Dwarf Fortress: What Happens When It Becomes A Game? The Zach and Tarn Adams Interviews

I have no memories of not being in front of the computer my first memory is watching my brother and my father play a game called dancing demon which was this sort of ASCII which is just like the blocky characters little critter dance around I think you can given instructions tell it what to do when it's dancing I don't remember because it was so long ago next memory I have is of using loops in basic which is a programming language to make something 2 things tall two characters tall move across the screen that was kind of a big moment when you can use y and y plus one to make something move across the screen so I always been writing games my my father thought it was important that we learn how to use computers and thought that video games are a great way to get kids to learn how to use computers and it's stuck very hard harder than he anticipated I think you know and in terms of our our further use to society and we just yeah when I say we I'm talking about my brother of course I just stuck with it I yeah that's forever cuz I've been making games as long as I could read I would describe what we're doing is is creating a procedurally generated world with a geography and a thousand-year history that is all created by the computer we've been recognized like our game was in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and we also made it on the front page of our local newspaper more than that it's a video game for the first and foremost you play it it's called Dwarf Fortress you're creating a fortress with dwarves and you kind of command them to do their work indirectly and that's one part there's three parts of the game there's the the lore the dwarf fortress and then you can also be an adventurer and that's more like a standard role-playing game so it's a work of art that's also a video game I've never been really a person that looks too far ahead in the future I've always kind of lived for the president which is good and bad and I've been creating computer games since I was about five years old me and my brother kind of came up with computers like the personal computer came out when I was five years old and my brother was just a little younger and our dad taught us how to program at that time we've just been doing this so long that like when you asked what would it be like without it we I don't even know the first game that we ever wrote really was was from the a game that was called temple of loss which was just a D&D ripoff game that was on the bulletin board so back then but it came with the source code because that's just the way things work back then when basic and everything we knew had a program a little bit and basic but we didn't know how games were written and that's how we learned how to make video games is from just goofing on that video game the stuff my brother was doing he's the programmer I programmed with a little before and he helped me learn how to program later but my my stuff was just like light-years behind his something that would take me a month would take him like five minutes and so he started picking up on this programming especially with graphics Ben Lincoln in the early 90s where he started to make video games that were comparable to the stuff that you could go out into a store and buy and at that point we thought maybe we have a chance but the problem was is that the internet didn't exist back then and so the only other examples we could find of indie developers were soliciting through the mail and so we did that we actually made a game on AOL and actually asked him to send checks to our grandmother's house nothing ever came of it and it wasn't until the internet was down and tell PayPal and other credit card companies were on the internet that we were able to make any money and I was years later yeah my life didn't really go into any special place I tried a bunch of different stuff and when Bay 12 archived our game company took off that was just it's safe my life tarnan was always always knew that he wanted to program and always knew he wanted to make this grand fantasy game and there was times in my life where I'd that kind of fell away but those were bad times of my life and places I didn't want to be as a child I certainly thought of programming and basic as a another way of communicating I guess there was speaking in English writing in English math which is something they also started me on very young but then there was programming and it was obvious that certain words and perking like print are English words and it's also clear in programming that's some of its mathematical it took me a while to put together that the math happening in the program was quite the same as the math that I was doing computer games didn't seem like a real possibility especially when I was in like a junior or senior in college I so I just kept doing math and went to grad school and got the PhD did the postdoc but it was all not really a thing that I was passionate about either ever I did it when it was easy and it stayed easy for a while and then it got hard and I was into video games very heavily writing them at that time later in my career and just kind of made the transition at that point I think I had a sort of shyness in terms of programming because I didn't have a lot of experience with like assembly language stuff or being able to come up with like the magic bit that you use or into something to make it you know ten times faster or whatever that just wasn't part of my initial education and then I never really had it had a chance to dive into it afterward and so I always kind of felt like I wasn't much of a programmer still kind of feeling that [Music] so it was a philosophy major actually before I get him a history major what I learned was that the ancient philosophers I started admiring the time that they lived in more than what they were actually talking about that's not exactly true I appreciated the ancient philosophers more than the ones that came later like Descartes as soon as I got to Descartes I lost interest in philosophy and I wanted to go back to the ancients again and that's when I started learning history instead so I'm sure that that has a lot to do with with how Dwarf Fortress came about maybe more than anything the the study of history taught me how to read books and just the enjoyment of researching everything like people say that Wikipedia is our design document because we do so much research when we come up with the different facets of Dwarf Fortress so the original game was slaves Darmok god of blood and that was a 3d game so we we knew that we could do a 3d game but it would take all the resources to make it look pretty and we wouldn't be able to do anything we wanted to with the simulated world so when Dwarf Fortress came out there was no world there was just a fortress then you automatically lose and then you go in with a adventurer and find all the treasure and then your score is how much treasure you've found so it's really just a really simple arcade game that adventure mode part was just like a roguelike from the 80s it had the same graphics they had all the same keys it was just from that tradition in Dwarf Fortress it creates on by default a thousand-year history we were inspired by the Assyrian Kings and the King lists that they kept and stuff like that we wanted to read kind of like an ancient history tome in these thousand years it creates like the the first human cities and the goblin cities and they they fight each other and and there's these epic battles or it keeps track of all their other wounds and sometimes they go out and tame giant beasts and bring them back to their fortresses Dwarf Fortress has a year 1400 cutoff in terms of what sort of technologies and things we want to deal with just I mean selected not quite at random but we just looked through some lists or like okay you know this is as much as we're ever gonna do you know we're kind of flirting with the idea of gunpowder flirting with the idea of really basic cannon type things people sometimes want to see stuff blown up we're not 100% for that but we understand where they're coming from but yeah radio is electricity all that kind of stuff one of the reasons we got into this whole thing was was just the ability to surprise yourself with the game doing things that you did not anticipate I think that grew out of us just either just the two of us or having like one or two friends around that we would just show the games to it's like you always need to surprise each other because you can't just make it well we did make new games every day but you you know if you want to go back to an old one it had better do something new right so you have these all these little procedural elements to bring out this perpetual state of surprise and that's still something that's very true today about Dwarf Fortress and even more so now that there's like a community of people I mean this whole idea that someone made Space Invaders with like 85,000 mechanisms and a thousand drawbridges of different colors is like just something that I can't conceive of in the same way that I don't consider myself much of a programmer it's that that's sort of thinking about logic gates and the meticulousness of it that was amazing to see to see the the programmers get hold of our fluid physics and our animal physics and there are vampire powered computers because vampires don't die so they can just walk on pressure plates forever forever and you just put them and I think I'm not really sure I think you put them in a military squad and set them on patrol and they will mindless bomb mindlessly is not really fair because the poor things have Minds and they just don't have the same like things that they think about in terms of getting bored to death because they can't die but yeah it's just I don't know yes since the Wonderman still always there we were spoiled we got a new video game every week and we would just play them until we got bored with them which happens pretty frequently so we were like our own games we wanted to try to make something that was replayable it had to create a different world every time it had to have a high score list so that we knew how good we played and we could beat each other's scores it's kinda it must be from the age of chucky cheese and arcades and stuff like that where we play as kids they all had a high score less of course that high score list is the very beginning of four fortress legends mode where the lore is stored in stuff it's so not only does it have a score of your reputation or what kind of dragons you've beaten but it also has what actually happened it's all saved into the computer the net hack bones files is another example of something where your past game can interact with your present game and that was the first time we saw anything like that is it playing hack it's definitely an interesting alternate history scenario if graphics sort of stopped at some point and people just weren't interested in having more and more realistic graphics you know where would game design of gone and you can see you can still see pieces of this in different different communities there are a couple say the the roguelike community sort of traditional games that are very much like rogue was and games like nethack and that kind of thing for the people that aren't familiar with them they're sort of text-based graphics and so the addition of new graphics card capabilities was not relevant and they became very complicated they've got more and more and more complicated partly in that tradition so you can kind of see that people were going that way another another angle is interactive fiction a lot of people would think of say the early infocomm games things like Zoar but that community is still alive and it's still going and non-stop and has kind of more participation than ever and people are doing sort of incredibly creative interesting things and it has merged in part with our side of it with kind of simulation adding more sort of mechanical elements as one angle there of course many others that aren't simulation assal kind of living out on these small niche fringes you can see what what might have been [Music] it's just yeah I mean it's funny because I mean it the in actuality what I think is that almost all of my learning over the last 15 years outside of mathematics has been structured entirely by the needs of the game it's not that I'm in curious though it's that there's a certain amount of time for learning in the day just by you know fact of how seconds work and the things I'd rather learn are things that are going to go into the game but then once you start up on something once you start up on reading about cheese or vegetables or how peanuts grow these interesting things like the that I only recently learned that a cashew is on the bottom of a giant cashew apple and every single one has a giant apple somewhere associated to it when you have like a handful of cashews there's like somewhere else there was a giant barrel of apples that were eaten locally that was really cool my curiosity usually doesn't perk up until it's going into the game like we recently added dance forms to the game like a random dance form generator they're just sort of paragraph descriptions about how they tie into music and what are the different steps and the feeling that it's going for and all that kind of thing and I still don't know a lot about dance but everything that I've ever learned about dance pretty much came doing that and I would be fairly in curious about dance otherwise if I were just to sit down and learn things but I have such a weird life now it's kind of hard for me to tease apart my general sense of curiosity anymore it's just the horse is way out of the barn the simulation in our game is so all-encompassing that other people look at it and simultaneously don't guess how it complicated it is and also put their own ideas into it and think that it's stimulating stuff that it's not and so because of that it gets this reputation of being the biggest simulation ever which it probably is for instance the fighting where a normal game would have a number that it would slowly decrease until you die the Dwarf Fortress simulates muscles blood vessels nerves you can dislocate limbs you can knock teeth out you can do all sorts of crazy violent stuff at the combat and speaking of the history books that's from The Iliad it's like an example of where we came up with these ideas to have these overly complex combat systems I started keeping a dream journal in 2014 which I kept for more than a year and I found that maybe 20% of my dreams were actually just completely game design related dreams it kind of says to me that my subconscious is always kind of working on that stuff the same way that you kind of get used to that in mathematics especially when you're banging your head against the wall on a problem for 10 hours and then you wake up in the morning and you have the answer and in fact you have to get used to that being the main mode of operation certainly with Thor fortress the connections that you'd build up and you can see it when you're writing it like to specific elements of the game are being connected together with a new game mechanic and you can you your brain already starts like just popping all the new stuff that's gonna happen and then you get surprised because it's even more than you thought right even though it's something that I can kind of effortlessly work on in the sense of not being burnt out it kind of reminds me of mathematics in the sense that there is always a problem so hard to work on that no one solved it for 400 years or something and the the game design and simulation is the same way I I have no idea how to do time travel in Dwarf Fortress it's not doable as far as I can tell to do a really good job of it just because of data considerations and other considerations but are there like creative ways to do parts of it or to do something that feels like it and that that is something that rates is a very difficult creative challenge yeah I mean it's it's a it's a broad in deep subject so it's kind of hard to get started there there's the mechanical depth of just sort of engineering driven numbers of yields and and fracture you know what is your fracture point at these six different types of forces and so on that's only partially implemented there's the artificial intelligence aspect of it trying to have sort of personalities and intellectual values and memories and how those tie into what people think of each other and how they act down to a very granular level had to build all that up by scratch - right there's this thing about like when you're gonna model something which is what what we're doing right we're modeling these systems you know where do you even begin with something like that I mean people have kind of a normal way they go about that which would be to do something like well let's look at the the hierarchy of needs or you know we might start with something like myers-briggs and then decide that that's really inefficient go for the big five and then you're like well the big five actually have thirty facets and you're like I I've got 30 facets to play with now but can I use them in my game no not really because they're all a little too vague and wishy-washy and then for us the next step was like to jump over to st. Thomas and just start judging people very harshly with because he's got I don't know how to pronounce anything but so Summa Theologica basically reads like a D&D manual and but but people have many more attributes than six they have like fifty right and so you're like okay we can make use of some of these not all of them but some of them and we just kind of built this completely ad-hoc system for Dwarf Fortress that has all of these these different things and then that I mean that that's that's all kind of at this granular level right and then there's what happens when it becomes you know a game right those sort of stories that can come out of these things the things where people have this story making engine in their heads right that'll just kind of produce mechanics where none exists and weave things together and knowing that and then you actually do throw a lot of mechanics in there you get these it's really amazing stories that that that people come up with of course the main ones we remember are the the abuses and the bugs and there is a school of thought on our forum that we should just fix the bugs and fix the framerate problems and I we're pretty sure that that's not why why people give us money is to be a slick game especially when it has ASCII graphics from 1981 or whatever so it's like or is that really what they want and if they wanted that there are plenty of games that can do that for them and so that's just not what we're doing the way that we marketed the game is that we created a website that had a forum that we'd answer questions on that where people could talk about our games and other games and that forum became really popular and it's because of that that we were successful that forum is really hard to maintain every day we have to make sure that it's not being run over by trolls or devolving into meaningless arguments we have to make sure that people are engaged because not only marketing wise this is the reason we're successful because of the forum but also because of the people that help this there's people that donated their time and helped us rewrite Dwarf Fortress to work on Linux for example or Apple without them it wouldn't have happened so it's like having that forum is the reason we made it the way we operated on this kind of contribution based model that wasn't based on sales the forum was sort of you know many times more important than it would be to other people as a form of community building people that do retail like sales on say steam or something don't necessarily need to have a community at all you can you mean if you if you have a hit it's going to be a hit whether or not you have a community and you'll basically be running from your community in in certain cases right after that you don't want to deal with certain things whereas for us you know cultivating a community over the 17 years is the only reason we're still here like the only reason we're still here and for people that are setting up say a patreon or that are planning to finance their game in some other more amorphous way the people that you're going to be getting money from are the people they're gonna be playing your game and the people that stick around will continue to give you money and it's worth it having a relationship with them and it's led to all kinds of cool things having community these the the fact that we took contributions at all came six years after having a forum and it was from the forum that that idea we didn't have that idea it was an idea that came from the forum it's it's hard to say it's like so what would define success it's like you know is it financial is it just if it takes off financially is it successful we've made a mark on the the gaming industry that that is I don't think it's gonna be easily forgotten so I think like that way creatively I think it's already a success the financial side of it is living on top of the human side of it and is not necessary in any way except by virtue of the society that we're living in so I mean that's always been sort of secondary to us except for the very necessary fact that you need to to be financially successful in some sense in order to remain alive we don't really think in terms of metrics of success at all because that sounds like a like a binary state kind of like you are successful whatever add and and you know as we've been kind of saying this whole time they're sort of just this ongoing process of making the game in this sort of joyful fashion that you know would sort of chizel e be defined as success everyday or whatever right it's just we're doing what we want to do so I guess that's that's success in in terms of you know even the sort of cynical way that that you would look at it through a financial lens because the reason presumably people want money is so that they can do what they want and that's what we're doing I think I'd be missing a creative part of my life that would be hard to replace I also write fantasy short stories mainly for the further the sake of being diced and put into the computer game so yeah maybe I'd be writing in my spare time as I work at a gas station what's likely so I still I still have these kind of childish ambitions like that that probably will never happen but it's it's it I mean where for kurz happens so there's always hope for the future when it comes to day to day implementing things indoor fortress I don't have any motivation kind of never flags it's sort of what I what I do and it's always great to open up the computer see the see the game there and work on it that's I mean it's it's it would be like getting tired of reading books or something like that is just a really weird thing to think about getting tired of but everything else about it when it comes to like funding community management all those kind of things they feel more like work and so they're subject to all of the standard sort of advice about burnout and pacing and making sure you take some time and all of that all of that kind of thing and and you know fortunately for me since working on Dwarf Fortress feels like relaxation it's kind of built into the process [Music] we do have a kind of an idea of what the final version would be like it's something that will randomly generate these economies and and histories and magic systems and the full fabric of reality will be different in every world you generate that's one side but the other side is that you'd there'd be these editors where you can fiddle with the knobs until you get something exactly the way you want it to be or you could go into the game itself and change the way the mountains are formed or drop castles that you create an editor and so you could make Game of Thrones or the similar Leone or any other of your fantasies that you come up with yourself and create a world that's fun to play so finish finishing door fortress no I mean it's it's something that's definition has changed over time and right now we're at the point where word I work we're going to continue working on Dwarf Fortress as kind of the I mean they may cross this this 1.0 threshold at some point just because we have selected a little finite list of features that constitutes 1.0 version 1.0 comes out sometime in our late 50s now but that keeps sliding so I mean that realistically we may never get to a version 1.0 but it doesn't mean anything because people are playing the game people are having fun with the game whether it's finished or not is a is irrelevant to that but I myself like playing finished games so I understand like I understand a game that's more polished I understand a game that has a tight flow to it I understand a game that is reasonably bug-free these things I understand why people want these things and we have been improving on those scores I mean to us it's more asymptotic as we approach these states of seeming a little bit more polished or having fewer game breaking bugs especially with modding and stuff and Dwarf Fortress there's no real life to a project that's easy to define anymore people are still pulling up projects from 30 years ago and resurrecting them in different forms and modifying them messing with them I mean the original Zelda game gets new like like gender swap skins tough stuff like that even that was recently right I mean it's as if I remember the the sort of rom hacking or whatever it was that caused that to come to pass that that projects still alive in some sense so I don't know yeah we just don't worry about what finished means so much [Music]

Channel: On Doubt

Views: 211,235

Keywords: bay 12 games, dwarf fortress, zach adams dwarf fortress, tarn adams dwarf fortress, bay12games, dwarf fortress interview

Id: HtKmLciKO30

Length: 28min 48sec (1728 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 05 2018