Losing is Fun: An Interview With Dwarf Fortress Developer Tarn Adams

I’d venture to say Dwarf Fortress is the most rich, complex game I’ve ever played. The game uses a modified ASCII character set for graphics, and yet it works my computer harder than Bad Company 2. The game’s main objective is simply to survive, and yet there are pages upon pages of documentation for the best methods of doing so. Dwarf Fortress was released in 2006, and has become a huge hit among PC gamers. Even if you’ve never played Dwarf Fortress before, you may have heard of the famous “Boatmurdered” game, where several players took turns playing the same fortress (I recommend you read their stories, it’s absolutely hilarious).

Dwarf Fortress has an extremely advanced system of variables; Dwarves have likes and dislikes, personalities and desires. The environment has an advanced physics engine, complete with its own fluid dynamics model.  Unlucky miners can cause cave-ins or accidentally exposes a magma flow.

The entire game was the brainchild of two brothers, Tarn and Zach Adams, and is currently being developed by Tarn. It’s obvious Tarn has worked extremely hard on developing the game, and just released a massive patch a few days ago. Wanting to find out more about Dwarf Fortress and its progress, I decided to contact Tarn for an interview, who was more than willing to talk with us.

Negative Gamer: Thanks again for doing the interview Tarn. For readers who have never heard of Dwarf Fortress, how would you describe the game?

Tarn Adams: It’s a PC game that aspires to be a fantasy world simulator. In its current state, you can control a colony of dwarves in a reasonably robust game as they go about their lives and mine down into the earth,or you can play the unfinished adventure mode that lets you control a single character through their fairly violent and short existence. It relies on a text display in the manner of rogue likes to get information across, but as with many roguelikes, there are 2D tilesets available (on the wiki).

One of Several Fan-made Tilesets

NG: A massive update, version 0.31.01, was recently released, and has a staggering amount of new features and changes. Some additions are amazing, such as weight affecting Dwarves resistance to cold. Where do you get the inspiration for some of these changes? Are the majority of them community requests?

TA: We (when I say we, that’s my brother and I — he co-designed the game) drew our inspiration for the game itself from many places, but when it comes to the recent specific changes, a lot of that came out of adding the tissue system in the first place. That was something we’d always wanted to do, to improve combat and to open up these kind of possibilities (see the earlier failed attempt at bay12games.com/armok for some really strange experiences in tissue modeling), and once you’ve got such a thing written up it just has a lot of potential interaction with the systems already in place, and you try to catch as many connections as possible. We already had inventory insulation for example and a fake insulation number for each creature, and tissue insulation was natural from there. I wouldn’t say the community is responsible for suggesting the majority of the changes, but players certainly suggested many things that made it into the game and the game is better for it.

NG: You’ve made absolutely amazing progress on the game as a one-man team. Have you ever considered a larger team to help development, or do you prefer working by yourself on DF?

TA: There are some people helping out, especially with technical stuff that it would take me a long time to learn and program on my own (and with the rest of the game on hold on top of that). I prefer working by myself overall, and I don’t anticipate opening up much of the game itself to a larger team, aside from what is going in the raw data files which anybody can mess around with.

The Biome Generator is extremely advanced

NG: Are you happy with the direction Dwarf Fortress has taken? Where do you see the game in five years?

TA: Yeah, where my previous projects have failed or otherwise lost steam, Dwarf Fortress is still chugging along, and that is cool. It has only been out on the internet for three and a half years, and in development on and off for eight, so five years is pretty major…well, it should be crazy by then. I hope it won’t be any less playable, he he he.

NG: A larger portion of our readers are console players, and I’m sure they would love to know if you ever plan on a trimmed down console version of the game?

TA: It’s hard to commit to something like that, since I’m mostly interested in adding to the game. I also don’t know how unfinished/version-heavy games work on consoles these days. We haven’t connected our XBox to the internet… I guess there are all sorts of things there. If consoles these days can handle the game and somebody were to port it and it were easy to distribute, I’d consider it, but a trimmed-down game probably isn’t going to happen.

Dwarves hard at work

NG: It seems like so many games are abandoning key immersion and gameplay features in favor of a flashy, Hollywood style of presentation. Dwarf Fortress is exactly the opposite, forgoing the showy graphics in favor of immersion and detail that is almost unheard of in a game. Do you feel like developers are assuming the lowest common denominator in development, choosing explosive snowmobile races instead of quality gameplay?

TA: There are a lot of developers out there. Among the major games you see TV commercials for and so on, well, I guess you could say that they are aiming for a large audience by necessity, but even then, I had fun with, say, Red Faction: Guerilla, and I think it had TV commercials. Maybe it was lowest common denominator fun, but I didn’t mind, and they had a better “cave-in” model than DF ever will. At the same time, when it comes to other kinds of details, then, yeah, DF is pretty far out there, and I don’t expect to see a lot of what I’m doing in a large commercial project any time soon, and I think DF fulfills a need for some players that the giant developers aren’t interested in fulfilling. My brother and I continue writing games in part because the games we most want to play aren’t being created by anybody, large or small, so in that way I’d say developers are ignoring quality gameplay, but that’s down to personal taste, he he he. It could be that way for everybody. All of our dream games are slightly different. That’s part of what allows independents to co-exist with the major studios and still survive.

NG: Are there plans for a multiplayer version of Dwarf Fortress in the future? If so, what type of gameplay would it entail?

TA: I don’t really have much multiplayer blood in me. I can’t say it would never happen, but I don’t think it’s likely, at least beyond what’s already happening — there are DF succession games and so on. People have brought up ideas like being able to send an army off-screen and having it saved to the disk to send to your friend or something, and ideas along those lines could happen at some point, maybe, but it isn’t a focus. Maybe something with the new arena mode? I don’t know.

Third-party programs can render your fortress in a 3-D top-down view

NG: Dwarf Fortress is a perfect example of an indie developer seeing huge success on the PC. Do you feel that the PC is still a great platform for indie developers to meet with success, or are mobile platforms like the iPhone, Android, and now the iPad the new platform of choice for devs?

TA: I don’t know the first thing about how successful games on mobiles are, by any measure. I know independents have done very well on the consoles, especially since there are specific distribution methods there for them, but there are people that have found success on the PC as well, and it’s certainly easier to get started now that everybody is on the internet. If somebody is writing games to write games, they should go with the platform that lets them best realize their vision. The PC is a natural fit for Dwarf Fortress, but for another game it might be a console or a hand held or something mobile or whatever.

NG: Dwarf Fortress is a rare gem in that it supports Windows, Mac, and Linux. Do you find that developing for Mac and Linux, both of which hold much smaller market shares than Windows, worth the effort? Do you feel like there is untapped potential in the Mac and Linux market for devs?

TA: Fortunately, a few people have helped me with that, so my view might be skewed here, but I think it’s definitely worth it. There’s untapped potential, though emulation has gotten to the point that Mac and Linux people aren’t generally shut out even if a game is Windows-only, so it’s not like a dam waiting to burst. Mac and Linux people appreciate native support though.

NG: And lastly, what advice would you give potential indie developers from your own experiences?

TA: For people that really want to make computer games, well, hopefully they have already begun writing them, and if not, they should get started! If you have no experience finishing a project, start small, perhaps with one of the many game-making utilities that’s available these days if you have no programming experience. Once you’ve finished some small projects, you’ll develop a feel for some of the skills that are needed, and what it’s like to make a game in general. Get on the web sooner rather than later and show people some of what you are doing. There will be people that share your tastes and they will help you, and they’ll get the word around once you’ve got something playable.

Most importantly, work a lot. Plan games. Code all the time or draw all the time if that’s the part you want to focus on. You have to make concessions to your real-life situation, but the time you put in will show.

This is what has worked for me so far. Any independent developer will probably have something different or contradictory to say, because there are many ways that a project can come to fruition. In that regard, you’ll have to make choices all the time that don’t even relate to the content of the game (open source or not? sales or donations or something else? platform? team or solo?), and those choices rarely ever have simple answers that work for every project or even for the same project over its lifetime. So keep a flexible attitude and discuss these choices with people when they come up, but trust your judgment in the end as to what will keep your project afloat.

There you have it readers, an interview with one of the most influential independent PC developers to date. If you want to download Dwarf Fortress or find out more about the game, go to http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/