| Title | In 20 years Dwarf Fortress will be good enough for Tom to play |
| Author | Nick Diamon |
| Posted in | Games |
| When | July 2, 2013 |
Dwarf Fortress is that super-complex game with ASCII character graphics that's been bouncing around the internet for over ten years. You've probably heard of it. You may have even given it a go. It's funded entirely with donations and can be played for free..
Read the full articleI started back into DF about a week ago, for the first time in almost three years. My first fortress fell after I got cocky with a zombie apocalypse (probably prompted by me introducing a human necromancer to my shiny new drowning room.) Second fortress, started yesterday, was going great until someone sabotaged the lumber industry when they hid the only axe...
EDIT: oh, I've been playing a lot of Gnomoria, and Towns before that, and I mean a LOT, but neither is CLOSE to being the experience DF is. Gnomoria made a bunch of bad design decisions, basically slowing the pace way down and over-complicating production probably to eke out the limited gameplay. It's still fun in a DF-lite kind of way.
The graphics in this comment that I'm writing are as good as the graphics in Dwarf Fortress!
BULLSHIT! I don't see any colors other than white.
Yeah, I've played both but they don't do it for me like DF does.
I'm sorry, but I don't really understand what's going on in your comment. Please post your next ones in some sort of grid, at least.
So when is Quarter to Three going to change its name to the Tom and Jason Comedy Hour? Except Tom's use of big words makes him sound like the straight man and Jason's low tones also make him the straight man. We need a punch-line man-man. Thing. I've lost my point (good thing that's never stopped me).
Shouldn't it be called Little Person Fortress?
I like to think of Toady, pecking away at his keyboard, as performance art. He is a recursion of the dwarves he creates.
I always thought that if I had a big game company I'd "buy" both brothers and Dwarf Fortress, pay them just to continue doing their job without worrying about donations.
Why? Just for the image of the company. Instead of wasting money on ads and marketing this would greatly affect the way the company is perceived by customers.
Then I'd hire a team of five programmers and make them work solely on taking the superficial layers of the game and abstracting them, so that they could finally develop an interface that is usable and powerful.
And finally, you sell these, for something like $10, some six-months commercial releases, with DF+advanced interface & graphic, while the basic game continues to be free for everyone.
It was a zinger of a headline though.
Don't let the ASCII scare you. They have tilesets, cute little pictures replacing the characters so you can easily tell what everything is.
Just download the Lazy Newb Pack http://www.bay12forums.com/smf... it has everything you need (and lots of non-newbs use it).
You need some cage traps, and chain some animals on that bridge to detect thieves and goblin dwarfnappers.