RPS Feature Great Odes
Dwarf Fortress is a titan of PC games, famous for among other things its complexity, its decades-long development plan and its procedural world generation. In light of some coming additions – procedural, culture-specific forms of poetry and dance – Adam and Graham decided to discuss why such seemingly minor detail is exciting and important.
“The mind has been rewritten quite a bit,” starts one of the patch notes for the new Dwarf Fortress update. The first addition to the fantasy simulation game in two years, version 0.40.01 offers sweeping generation to world generation and simulation, combat and movement, fortresses, trees and, yes, the mind. Step below for a dive into the game’s wonderful patch notes, and for more barely coherent rambling about how great this game is.
Dwarf Fortress is not as hard to play as you think it is, but there’s no denying that its ASCII graphics lack modern clarity. Chances are that if you’ve played the game any time in the last two years, you did so not using a vanilla install, but by partnering the complicated fantasy simulation with third-party tools like DwarfTherapist or Stonesense.
As of earlier this week, Stonesense just became a lot more powerful. It previously let you visualise your world with isometric sprite graphics in a separate piece of software, but now that angled art can be integrated directly in the game itself. Best of all, it can be used not just as a visualiser but as an interface to control part of the game.
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.
