Independently developed games tend to be hidden gems with unique and interesting gameplay. Dwarf Fortress is a perfect freeware example of this, although the ASCII graphics may not give that impression at first glance. However, rest assured that since its public release in 2006, it has continued to amass a strong following and is still actively in development. In fact, the game’s designer, Tarn Adams, is able to work on Dwarf Fortress fulltime thanks to donations from the game’s loyal community. Anti chats to Adams about his unlikely game with the fanatic following.

Anti: Thanks again for the interview, Tarn. For many of our readers, this will probably be their first time hearing about Dwarf Fortress. How would you describe it to them?

Tarn Adams:  We usually call it our fantasy world simulator, but it's really incomplete, so we can call it a dwarven colony simulator. You take control of a group of dwarves and mine into the earth looking to craft treasures and face danger. It's kind of like an RTS in many ways, but it goes into detail concerning each of the individual dwarves and their environment and so on. There's also the "adventure mode" RPG in which you can take a single character around to explore the world. But that is even more incomplete than the rest of the game.

In any case, if you like city building games or games like the Sims, you'll find things to like in Dwarf Fortress as well. As long as you don't mind seeing it all die horribly (laughs).

AC: Dwarf Fortress is a notoriously hard game to get into. Is there anything you would say to the average person who might find the difficulty curve of DF a bit intimidating to encourage them to play the game?

TA: It's certainly not for everybody right now, but if they like the stories they're reading online and so on, and really want to take part in that, I'd encourage them to check out the tutorials linked from the website and to look at the wiki and ask questions.  We try to be helpful on the forums and in the IRC channel, and many people have managed to overcome the hurdles, even if it took several tries.

If the problem's strictly the graphics, as it is for some people, then I'd recommend looking into tilesets on the wiki, and asking around for how to set them up.  There are also packages like Mike Mayday's which are graphicsed up and ready for download. There's not a lot of graphics support at this point, but it has been enough for some people to get them started.


AC: Dwarf Fortress is rendered using a text-like display, or, as mentioned, tilesets. How much of an impact do you think this has on the gameplay and design of Dwarf Fortress?

TA: Just cutting down on asset production is a huge deal.  With Armok, I felt compelled to have the textures for muscles if the skin was removed and all that. Now I'd just have to change the colour of a character if I even bothered.
I'm more free (sic) to create environments of my choosing, since it is less work to display them. I don't think I'd have put in flowing liquids so readily if I had to display them using 3D graphics. Just going tile by tile, that process is pretty straightforward. On a polygonal map, it would be more difficult to get something that worked at all. In general, I just feel less constrained.

AC: The latest release has added a massive amount of gameplay elements and background features. How will Dwarf Fortress' gameplay continue to change and improve over the next year?

TA: Hopefully I won't be fixing bugs for the entire year (laughs). We knew it would be a buggy release, and it continues to be a project, especially with all the new traffic.

The idea, once it is cleaned up, is to work between three different goals, in no particular order, perhaps moving between them.

First, the adventurer RPG mode is really impoverished right now and has been neglected for years.  We'd like to focus on getting that mode up to a certain threshold of enjoyment.

This will include letting the player use many of the professional skills available in the dwarf mode (especially hunting, butchery, mining, chopping down trees, making walls, etc. to start) as well as putting some less dangerous troubles to encounter around the towns.

Right now, you pretty much get tasked to kill a dragon or something right when you start out and it's kind of ridiculous.

We're still hashing out exactly which road we want to take there, since the work in dwarf mode has opened up several potential avenues.

Second, there's the "army arc" as we've been calling it, which is a branch of development that I keep preparing for but never actually start.

In particular, we'd like to improve the sieges that happen in dwarf mode.  Right now a few well-placed traps or a single well-placed wall can end an invasion, which is sort of disappointing, and we'd like to correct that.  This will involve some preparatory work with armies moving around on the world map as well, which will hopefully make the worlds seem less static.

Finally, we've been holding an ongoing community vote for quite a while now, and it's time to address the top vote-getters.  The majority of them are very pragmatic changes to how dwarf mode works that'll make things easier for people, so fortunately there hasn't been any conflict in terms of the community pressing for something that we don't think fits the design. We'll probably just go down the list and address the top 10 or so.


AC: The April 1st release brought with it a massive amount of behind-the-scenes complexity, ranging from randomised appearance for all creatures to simulating tissue. What else has come in with the latest release, and how does it affect Dwarf Fortress in both gameplay and groundwork for future features?

TA: There were an awful lot of changes.  There are the ones that come up sort of front and centre, like the military and healthcare changes and the new expansive cavern system, and ones that will come up front and centre later on, like the new poisons (laughs). All of the civilisation positions for people with responsibilities made it out into the text files that people can edit, and the new flexibility here is going to have wide-ranging effects.  The demons already create their own custom positions during play when they subjugate civilisations.

The attribute/skill setup was rewritten, and creatures have a physical and mental division now.

It sticks a "soul" in the body, and there's support there to allow more than one soul at a time, which should lead to intriguing possibilities later on.

Down at the basic level, materials have fairly lengthy definitions now, and everything is made up of materials.  That comes up in the combat model and the temperature simulation, mass-wise, all over the place.

There are many new things...  I struggle to remember at some point (laughs).  I'm sure I've missed some.  The (buggy!) squad/military rewrites should help with the upcoming siege revision I mentioned, since enemies will be able to take advantage of the organisation.

Most of the creatures have some randomised variables now regarding their appearance, especially the humanoid ones like the dwarves, but there are also the creatures that are generated from scratch, like the demons and other things underground.  That should serve as groundwork for other random creatures as well.  We wanted to start from a place where mistakes would be more tolerable (laughs).

Eventually though, as we tune the system, we can start to introduce randomly created vermin and plants, step up to large wilderness creatures, and then on to civilised creatures, with an eye on not having the world devolve into a pile of completely awful random goo.

It should be great to have one of the principle players on the world scene be a civilisation whose nature you don't understand from past experience in other worlds (as people can come to know the elves or goblins).

But if that civilisation isn't introduced to the player carefully, it could be a real letdown, so we are starting with creepy things down below.

It's the same sort of thing you get where a fantasy writer might throw a bunch of made up words at you at once without care, and you might feel compelled just to put the book down because it's just awful.  We want to try to avoid that if at all possible.

Though there will obviously be problems there (laughs).  I'm sure there will be atrocious stuff when the time arrives.


AC: You're referring to the "Forgotten Beasts", which are the randomly generated monsters found in the caverns deep below the earth. Can you tell us a bit more about how the new underground works?

TA: Previously, there were isolated features in the mountains like cave rivers and chasms and pits and magma.  When we moved to three dimensions, that became a problem; finding a 1D string or small 2D patch in a 2D space is relatively easy, whereas finding a 1D string or small 2D patch in a 3D space is nearly impossible. So we jumped up to 2D sheets in a 3D space. That is, there are gigantic caverns layered one over the other now, throughout the world.

These have different sections with varying water amounts and passageway parameters, and these sections are treated more or less like biome areas from the surface area, with their own animal populations and so on.

There are a number of cave entrances positioned around the world to allow adventurers access if they don't want to use a dwarf fortress that accessed the caverns in a previous game.

There's a magma sea situated below all of the caverns, and more to spoil, so now the availability of interesting underground features isn't as much of a problem.  Early 3D dwarf games were pretty dreary that way, whereas the older 2D version had a defined structure with river - chasm - magma that controlled the flow of mining and the overall game somewhat.

We've reclaimed that feel somewhat now, with vastly more control over what's down there.  The underground should only get better from here on out.


AC: Development started in late 2002 with the first public release being in 2006. Last year saw no releases as you worked on the new version, and your interview has been full of enthusiasm for your work! What has kept you going for so long, and what advice do you have for budding game developers?

TA: I think it's cool to see the games come alive and that people are enjoying some of them, and Dwarf Fortress in particular, which is a project my brother and I have been working on in some form for the last 20 years. We've been working at it long enough that it's hard to imagine doing something else. Pretty much everybody I've talked to that has played games has ideas about games, and being able to make some of the ideas into a reality is very satisfying.

I'd encourage people starting out to start in on their own projects immediately if they want to design their own games, though it's important to finish some small projects first to get a feel for things.  If you get a website and distribute some stuff once you've got a basic grasp of things, and you are enthusiastic about your games you'll find people are willing to help you out if there are areas where you can't go it alone.

It's very important to work at the skills you enjoy, whether that's design or programming or doing artwork.  Whatever you want to do, get practicing now!  Just ask somebody or look around online if you don't know where to start.  Getting a project underway, interesting and playable in any reasonable amount of time is going to require a lot of effort in any case, so you should expect to work long hours, but it won't matter if you are doing what you want to do.

I can't personally suggest educational avenues or career advice for people that want to work for a larger publisher on AAA stuff, though I'm sure there's some information online for that.

In any case, there are more and more ways to make it as an independent these days (various distribution methods on the consoles, etc.), so I'd at least think about that and talk to people about it before you commit to going to work at a place where you might not have a lot of input, if you're interested in design, anyway.

AC: You as the developer and your brother as the co-designer make up the development team for Dwarf Fortress. In what ways has the small team affected development?

TA: I don't have any experience in a large team, so it's hard for me to contrast.  It's certainly easier to maintain control over the project, since the code for each of the game's mechanics is designed and written by us.  I can't imagine creating the game I wanted if there were more people working on the project, and just as a practical point I wouldn't be any good at managing more programmers.

I've had help with some of the technical programming, since it would be difficult to set aside time to learn that stuff myself at this point. But the overall experience clarified to me that the game probably wouldn't survive having its core elements opened up to more programmers, at least with me at the helm.

Working with my brother in particular has been great though. We are in sync on the broad design issues, but we have somewhat different interests overall, so we can keep each other from wandering a bit, especially when I start getting over-focused on some particular game mechanic.

We can also change course fairly easily if something comes up, without having to inform/restructure an organisation, as with the month-end project we were working on for a bit before we put it on hiatus for the big DF release.

AC: Thank you very much for your time and insights into Dwarf Fortress, Tarn. Before you go, do you have anything else to say to our readers?

TA: You're all awesome, and I hope you enjoy the game!

USEFUL LINKS:

http://bay12games.com/dwarves/ - The website
http://df.magmawiki.com/ - The wiki
http://bay12games.com/forum/ - The forums
http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.php - Version with the tileset mentioned
irc.newnet.net/#Bay12Games - Official chat channel.