So who has experienced Dwarf Fortress?

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

Made by one guy who quit his full time job and lives solely off donations generated by the game.

Everything in the game world is procedurally generated. The landscape, placement of towns, names of everything from volcanos, rivers, cities, megademons encased in adamantium, the deity who encased the demon, etc... Anything that happens while playing and some things that don't and saved as legends that you can uncover while playing as different characters.

There are two play modes, Dwarf Fortress, and Adventurer. The Dwarf Fortress mode is the meat of the game currently. You start off with 7 dwarves in the hopes that your outpost grows into a big city that attracts the King or Queen of your nation. The other goal is to mine the mountain and hope to find adamantium. There are a few other goals that are not yet implemented. Along the way you must contend with the local wildlife, goblin invasions, legendary beasts, and politics. When the game starts off the fort is run under a sort of ideal communism. Once enough nobles arrive due to your fort's wealth the economy starts up. Making sure your working class dwarves get enough work so they don't get evicted from their bedrooms becomes a priority. Otherwise a dwarf might get sick of sleeping outside too much, go on a rampage and throw a dwarf child off a cliff. Then the mother of the child will become enraged from the death and punch the mayor in the face breaking his brain. Now that the mayor is looney tunes, nobody can talk to him. The general population becomes enraged and a blind crossbow wielding dwarf tries to keep the peace and starts firing wildly into the crowd only injuring even more. Once most everyone's guts are spilled all over the place some of the last dwarves start engraving the sad sad history of your fort on the walls. Then you can start up adventure mode, which is like a roguelike (not very fleshed out yet), and look at the engravings. This sums up what Dwarf Fortress is.

It is unlike other ASCII games like Nethack, because there isn't a million things you need to know otherwise you die. There are many solutions to every problem in this game, and only your own ingenuity limits you.


This is looking at your fortress. The filled in dwarves are military, the others are workers. Different colors indicate different jobs. The fat brown 8s are beds, the superscript 2s are bones, and wavy lines indicated either sand or road. Water if they are blue. Water flows properly according to pressure (if you mine out the bottom of a huge lake, the tunnel you mined under the lake gets filled with water akin to a submarine decompressing).


This is the nobles screen, and more get added as your fortress grows. They demand things like fancy bedrooms, private offices, and private dining areas. They also mandate the construction of certain goods, and prohibit trading of certain goods. If you don't fulfill these demands they start throwing dwarves in jail (which is why my Guard position is vacant, so there is nobody to apprehend the offenders)


This is the stocks screen. The accuracy of the numbers depend on how much your clerk works.

The guy doesn't work on the graphics or interface much since any time spent on them is time not spent adding things to the game. The ASCII is displayed through OpenGL, though.

Even so some fans have made 3D viewers to help visualize the fortresses.

I have played plenty to this game and is great. The last change that created variated maps and allowed going up and down improved a lot the thing. It's something that should be at least tried, the only problem is that sometimes with so many ASCII characters it gets confusing.

I've been aware of this game for a long time (I monitor "roguelikes"), but never get around to actually trying it.

The game is hardly 'like' rogue though. Perhaps they both use ASCII and both set in fantasy settings but there is really nothing in common beyond that, especially considering the game play.

The main portion of the game has little in common with rogue, beyond the ASCII, although the adventure portion is pretty roguelike. Regardless, whether it's actually roguelike or not doesn't make much difference in this case. It was posted & talked about in the roguelike newsgroup. (Which I monitor loosely, for new games and such.) Whether or not the mere fact of being done in ASCII graphics is enough to qualify it as a roguelike is open for debate.
I suspect that the author had roguelikes in mind when he first started working on it, but wanted to go in a new direction, and wound up with a game whose gameplay is very un-roguelike (at least for the main game).

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.roguelike.misc/topics

Isn't it telling (concerning the state of the industry) how the only games which aren't easily classified using the few standard terms are the ones which are developed 'independently'?

I started to think when along the development of a game do they decide what genre to pigeonhole a game into, and I believe the answer is 'first thing'.