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I feel like every time someone sets out to create a F/OSS successor to DF, they end up mired in creating dungeon and world generators and never produce a functional game.

Really, that's what DF is anyhow; they even call it a "story generator" IIRC. Tarn just managed to put enough of a playable game together before getting lost in the details of world generation, and people have stayed engaged enough with it to keep him involved in the project.

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Yeah, and with FOSS this is all the more important. No one is going to play your game, if it's not fun. Few people are going to play your game, while it's not yet in some tangible way better than DF.

And if people don't play your game, they're not going to contribute to it.

This is a common trap in game dev. You have to get that steel thread pulled through before you spiral off into building systems in depth.

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