surprise. As long as the surprises don't sour into frustration (e.g. 2022-12 Steam version doesn't let me build up/down stair constructs to extend a downstairs upward, wth), then the tongue-in-cheek "!FUN!" make for good stories. Stories are born when plans go awry; frustration is born when the story is unlikely to entertain people you love.

Envy these students getting to learn from one of the true legends of game development.

the talk was great like always but I haven't seen one where he's gotten to take questions and that part was especially great. I hope we get to see more stuff like this I could listen to him talk about how the game is built all day

why would you disable the like/dislike bar? Nobody can hate Tarn Adams

He's the Donald Knuth of video games. DF is still easier than writing a tex macro though.

This was great but I wish there had been more on history generation.

I love herring his thought presses it shows how he makes the game so complex

What an execellent talk! Beautifully in-depth, and great questions from the audience at the end to boot

Thank you for the talk and for giving Tarn a platform! This game and it's creators sure deserve as many attention and praise as possible.

Tarn and Zach are just amazing. Thank you

I had no idea this talk was happening... If I known I definitely would've gone. Dwarf Fortress is such a fascinating game

I just made a Demigod in adventure mode, covered him in brown recluse spiders, slapped a mason and demanded his pouch, and named it the bad bad balls before smashing a bird to death with it.

This reminds me of Keith Burgun's 'Clockwork Game Design'.

Really cool talk.

Listening for Toady for hours....relaxing

I love this guy 🥺

This stuff is just so interesting. The cool thing is a lot of the concepts he discusses are so simple and obvious at their core that it's not as hard as you'd think to follow along.

His slides look like he made them in MS Paint, and I love it

Interesting dutch angle lol

Tarn Adams is awesome

An adventurer isn't exactly ground up in gears, because in Adventurer Mode the player has more agency than other units around them. Non-player units may be capable of the same behaviors as the player, yet they won't actually engage in them. NPC's who agree to join the player lose more agency because there are more behaviors they won't engage in, and more behaviors they're compelled to. Certainly a lot of narrative emerges from a party composition, but it's still constricted more than necessary for gameplay.

Why the dislikes it's weird? This was amazing!

01:19:00 ⚠️ Headphone warning. ⚠️

It’s on Steam now!

words from a genius of game design ; a living legend

who added the soundtrack at 1:09:00 and was it diegetic to the room

Tarn is the king of geeks and the underworld :D

He's an amazing speaker

did anyone find out what that game, or tech was called? 1:01:13

1:10:25 when the strange mood hit

14:50 avoid unnecessary detail

59:06

great talk. its a shame many of these developer conventions have audio issues.

27:00

fucking cats clean themselves in this game, and get their paws dirty? Eye lids are actually used for cleaning eyes???

Brilliant dude but his mind is all over the place. I can't follow his talks at all.

I have mad respect for Tarn, but he really needs to reel in his 'uh's and 'ums' because it's in the dozens per minute my golly - though the one just after 4:03 was pretty funny

33:48 And that, right there, is why I hate STEAM. It's also to be released on itch.io (DRM-free), and yet, likely due to the same terms that prevent devs from posting links to STEAM _and_ GOG on their official websites, Mr. Adams here only ever calls it the "STEAM release".