The objective of the medium of painting is to express emotion or narrative through still visual images. Everything, everything interacts with everything else! Interaction is what separates a game from a movie, a novel, a painting, and Dwarf Fortress does it the best. It takes the central locus of what makes a videogame a videogame and runs with it: interaction. What Toady has made has more in common with a little world in a bottle for the player to poke around inside in than a game, but at the same time, it's arguably one of the conceptually purest games ever made.ĭwarf Fortress is an experiment, it pushes the medium of the videogame to its furthest extent. It breathes, sleeps, fights, weeps and vomits all with minimal player and programmer input. All of which is unscripted, because the world simply breathes on its own. The systems within Dwarf Fortress form a deeply, deeply interconnected mesh of interaction and they throw up these beautiful narrative-tapestries. They're not flavour text! Other games can have these kinds of systems but they're usually tacked on or compartmentalised from each other in neat little boxes for the sake of avoiding feature creep or performance headaches. All these things actually mean something.
#DWARF FORTRESS LOST MASTERPIECE CODE#
Whales will beach themselves, each and every sentient creature has thoughts, feelings, aspirations, family and heritage, every single material in the game has an extensive list of physical properties, there are lines of code that dictate how plums fall from trees! And more than I can possibly list! And all these systems interact with each other in a way that create an emergent system of gameplay that allows the player to create their own unique stories of how each of these agents interacted with each other in such a natural way unknown to videogames at large.
The scope of what has already been achieved consistently boggles my mind. It's essentially the work of one man to create a coherent, consistent, extremely detailed universe. I was halfway through explaining to myself why Dwarf Fortress is so incredible and I think I've finally figured out the core of why this whole project is so incredible and unique.ĭwarf Fortress is an experiment at its very heart. Every time I think about Dwarf Fortress I'm always in awe of the scope presented in the game, but I couldn't quite articulate why it strikes me as such an incredible game at the conceptual level.
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