![]() Dwarf Fortress is well-known for its production of funny anecdotes through play, but it's at least as well known for the silliness inherent in its development. The silliness is a salve for this also, because everything is more tolerable when it's funny. I'm much like you, though - terrible at Fortress mode, more recently focused on Adventure, and more than happy to let Tarn Adams work on whatever he wants in whatever order he wants. Graham: There are third-party applications that make it usable to varying degrees. ![]() Ideally, the interface would be the priority but in Adventure mode it’s fine anyhow - and Fortress mode has.mods? I guess? I’m so behind on the scene. And is now revered as a god for reasons unknown. How great is it to play a game and be the one person in the world who ever hears that one poem about the one-legged elephant that drank a sea of lava and then burst into flames. Never forget the importance of silliness either. Anything that adds to that and makes the world, and the exploration of the world, feel worthwhile is important. It’s the difference between finding a dungeon with rooms that are slightly different shapes, and have skeletons in different places, or finding a group of people who can - in their crude copy-paste fashion - talk about their family and their foes. So a lot of my interest is focused on Adventure mode - playing as if it were a more traditional roguelike.Īnd I think in that sense, this stuff is important to me. When it comes to the grand narratives I experience them by proxy. I’ve been playing for long enough that I can put a functional fort together and things will tick along quite nicely for a while but that’s about it. ![]() I mean, just abysmally, horrifically, catastrophically bad. I’ve been playing it for years and it’s one of the few games I still spend time reading about on a weekend when I’ve switched off my work-brain - BUT I’m absolutely terrible at Fortress mode. So I suppose the obvious question - which I'm happy to ignore because I love it, but others are less so inclined - is whether all this generation work is worth it? Does it bother you at all that Dwarf Fortress has unique forms of dwarven poems but not a functionally usable interface, for example?Īdam: This is where I let you in on my big Dwarf Fortress secret. When I actually get down to the business of playing in the traditional sense, my attention is more focused on 'oh no I need food' and 'oh dear they're all killing each other'. That said, my main interaction with that generation is through the menu interface it gives you to browse through its simulated wars, civilizations, cities, famous figures. Dwarf Fortress remains only of a handful generating history for that world, and yes, like you say, the only one that seems to be mimicking the change and spread of actual culture. Sure, its landscape generation is impressive, but there are a thousand games doing that now. Graham: Dwarf Fortress' world generation is probably my favourite thing in all of videogames. It’s doing so many things and so many of them aren’t being done anywhere else. And that’s Dwarf Fortress in a (very large obv) nutshell. I can’t think of any game that’s doing anything quite like this. I don’t think I’d be human if that didn’t make me excited and I definitely wouldn’t be me if I didn’t start thinking about where I’d seen something like this before. Then they might start their own group, with their own students, and the style propagates through the world, with individuals picking it up and altering it - it can cross from one species to another and there will be specific poets and poems who integrate their personal and cultural experiences into their work. A poet can start a movement and then students will gather, form a group, learn the new style of poetry, and go out into the world. The thing that stood out to me is a teaching system. The most recent posts - and I’ll quote from them in a minute - go into detail about the kind of things that the new systems will do. People don’t understand what I’m saying but I say it anyway.īut right now, I have specific things on my mind and this all goes back to a post of yours about the procedural poetry generation that is being programmed into the game. I spend a lot of time either wanting to talk about Dwarf Fortress or actually talking about Dwarf Fortress. 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.Īdam:I want to talk about Dwarf Fortress, which isn’t particularly novel. 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.
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