more people should play scrungly little ttrpgs and video games on itch.io so many of them are free and good. Just search by genre and let your heart be your guide
Squamous
@squamousmodsman.bsky.social
I make Patreon-powered Dwarf Fortress total conversions focused on atmosphere, immersion, and emergent narrative that tell interesting stories. I also do other things. https://www.patreon.com/c/themodsmith https://longnightdf.neocities.org/
Deep in the weeds. Theoretically there is a way to implement dynamic multi-species civilizations in Dwarf Fortress but I'm hitting a barrier at the very end. I still think it might be possible but there's very little documentation. Working on other stuff too but this is a fun side project.
Went down a rabbit hole, shared last names will be a thing next update, at least for historical figures. Matrilineal for the Long Night, because its practical. Except for engineered organisms. Then you get your creator's last name.
TRENCH DOGS is out on youtube! It's a feel good story, in a way
I think it is genuinely insane how moddable Dwarf Fortress is. I have made it into a scifi megastructure with modern gunplay and functional power armor. Imagine if you wanted to simulate the fantasy 1700s with musket lines blasting demons. Very doable. More people should try it.
One of my long-term desires is to fully realize haunted houses in dwarf fortress. I want a derelict building in a village to have an abysmal presence that a psychically sensitive character can sense and avoid but john normal walks in and ends up flensed by The Scary Getter. I can do this I know it.
Still working, just deep in the weeds of bugtesting. Want to get procgen armors out soonish. (linked image is not final for chestplates, just a sample).
My cat's iconic behavior is that if she wants to be held and I'm busy she wheezes and honks in a really concerning way. I have never seen another animal do this.
I couldn't capture it in action but something neat happened. As I was wandering, a pair of horrible horse-sized feral posthumans leapt into view. Instead of killing me, they killed something nearer to them, then fled with the corpses, like real predators. Would be a harrowing experience. Near miss.
With my changes to light in the latest update (on DFFD beta for now), you can see how any place lit by the sun is visible, but places overshadowed by hanging structures remain obscured. You can see a beam of light far away, but not the dark between it and you. Could be anything in there.
Flashlights and sensible light physics will be in the next update. If a tile is lit, you can see, it, even if you are in a dark place. Light sources will illuminate areas in front or around you. Posthuman entities have nightvision, but if you play a normal human, these will be important.
Currently working on procedurally generated descriptions for armor so every civ has a bespoke array of cool power armor. I must admit I am loving taking a break from coding to go back to prose but good lord making the whole flowchart work right with all its style conditionals makes my head hurt.
Please enjoy this commissioned art by HÆLÏCK/Ocean37. I think it reflects the surreal high technology-horror aesthetic of the Long Night quite well! If you like what you see here, consider checking out the mod, but bear in mind there is a huge difference between the steam release and the DFFD beta.
Trapped myself in an inescapable hole in Big Walk, my own personal 127 Hours, they needed a search party to find me.
a particle beam can punch through multiple enemies. NPCs will reposition to avoid targeting their allies in the beam's path. The player is under no such restriction. Ignore the particle clusters lodging in wounds and being pulled out, that's a WIP lol.
firing a beam cannon at some big amoebas. Tragically I missed the shot but you can see the cool animations plus how reloading works. Unlike vanilla, I can move and reload at the same time, though I stayed in place for this one.
Scenic picture from a walk where it suddenly rained on me (ignore the phantasmal apparition)
Good manga that only updates once every thousand years. Don't let the cool power armor fool you this is actually about insanely thorough geopolitics drama in a Strangereal-type world. I mean they do blow each other up in cool power armor fights a lot but still.
found a new obscure bug in dwarf fortress no one else would ever have to deal with award
I too am tired of tabbing back to my website to remember what all my stupid abbreviations mean. No more (soon).
A long time ago I toyed with making armor have names like this, but there is no description mechanic for armor, so you had no idea what it meant. But with DFhack, I can append the description directly to the armor item, and with the new Lua, I can procgen it per civ. We armored core/gundam now.
Added vanilla hunger mechanics to adv mode followers in the latest beta update. I really like that. Imagine being like the most horrifying flesh mech possible but you gotta make sure 5 baseline orphan children get fresh food and water and that's your adv mode campaign. That's what it's all about.
i am once again asking everyone to play A Song of Sunlight. It is really good and also free. store.steampowered.com/app/2263250/...
A Song Of Sunlight on Steam
An RPG set in a distant, lonely future. Follow Arem, a young man lured from his small island community to explore the desolate megastructure beneath it: “The Well.” With the simple goal of finding the...
store.steampowered.com