Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Well, in a literal sense. PCG posted this yesterday, which is a lovely adventure in Dwarf Fortress, illustrated in a highly accessible style by graphic designer Tim Denee. Lovely on just about every level, including being lovely.

Time to sit down and start singing about it going gold. Or, at least, the next version, which is as close as we get in the world of the ever-epic short-chap-simulation Dwarf Fortress. A list of mirrors can be found here and the full list of changes here. In short, lots of simulation improvement – including, intriguingly, souls which store an individuals mental attributes and skills. Also, fatness for tubby dwarves and – ooh – a massive expansion to the underground. Be a dwarf! Dig! Dig! Anyway, as I said, get from here, see tutorials from the last version here (i.e. obsolete, but enough to get the jist) and generally get stuck in. But Remember: initial releases tend to be a bit twitchy. It’s also interesting to read their April report, saying what they’re up to, including the amount of donations they get for hard-stats indie-number-crunchers.

Just picked up at Qt3, here’s the ongoing thread by QuantumSawdust over at the Dwarf Fortress forums where he keeps you up to date about his (semi-retired) fortress, Flarechannel, as shown above Click through for the full image. Well over a year’s work. Many more astounding pics in the thread plus the save file, and I recommend you read The Fable of Catten and Eagle in the first post. I keep on wanting to go back to Dwarf Fortress, and things like this simultaneously make me never want to play it and never play anything but it .

The release of a player-made plugin for ULTIMATE INDIE GAME Dwarf Fortress stirred brief debate amongst the hemispheres of the RPS Hivemind. “Worth remembering: it’s a visualiser”, attack-thoughted node-designation GILLEN. “It does at least run as the game is playing”, hypno-suggested node-designation MEER. “WE/I LOVE DWARVES. WRITE ABOUT DWARVES WRITE ABOUT DWARVES WRITE ABOUT DWARVES”, then throbbed the Mind in spiky unison. For yes, while it is enormously pleasing, Stonesense is not a graphical engine that replaces DF’s (in)famous ASCII appearance. What it is an add-on, displaying an isometric, cartoony image of the state of your stone-centric world alongside said ASCIIosity in something like real-time.
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RPS chum Robin “Roburky” Burkinshaw is fast becoming something of a celebrity PC gaming diarist, with his recent Sims 3 diary blog attracting enormous attention from across the gaming sphere, and even from mainstream media. We, however, asked him to write something that definitely won’t get into Entertainment Weekly: the journal of a Dwarf Fortress campaign. What he came back with gives you some idea of just how insanely detailed the Dwarf Fortress world really is, and how much an incomplete simulation is likely to land hapless dwarves in trouble. Tales of fish dissectors, rivers of vomit, and doomed architectural improvisation follow.

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Now, we’ve done a big ol’ Dwarf Fortress Tutorial link before. Which was all very well, but they were video tutorials which are trickier to actually reference in play. Which is lucky that I picked up TinyPirate’s series of DF tutorials for total newbs from Qt3 which he’s finally completed. Full index to all thirteen (count ‘em!) DF tutorials beneath the cut.
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Perhaps the most requested feature we half-promised to do on RPS is a beginners walkthrough for Dwarf Fortress. And, clearly, I’m never going to do it because I’m too lazy. Some gentlemen, as I discovered on Qt3 this morning, are not lazy. They are industrious, like dwarfs. For example CptnDuck, who’s done fourteen ten-minute tutorials explaining pretty much everything you need to know about Dwarf Fortress. So, if you’ve been scared before, download the game and get watching. And to help, I’ve embedded all fourteen (count ‘em!) beneath the cut…
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Gamasutra have just ran a long and illuminating interview with Tarn “Toady” Adams of Dwarf Fortress fame. Across ten pages, we deal with everything from the origins of the god Armok’s name (It comes from a variable, Arm_ok, in an earlier game which kept track of your limbs), why they’re doing this epic fantasy game anyway (A love of priests named Aaaa, obv) and its nonlinear playpen as a storytelling device. And that’s just from the first four pages. I’d paraphrase the rest, but RPS-towers internet is having one of its momentary spaz outs when I can’t. Still – good to hear that Tarn now survives solely from donations into his tip-jar, allowing him to do it full time. For the love of dark gods named after amusing variables, go read the bloody thing.

(You haven’t got around to that Dwarf Fortress For Idiots Post yet, have you – RPS Subconscious)

Shut up, you.

I should probably point out that this particular post is entirely referral-based thanks to this post on TIGSource. Hell, I’m not going to say anything much new, so you might as well go and read it over there. So anyway: the game pixel-art types over at SpriteAttack have come up with this awesome isometric imagining of what Dwarf Fortress could possibly look like with a bit a graphical elbow grease:

Additionally, that astonishingly handsome and intelligent indie games website tigsource.com have also pointed out that RPS-favoured fantasy-management ASCII project Dwarf Fortress has had an unofficial graphics update thanks to the work of Mike Mayday over at RPGCodex, who has compiled various tilesets. Good work, Mike.

As linked in the comments of another thread by Andrew Doull you’ll soon be able to create graphical visualisations of your Dwarf Fortress maps. Impressive stuff.

Dwarf Fortress is one RPS’ favourite indie games, although it somehow didn’t make it onto our end of year Advent calendar of fame.

Dwarf Fortress v0.27.169.32a out. Proof, if proof be needed, there’s room for more than one game with the word “Fortress” in its title in RPS’ heart. And there should be in yours too. Go gets!