Judging by the popularity of the game- Dwarf Fortress has been downloaded more than a million times-many agree. “We’d written them as carnivorous and roughly the same size as dwarves, so that just happened, and it was great.” In an interview with the New York Times, Adams tells of his surprise when he discovered that the carp he programmed into the game also turned out to be dangerous monsters with an appetite for dwarf warriors: For the person who takes the time to understand the game’s mysteries, it becomes a world that’s almost got a life of its own. It’s also the reason he has spent several years adjusting and tweaking the balance in Dwarf Fortress and the nearly infinite number of situations that can arise from the combinations of thousands of different objects, creatures, and occurrences. Great game play and interesting mechanics are always more important that good-looking graphics, maintains Dwarf Fortress‘s creator, Tarn Adams. They also give the game’s developer time to focus on other things. Just interpreting the information that’s presented on the screen demands a lot of study, and it’s not a wild guess that most people who download Dwarf Fortress give up after only a couple of minutes.īut the simple graphics are not there just to scare off all but the most devoted players. Many Dwarf Fortress players maintain that the simple graphics make the game more immersive-for what giant spider could possibly be scarier than the one you imagine?-but for beginners it is, to say the least, a deterrent. Small, smiling faces of different colors represent the dwarves. Minerals to be mined from the rock are represented by the British pound sign, beds are pale-yellow crosses, grassy meadows and trees are green dots and triangles, and so on. In this game, a terrifying giant spider is not a detailed 3-D model but a simple gray letter S. The Dwarf Fortress game world is completely made up of letters, numbers, and other symbols that can be typed on a regular keyboard. But Dwarf Fortress is different from most other games of the genre in a couple of ways.įirst of all, the graphics are highly stylized. The basic game mechanics are similar to many other strategy games- The Sims, for example, where the player manages a household, or the Facebook game FarmVille, where the objective is to get a farm to flourish. The player controls a group of dwarves that can each be put to various tasks (chopping down trees, mining ore from the mountain, cooking, making furniture, fishing, for example) or made to protect the fortress from monsters such as evil vampires, giant spiders, trolls, and wolves. In Dwarf Fortress the player is tasked with helping a group of dwarf warriors build a fortress in bedrock. The idea for Minecraft began to take shape in his encounter with Dwarf Fortress. He combed the Internet in search of inspiration for his project the heavy labor-the coding-could begin only after he figured out what kind of game he wanted to create. Like when he was a child and would run home from school to his LEGOs, he now spent almost all his free time in front of his home computer. Markus had downloaded it to try it out himself and watched, entranced by the simple text world drawn up in front of him.Ī couple of weeks had passed since Markus started working at Jalbum and his thoughts were circling full speed around the game he’d promised himself he’d work on. The game was called Dwarf Fortress and it had become a cult favorite in indie circles. For most people, the colorful numbers and letters that filled the computer screen would be completely baffling, but Markus felt right at home.
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