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Although people saying you'll build less in RimWorld than Dwarf Fortress are correct, I'm assuming people won't just play one game of RimWorld. The purpose of having the Blueprints be separate files is so that they can be used in multiple games. Again, building 5x6 bedrooms in your 99th playthrough might not be as exciting as your first.

I think allowing players to build multiple structures at once is important for increasing the ratio of meaningful clicks to total clicks, which seems like a worthwhile design goal. However, this Blueprints idea is only one way to implement that. Does anyone else have any ideas for how to allow players to build multiple things at once?

An Autopause-Function atm the Event occurs would be a great solution, as well as options for event-types like Checkboxes for Auto-Pause on...

I want to second this idea because my experience with Dwarf Fortress and Paradox games speak to how important this can be. Ideally we'd be able to implement the Paradox system, which lets players choose which messages to pause on.

Similarly, it might be a good idea for the game to start in a paused state as well.

After kickstarters cut and the small percentage of failed pledges every project gets, I wonder what the take home will be?
Good news is I think the give a week for failed pledges to be corrected, btw how are you doing on the paypal front?

On a related note, I believe the rule of thumb is to plan for 2% loss in failed pledges, however because the majority of RimWorld backers are in the lower tiers I think RimWorld's better off than other projects in this regard. With Kaiju Combat the most loss from failed pledges came from people taking the higher tiers ($500+).

Glad to see RimWorld being so successful! I hope that bodes well for the future.

Tynan has been doing a great job updating the game with new builds and bug fixes, but as RimWorld grows the issue tracking will become more complex. It might be helpful to have software that helps handle that sort of thing.

Two systems I know are good are Fogbugz and JIRA, but I believe there's no free version available for those. Wikipedia has a comparison page for them and many others, and there are a number of free resources listed there. Can anyone vouch for any free system?

Tynan if you catch this: do you already use an issue tracking tool of some sort? If not, would you be interested in using a good one for free?

A cheap UI help could be easily implemented in the Overview menu (where you can use checkboxes to decide who does what). Right now, you need to uncheck every box in a certain column if you want everybody to stop certain work. A great help would be if a column (for example Hauling) could be switched off by one click on the top of the column. If you would switch it on again later, it remembers which colonists actually had the checkbox checked and reinstates that.

That seems like a good user-friendly feature. Having an extra checkbox per job that checks or unchecks all colonists from that job seems like it shouldn't be too hard to implement. Having game remember which colonists were checked beforehand might be a bit more complicated, but I think a simple array could handle that. However, would we want to remember which colonists were checked, or would it be more convenient to make it always check/uncheck all? MarchingHome mentioned GC13's situation wherein he wanted every colonist unchecked, but there are other situations in which you would presumably want all of them checked.

We'd also have to consider edge cases, like what happens when someone new joins the colony. I think a good solution here is to have the job checkboxes automatically assign/unassign all colonists who aren't incapable of a job.

[Story Start]

spamtastic92's ideas for the backstory reminded me of the Backstory Introduction thread. There are similar ideas in the opening post there.

I like the idea of allowing the player to influence their backstory instead of making it the same for everyone. Here's one of my ideas from the Backstory Introduction thread:

Story Start - this would be like the King of Dragon Pass Opening, where players build a story that determines how they start. For instance, the game starts with a space liner crash, but what if was it a military ship, a cargo ship, a research ship, or something else? Where was it headed, and what did the captain do when it started to crash? By letting the player make decisions about how their story begins, we give them the chance to be invested in their story before the game even starts. I think this kind of option could add depth to both players' stories and starting gameplay.

Here's a quote from the linked page:

How much land did you claim?

• As much as we needed, no more
• More land than we needed, to grow into
• Lots more than we would probably need
• Huge tracts, far more than we needed

I hope that provides an example of how we could allow players to influence their backstory by letting them make decisions, like whether the crashed ship was a space liner, cargo ship, pirate ship, etc.

As far as "why don't they just get on a trade ship?" goes, if you can't suspend your disbelief remember we're talking about a few people stuck on a moon somewhere in space. When you see a car on the side of the road, do you stop to help? Or more appropriately, do you expect semi-trucks to stop and help? What makes you think a trade ship is going to leave their route to pick up three space-bums?

Back to the topic, a scheduler is a reasonable idea but it'll probably have to wait due to being complicated to code and complex for players to learn.

How complex are we considering making the scheduler? Although giving it a lot of functionality so that players have much greater control over colonists would certainly appeal to some players, I think a simple "Day Shift / Night Shift" toggle button would be enough to let people not have to fast forward through every night. That seems like it would be much simpler to implement.

I think the Moddability module is important because it could lead to some other module content being developed. If people make a mod that everyone likes, it gives ideas for how to develop the main branch of the game (I don't know if Tynan would ever consider integrating mod content into the main release, but it's done with rogue-likes and such). This depends on how extensive the modding capabilities are of course.

The Moddability module is rather unique in that it's meta-content - instead of directly adding any content to the game, it creates a new way for more content to be added. I think it would be easier to develop modding tools early on and update them along with the content of the game.

*Pictures - Picture frames of colonists to hang on wall, passed or alive. Linked with relationships?

this is a top down game, i don't think that would translate well.

salt1219 brought up a good point - if pictures were hung/built on a wall they could be impossible to see most of the time. However, I think RimWorld would really benefit from from generated objects like Dwarf Fortress' statues, engravings and etc. That is to say, pictures could be of animals, plants, landscapes, colonists, etc. Those add a lot of style and fluff to the game - some of the more memorable moments in Dwarf Fortress come from them.

British was right that similar ideas have been brought up before, but it seems like this is more focused on the past whereas most ideas have been for present-time record keeping.

Rather than having a history of the world, I think it would be more fitting to have a history for the people. Not only colonists, but also raiders and travelers and etc. For instance, characters could have a record of fights/kills, with appropriate values for soldiers and similar back-stories. Likewise, characters could have likes or dislikes (food, animals, etc.) that could either affect gameplay or just be fluff.

I agree with British saying Melee combat should play a bigger role, but without needing an excessive amount of melee weapons to do so. GC13 seems to have a good perspective on ranged versus melee combat as well.

However, instead of making Hand-To-Hand a "within a certain range" combat stat, maybe we could rework melee combat to be more viable? For instance, melee combat could make is easy to incapacitate someone instead of kill them, making it preferable if you're trying to capture someone. Being in melee combat could provide cover from ranged attacks for both of the combatants. Though melee combat will likely never be as viable as ranged combat, it can at least be a feasible alternative.

I have several plans to make some raiders better at handling choking/funneling strategies. The methods that some players have been using did not come up in testing before this month. Which is fine - that's why it's important to get feedback from real players!

Glad to hear you're on top of things Tynan! It does seem like a more intelligent AI would add a lot to the game.

However, one thing it might be important to expect is that players figuring out the quirks of the AI, no matter how intelligent it is. Since that may be the case, as more enemy types get developed I think they should have different AIs. Different behaviors for enemies means players won't be able to make one defense to hold them all off. Consider a robotic enemy or one capable of destroying walls/rock that always took the shortest distance from point A to point B regardless of what was in the way. That would take a very different defense than enemies with more advanced pathfinding. Other enemies could provide different challenges - consider flying enemies that moved "over" walls and rock, or enemies with personal teleporters, or etc.

As for combat controls, I agree it's too finicky and gives your colonists too little control over themselves. I want to rework it to be less specific, so players only signal their general intent and the AI does it, the way the rest of the game works. Right now I'm thinking of assigning "soldiers" to "squads" which can be activated. You designate a "flag" for each squad, and they try to hold a position near the flag. But this is just thinking right now.

I agree with Semmy about avoiding make the combat too Dwarf Fortress-esque though. The direct control over characters in combat reminds me of FTL, and I think it's a good fit for RimWorld.

[it's good to design this kind of interface last after you know what stats you're trying to express.]

So in general, yes, I definitely want a stats page, but it's something I'm leaving fallow for now just because there are more pressing concerns.

The other thing is that it's good to design this kind of interface last after you know what stats you're trying to express. If you do it first you have to change it every time the rest of the game changes, which it does often. Doing it last saves you time overall.

It sounds like Tynan is already on top of things here and planning including stats pages in some future build. That's good, because it seems like they would add a lot to the experience. However, if it's better to build stats displays after we've decided what stats are important, would it be helpful to come up with a list of meaningful stats people would like to see?

I think there are two main scopes to this: overall colony stats, and individual colonist stats. The former should help give depth to the overall story arc, while the latter would give a lot more detail to the characters - which are usually the most important part of any story.

[What ideas could add depth to the research system without over-complicating it?]

Repeatable research is an interesting idea, definitely a possibility. It would simplify some things.

Watching a RimWorld stream today research came up and the general consensus seemed to be that research goes by too fast, and after everything is researched there's no use for the research skill. It seems like these issues could be addressed by having research more paced and repeatable research respectively.

Furthermore, the idea of separate tech trees for each topic came up. I think simple tech trees could add some depth to the research system, without making it too complicated. Combined with repeatable research I think that would make for a good research system.

Here's an MSPaint mockup:



A number of good ideas have already been mentioned in this thread, but I'd be wary of making research too complicated. What ideas could add depth to the research system without over-complicating it?

Well, they just have to be popular enough to be in third place for enough people. If you took a poll asking what the top priority should be, I doubt they'd place so high.

GC13 brings up a great point here. Another game called Kaiju Combat used the three-vote system to choose which characters got in game, and judging from the forum comments it seems like a number of people's third choices got in instead of their first.