As far as I know it is one guy, he had a little help last summer but then the help “went back to school”. contracts the art and sound.
I found the Greenlight entry for this title: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=183032873&searchtext=rimworld
It looks good. I lived and breathed Dwarf Fortress for a month a while back, so I get the appeal of this sort of thing.
Edit: Answered my own question about Steam keys. The FAQ says:
Will I get a Steam key?
– It depends when you bought the game. If you bought the game on or before November 4, 2014 you will get a key when the game is released on Steam. If you bought the game after that, I can’t promise anything.
When is RimWorld coming out on Steam?
– When it’s ready. There’s no anticipated release date. It is greenlit, though, so it will be on Steam – some day.
Yeah, this was an interesting case with Steam Keys. Evidently it was something to the effect that Valve did not want free keys (free to the dev) to be distributed in perpetuity if it was going to take over a year for it to land on Steam. So Steam does want to limit their allowance of ‘free’ keys to a point.
A guy at work has been playing this err’y day at lunch since it’s initial release. I’ve taken that as a sign of it’s quality, though I’ve yet to dip my toes in.
It does look interesting, but I really want to stay away from it until its done. Is there any kind of real guess at a release date?
I’m playing it and I’m finding it an equally thrilling and frustrating experience.
It’s got the “builder AI” from games like Prison Architect that enjoy walking away from projects one block away from completion. “OOOH! A Penny!”
If you queue up 6 small buildings intended to be living quarters, don’t expect to actually live in one of them until all 6 are complete. It will build each house to 97% completion and then go have an 18 hour nap on the ground. It’s simple to understand why this is happening; The AI doesn’t know what it’s doing / building. There’s no logic in there to tell it to finish something before it starts working on something else.
This can be HIGHLY frustrating, especially when you’re under pressure from disasters and attacks and you find your own villagers to be actively working against you. There is no sense of awareness from them, they work as mindless drones that have no idea about anything. EXAMPLE: If I don’t draft all my villagers for combat, they’ll often wander mindlessly through the combat zone in a heroic effort to move a rock slightly to the left or something; They’ll get shot down of course, because the AI simply doesn’t “know” that combat is happening.
Instead of building what I want I have to constantly mind the AI limitations and build only a little at a time if I ever want to see any of it finished. It also has the age old bug that it can wall itself away from tiles by building around them, so again I have to mind that and gently nudge the AI to not screw everything up. None of these issues feel like fun additions to anything, they feel like the AI limitations that they are.
There’s no “Finish this project no matter what” -button for emergencies either, you have to fiddle with a cumbersome set of priority options, even if you just need someone to move that last block of metal two inches to the right. In combat the AI is no better, if your guy has a ranged weapon and he is getting bumrushed by someone wielding a knife, he’ll just stand there getting stabbed until dead. There’s no built in logic to any of this.
Since there’s no story to game, the AI director is little more than someone throwing random events at you from time to time. It has little regard for the balance of what it does, sometimes 3 game ending disasters right on top of each other and then months of nothing happening. I just had some sniper alien come out of a piece of humming space debris to witness how my entire base was burning down(caused by an electrical explosion) AND pirates were abducting my fucking guys! No one told this director to “Dial it back a little”.
Which brings me to the good stuff. There’s a lot of it.
Good to hear! Tell us more about the good stuff. :)
I got your good stuff RIGHT HERE!
The game is entertaining as hell and that’s pretty much the bottom of it. It’s the main purpose of actually playing it in the first place and it does it so well it should be illegal. There are a million random factors connected to each of your play sessions such as your characters, your land features, your enemies, your neutral creatures and of course the random events happening as the game progresses. These things will make your sessions seem very different and fresh, enough that it will take a long time to become stale.
You start the game with only 3 characters and your session will pretty much be defined by your 3 early picks. Characters aren’t just “builders” and “miners”, they’re much more complex and they come with a laundry list of stuff they excel at as well as stuff they flat out refuse to do. Starting out knowing nothing about the game, it got pretty hairy having to solo it in battle when two of my villagers were pacifists. Others have issues such as fear of anything “scary” so they won’t help you extinguish a fire for instance. Others again enjoy eating human flesh while some will break down and die if you make them do it. Some are great in battle but pretty much useless everywhere else and some are intellectuals that refuse to do manual labor but they’re invaluable as technology researchers.
I’m having tons of fun just stat hunting through my base visitors to find the next perfect target to imprison and turn to my cause. Yes, you can abduct friendly visitors and serve them raw meat and filthy potatoes until they puke everywhere just for the hell of it.
Example story from one of my sessions:
I came under attack by bandits, these were not the good guys I had pissed off earlier, these were just regular bandits up to no good. I killed two of them and injured another and the rest ran away. I brought the wounded guy, Tito I think, back to a cell and after checking out his stats I decide to save his life if I can. Days later, even though I’m spending quality food and medical supplies on him, he seems to be getting worse. Both his torso and right leg have a serious infection and I expect him to die soon. Then I remember that you can actually amputate limbs in this game. I can’t logically amputate his torso but I can cut off his infected right leg. So my assigned half ass doctor does a terrible job of it, he really is more of a hauler than anything else, blood is everywhere but Tito seems to be slowly recovering and his infections are gone.
Then I find out that characters get “immobilized” when you remove one of their legs which means they’ll just lay in bed all day. That’s no way to be awesome so I naturally go for the “peg leg” option. My shitty doctor returns after fetching some lumber from the stockpile, spits in his hands and goes to work again on poor Tito. Amazingly he survives it all and after some time all his health is back and he can now move around in his cell. By sheer coincidence I notice that his profession is actually “Pirate” I’m not kidding.
Tito though, is a highly set in his ways kind of pirate and I spend endless days trying to convince him to join my base. Even after saving his life and giving him a new awesome leg he refuses to listen to reason. I can’t bring myself to execute this guy but before I decide on setting him free, he and 2 other prisoners all perish in the great alien and electricity related fire of 5503.
This is the same fire that killed my visionary miner, a 33 year old woman who was one of my original 3 but who had recently been hospitalized with malaria. She fled her hospital bed as everything was coming down but she was surrounded. I watched her run around while on fire until she finally toppled. On the ground this stalwart woman still took several minutes to die. (fire seems pretty OP…)
So what you can get from this is most likely that you need a little imagination to play this game. It sets up the framework beautifully and it WILL surprise you in every session but you need to get a little invested in your characters. If you can do that I bet you won’t be able to put this down.
This is not even mentioning all the little things like the sound it makes when you stab a monkey and the excellent music.
There are still tons of things I don’t know about, what’s with the aliens? Is that guy wearing a force field personal shield thingy? How the hell did he get that? Is researching mortars worth it? Will I ever get around to start building a spaceship? Why are the turtles so fast and vicious?
Game is big, even if it’s not finished and I recommend anyone waiting to stop and just get on in there. I always come down hard on AI issues, nothing else can piss me off like crappy AI but in this case I’m too entertained to let it discourage me from playing.
Nice write-up, phero. I concur with the bit about the emergent stories being the best part of RimWorld and I can personally overlook just about all of the little niggles because of the zany stuff that goes on in and around my colonies.
The new artist sculptures are a real hoot in this respect as they incorporate actual “historical” events that have transpired in your colony since its founding. Oh, and beer brewing and hangovers! Rimworld just gets better and better
I am looking forward to this, however, I really do want to wait for late beta instead of early alpha. I would get too frustrated with much of the stuff that I have seen happen in quill’s videos. I would also want a fleshed out game with lots and lots of mechanics to play with.
From the write-up, phero, it sounds like this is more going for “Dwarf Fortress in space”, rather than something like Clockwork Empires, which seems to be taking the same basic formula and distilling it down to fit their vision/atmosphere/etc. Sounds great either way.
I’d go for it now if I knew I were getting a Steam key. I’ve grown pretty reliant on Steam to let me play games on different PCs – and to help me keep track of games when I ditch this current PC and build a new one. Still, I might take the plunge anyway.
Same, if it were on early access I’d grab it. As it isn’t, I’ll wait until it’s a bit more done. But it looks great!
I love the game right now, very fun, and very bug free for an alpha. I wouldn’t judge the game off of some of the YouTube videos exactly, sometimes the streamers just don’t understand a mechanic and get it wrong. Some of the systems can be very confusing at first and it takes some trial and error. My biggest complaint currently is trading. If you want to trade, it has to be outside in a certain area. After you have your supplies set up around your camp so that everything has its spot, it can be difficult to get the supplies you want to sell outside. For instance, all food is prioritized to go straight to the freezer. If I have too much and want to sell some of it, I have to adjust all my priorities to get them to move it outside, and then micromanage it so they don’t put everything outside. It’s too much work.
As of latest alpha, trade beacons work indoors.
Good, that’s a start. Still, I would like to see it so anything in your stocks can be traded regardless of where it is. I don’t want everything in one place.
This. It just feels like a silly implementation, he should drop the need for a beacon altogether. Slaves are sold directly from your prison without the hassle and that’s much better.
Another thing I just discovered that really pisses me off is those centipede aliens with their AOE incendiary attack. The fire ignores walls, even if those walls are carved out of a mountain it still manages to incinerate stuff on the other side of them. The wall itself takes no damage but the fire magically spreads through it.
In my current map I’m pulling out my hair trying to conquer a “tomb” while preventing those annoying AOE attacks from killing and burning everything of value in there.
You can place more than one, i place one in every stockpile and one outside where i want my goods delivered.
I just bought this even though I have dozens of other unplayed or barely played games.
The very first thing I did was have one of my astronauts attack a cobra snake…the snake took out the astro and then was pissed enough, and just not satisfied with taking one life…so he went after astro number 2. I was now down to 1 astro…a bald headed nerdy scientist. He had no one to breed with so he attacked a lonely deer and he got so damaged, he went into a coma. Glad they didn’t hire me to write “The Martian” screenplay.
This looks like it has amazing potential, but is still a bit rough around the edges especially after playing Prison Architect. Heck, it might just be the very minimal UI that gives that impression (and the fact I don’t really know everything going on from the youtube videos). Really hoping to see it achieve what appears to be close to DF-like craziness.