from = (c) Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson
A 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. 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. 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. The idea for Minecraft began to take shape in his encounter with Dwarf Fortress.
In Dwarf Fortress the player is tasked with helping a group of dwarf warriors build a fortress in bedrock. 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. 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. But Dwarf Fortress is different from most other games of the genre in a couple of ways.
First of all, the graphics are highly stylized. The Dwarf Fortress game world is completely made up of letters, numbers, and other symbols that can be typed on a regular keyboard. In this game, a terrifying giant spider is not a detailed 3-D model but a simple gray letter S. 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. Small, smiling faces of different colors represent the dwarves. 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. 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.
But the simple graphics are not there just to scare off all but the most devoted players. They also give the game’s developer time to focus on other things. Great game play and interesting mechanics are always more important that good-looking graphics, maintains Dwarf Fortress‘s creator, Tarn Adams. 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. 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. 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:
“We’d written them as carnivorous and roughly the same size as dwarves, so that just happened, and it was great.”
Judging by the popularity of the game—Dwarf Fortress has been downloaded more than a million times—many agree.
Secondly, Dwarf Fortress is a game that is almost completely open ended. Or rather, the game ends when the player dies, which happens often in the cruel, underground world of dwarves. Other than that, the player decides what to build and how. The game puts a bunch of happy dwarves, tools, and opportunities on the table and waves good-bye with one simple request: have fun. The rest is up to the player.
Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus “Notch” Persson and the Game that Changed Everything
For most people, the colorful numbers and letters that filled the computer screen would be completely baffling, but Markus felt right at home. The game was called Dwarf Fortress and it had become a cult favorite in indie circles. Markus had downloaded it to try it out himself and watched, entranced by the simple text world drawn up in front of him.A 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. 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. 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. The idea for Minecraft began to take shape in his encounter with Dwarf Fortress.
In Dwarf Fortress the player is tasked with helping a group of dwarf warriors build a fortress in bedrock. 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. 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. But Dwarf Fortress is different from most other games of the genre in a couple of ways.
First of all, the graphics are highly stylized. The Dwarf Fortress game world is completely made up of letters, numbers, and other symbols that can be typed on a regular keyboard. In this game, a terrifying giant spider is not a detailed 3-D model but a simple gray letter S. 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. Small, smiling faces of different colors represent the dwarves. 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. 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.
But the simple graphics are not there just to scare off all but the most devoted players. They also give the game’s developer time to focus on other things. Great game play and interesting mechanics are always more important that good-looking graphics, maintains Dwarf Fortress‘s creator, Tarn Adams. 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. 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. 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:
“We’d written them as carnivorous and roughly the same size as dwarves, so that just happened, and it was great.”
Judging by the popularity of the game—Dwarf Fortress has been downloaded more than a million times—many agree.
Secondly, Dwarf Fortress is a game that is almost completely open ended. Or rather, the game ends when the player dies, which happens often in the cruel, underground world of dwarves. Other than that, the player decides what to build and how. The game puts a bunch of happy dwarves, tools, and opportunities on the table and waves good-bye with one simple request: have fun. The rest is up to the player.
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