Dwarf Fortress already has more than two decades
of development history and if it’s up to its two creators, Tarn and Zach Adams, they’ll continue
working on their management simulation game for the rest of their lives. To get a clear
understanding of Dwarf Fortress’ origins, we have to go all the way back to the eighties,
back to the brothers’ childhood. Born in Kitsap County, Washington, Tarn aka Toady One and
Zach aka ThreeToe grew up around computers from a very young age. Their father, Dan, worked
in wastewater treatment, writing software to crunch data and run sewage plants. He supplied
the family home with the latest computers and even taught his sons the rudimentary basics of
coding, knowing programming and computers would become even more important in the future. “I was
set in front of computers by my parents when I didn't even know what was going on. I remember
some kind of ASCII demon or alien dancing, and they set up the dance moves by pressing
the keys. We also had a Vic 20 and an Atari.” When Tarn was six, his father taught him how
to use a ‘FOR loop’ in BASIC, to make something move across the screen. The brothers eventually
started playing a game called “The Temple of Loth” and they noticed it offered full access to the
source code. Seeing exactly how the game was made, it inspired them to develop their very first
game. This ultimately led to them developing about 400 projects in BASIC, ranging from Tarn’s
ASCII monster designer tool to a John Woo-inspired text-based assassin game. From a young age,
they fell in love with Dungeons & Dragons and J.R.R. Tolkien. The two also downloaded many indie
roguelike games from early bulletin boards, which were basically download servers that predated the
internet. One of those roguelikes was Hack and dates back to 1984. Hack, along with Rogue, Larn
and Ragnarok, all games the brothers also played, helped to popularize roguelikes at the time,
and in turn greatly influenced Dwarf Fortress. “We liked that you could choke to death on
your food or fall down a stairway and fall on something poisonous you were carrying
and poison yourself. That lineage was big, largely inspirational for Dwarf Fortress,
especially the bones file part where you die and then you have in your subsequent
playthrough, something about your previous character, more than a score or whatever,
incorporated in the game. You can trace that directly to Dwarf Fortress persistent
worlds. That’s where that comes from, this idea that you can kind of churn
this system and build a history into it.” Around the time Tarn and Zach were 12 and
14 respectively, they started developing their very first fantasy game together called
Dragslay. It was also written in BASIC and Tarn described it as basically a D&D game where
the player runs around and kills dragons and other creatures. Curious details and game
variables already started to emerge here, like your character having an IQ score that got
reduced if you were hit too many times in the head. It was meant to be just another project
the brothers would soon forget about. However, a couple of years later (1993), when Tarn was in
high school and taught himself how to code in C, Dragslay was revisited. Programming the game
in C this time meant he and Zach could make it bigger and add things like a world
map, a more complex combat system and keeping track of goblin populations. They
kept working on it for about five years, but it would eventually evolve and play an
essential part in the creation of Dwarf Fortress. Programming has always been Tarn’s escape. He
wasn’t the type of kid that would play sports or talk to others, instead he was very withdrawn
and only occasionally had a friend to joke around with. Even then, he didn’t care about socializing
and would spend almost all of his time behind a computer. There’s one close friend he made in
high school that Tarn still sporadically talks to today. During their childhood, the brothers had
to move around a lot because of their dad’s work, but eventually found their way back to Kitsap
County by the time Tarn and Zach were 18 and 20. This experience brought them closer together
and Tarn feels lucky to call Zach his best friend. At this point in his life, Tarn didn’t
see a monetary future in his and Zach’s video game projects. Not being interested
in Computer Science as an academic pursuit, he picked math instead and went to the University
of Washington. Since Zach was already studying Ancient History in the same university,
they decided to share a small apartment in Seattle. The summer before Tarn went to grad
school, he and his brother rebooted Dragslay. They changed the title to Slaves to Armok: God
of Blood, named after the god from Dragslay, who was originally named after a variable
called ‘Arm_ok’ that counts the number of arms you have left. For now, it remained a
2D project in a somewhat-isometric view and featured roughly the same combat system as the
first public alpha version of Dwarf Fortress, as well as persistent enemy groups, meaning
they could show up in your next playthrough. This version of the fantasy game was very
short-lived however as Tarn and Zach started having more ambitious ideas. They kept the
title, but made the switch to 3D graphics. Over the course of development the brothers added many
specific details and options to the 3D character models, like the possibility to remove the enemy's
skin with certain spells. They even went as far as to develop an option where the player could
zoom in and inspect how curly the character’s leg hairs were, or discover the melting point
of various materials. This version of Armok is the first piece of the Dwarf Fortress puzzle.
In December 2000, the brothers created a website for their indie studio Bay 12 Games and used it
to distribute Armok as freeware. Additionally, the site also lets you access the official
forum where fans can connect with each other. Even though Armok was their main focus for the
next few years, Tarn occasionally took time off to work on side projects whenever he had a
good idea. They were usually small in scale, needing only a couple of days of work to
be completed. The most popular examples are probably Liberal Crime Squad and WWI Medic. In
2002, Tarn began working on a side project called Mutant Miner and this is the second piece of the
Dwarf Fortress puzzle. It featured turn-based gameplay and was loosely inspired by Miner VGA
and Dig Dug. Players dig underneath buildings to search for minerals and fight monsters.
The goal was to discover radioactive goop, bring it back to one of the buildings at
the surface and use the goop to grow extra arms and other mutations to speed
up digging and fight off enemies. Tarn eventually tried adding extra
miners, but since it was turn-based, the game started to experience lots of lag. This
gave him the idea to switch to real-time gameplay to prevent all the slowdown and swap the one
mutant miner for a group of dwarves. Furthermore, he came up with a more interesting gameplay loop.
It still involved managing a mining operation, or a fortress if you will, but once the player
“loses”, an adventurer comes in and is able to explore the ruins of your fortress. This section
of the game played out like a more traditional roguelike where the player has to collect goblets,
journals and other trinkets that were generated during the previous phase and bring the treasure
back to the edge of the map as a way of building your high score. He called up Zach, who moved back
in with his parents after graduating, to flesh out the idea over the next three days. It was this
idea that would pay off big time 20 years later. The brothers started development in
October 2002 and estimated it would take about two months of work, just in
time to release it during the Christmas holidays. Little did they know it was
only just the start of perhaps one of the longest development journeys in video game
history. Thanks to the simple ASCII graphics, they were able to implement features at a very
fast rate, to the point it was starting to steal too much time away from their main project,
Slaves to Armok. Therefore, development was temporarily halted in November so they could
focus on Armok again and various other projects. Fast forward to 2004 when Tarn and Zach’s
enthusiasm for Armok was all but gone. The 3D graphics were slowing them down too much,
causing more and more new features constantly having to be delayed. So, the brothers made
the decision to fully switch gears to the dwarf game. Since early prototypes worked on
much of Armok's code, Zach and Tarn considered it to be a sequel to the 3D game. For kicks,
it was even officially named ‘Slaves to Armok: God of Blood II: Dwarf Fortress’. After this
change of plans was made public on the forum, along with a trailer and screenshots
of Dwarf Fortress, Bay 12’s community started to grow more exponentially. People
were intrigued by all the possibilities, especially knowing that the brothers wouldn’t
be bogged down by 3D graphics anymore. Dwarf Fortress’ landscapes are made entirely using
the character set CP437, which was also used for the original IBM PC. It’s more commonly referred
to as ASCII, a character encoding standard consisting of 128 characters, or code points
if you will. As a result, trees look like clubs or spades, blue tilde symbols display water, and
dwarves move through your world as smiley faces. While many players prefer this almost matrix
looking aesthetic, most fans use mods that replace the character set with actual graphics, allowing
for a more accessible gaming experience. Fans often used to request updates like more modern
in-game systems, in-game tutorials, 3D graphics, a less confusing keyboard shortcut system, and
better mouse support. Aside from the necessary and quick bug fixes, Tarn had stated that these
type of suggestions would not be his focus. “It felt like adding graphics would
ruin our ability to work on the game, given our failure in the earlier 3-D attempt with
Slaves to Armok: God of Blood. The DF modders have done a good job adding graphics though, and it
hasn’t impacted development negatively, but that’s a bit different from doing it in-house. Part
of it is thinking about what the point is. How many people are we trying to serve? In what way?
Is it better to be a niche thing for a thousand people? Or is it better to serve a million with
something that’s going to be shallower because you have to work on getting appearances up?”
Instead of giving in to the many fan requests, the brothers followed their gut feeling and
solely focused on adding and expanding features. Tarn and Zach made for the perfect team during
Dwarf Fortress’ development. While Tarn was programming away, Zach worked on the narrative
and descriptive details that give Dwarf Fortress its atmosphere, informed by his background in
ancient history. For example, goblins hang the skin of their conquered enemies from towers,
inspired by the writings on Assyrian kings that Zach recommended. When Tarn runs into issues,
the brothers typically hash them out together. Dwarf Fortress was making good progress and Tarn
was perhaps making even better progress in school. When he graduated he was named best math major.
Afterwards, he applied to 17 Ph.D. programs, got into 15 and eventually chose one at Stanford
University. In 2005, Tarn earned a doctorate in geometric measure theory and this landed
him a postdoctoral research position at Texas A&M University. It’s a career path that
most people can only dream of, yet Tarn would quickly discover that the future he envisioned
for himself since his undergraduate days, wasn’t what he really wanted. Juggling between
his postdoc research work and Dwarf Fortress proved much more difficult than he imagined.
Combined with the competitive nature and high pressure of academia, Tarn’s mental health began
to suffer and he eventually grew depressed. In order to do his postdoc work properly, he felt
he had to give up his game development hobby. This however was unimaginable to Tarn and right
then and there he decided it was either going to be making games for a living or doing nothing.
He never loved math, but he loved video games, that much he knew. Tarn describes it as a very
stark moment in his life. In the summer of 2006, after a year of working at Texas A&M, Tarn told
his department head he wanted to resign. After an emotional conversation, the university offered
to relieve him from his postdoc work and give him a teaching position for a single year instead.
This new position would earn him a salary of 50.000 dollars. Hearing this was a huge relief
and Tarn gladly accepted the offer. The extra money would give him a fighting chance of
making things work as an indie developer. In the meantime the brothers continued
working on their passion project as often as possible. At this point, Dwarf Fortress
had evolved far beyond its initial concept and was starting to resemble how people
know and play it today, with a few key differences. The entire map was still randomly
generated, but it was fully 2D, meaning there was no way to dig underground or climb walls or
buildings. Instead, at the start of each new game, players were given a wagon with seven dwarfs
and had to explore from the left to the right of the screen. You would always encounter a river,
then a chasm, followed by magma. Along the way, players were still able to build and craft items
while dealing with certain dangerous encounters. There was even a sort of endgame present in the
form of discovering and mining adamantine ore at the far right of the map. Once you started
mining adamantine however, there was always a chance your fortress would be lost soon and
the player would receive a game over screen. The decision to choose dwarves as
the games’ main race was an easy one, as it seemed like an obvious choice to Tarn and
Zach for a fantasy game about mining. Initially, their personalities consisted of pretty
basic elements like food preferences, skills, relationships, current happiness, total stress
and so on. However, as development progressed, the brothers wanted each dwarf to have their
own identity, much like a character in a book for example. Therefore, more specific attributes
were thrown into the mix such as imagination, artistic interests, curiosity, depression,
trust, achievement-striving, just to name a few. In total there’s about 50 personality facets,
30 intellectual values, a bunch of specific needs and 120 different emotions. These are then divided
into four categories: “creature”, “cultural”,” family” and “during play” and all of them combined
make up the personality of a single dwarf. This translates to much more interesting gameplay
moments where dwarves can hold grudges, are shy, take in pets and go crazy if a goblin kills those
pets, become fond of specific items and even hoard them. Of course, this is all determined before
you even start playing and Tarn also wanted to make sure dwarves can evolve and change if
a certain impactful event happened to them. Believe it or not, the dwarves’ physical
attributes are perhaps just as detailed as their personalities. Dwarf Fortress simulates muscles,
blood vessels, nerves and more. Because of this, combat can get pretty violent and instead of a
traditional HP bar, dwarves can lose limbs and even teeth, something that’s directly inspired by
the tabletop RPG Cyberpunk 2020. This and other detailed combat systems were also partially
inspired by history books like The Iliad. The two developers have also stated how games
like Starflight, Ultima, Seven Cities of Gold, Moria and many more roguelikes inspired
them while creating Dwarf Fortress. Tarn expected that after his year at Texas
A&M was over, he was going to have to live on his savings and eventually be forced to get
a side job in order to support himself. However, on August 8th 2006, the game’s first alpha
version was released. A few months earlier, on April 17th 2006 to be exact, a forum member
wanted to donate $75 for Tarn’s birthday and asked if the website could get a Paypal button. Once
it was up, the brothers, for the first time ever, earned money from one of their games. Later on,
they also implemented a subscriber system to make it easier for fans to donate a monthly sum. In the
next five months, they made around 300 dollars, which was enough to cover the Bay 12
website’s 20 dollar hosting costs. Once the alpha version was available to
download, the project quickly made its way on different websites and blogs, causing word to
spread. Unsurprisingly, donations kept increasing over the course of the next year. In 2007, after
his last year at Texas A&M, Tarn finally started working full-time on Dwarf Fortress, a dream
come true for him. Though he admitted it wasn’t always easy. “If the laptop broke during a given
six-month stretch that would’ve been it for the whole full-time thing and we were just lucky
about when our computers broke. I had my bank account skim zero a couple times. I never did the
whole, like, mortgage... I don’t own anything to mortgage, first of all, we haven't gone into
debt, but we were at nothing several times.” While things were tough financially, Tarn was
content. Paypal donations had reached a point where he was able to support himself on a small
living wage. Most of it was spent on basic living expenses and the rest went to Zach for his help
on the game. Thanks to all the contributions from fans, the project was self-sustaining, making it
unnecessary to charge for the game. Aside from helping the brothers financially, the growing
amount of support was also a clear sign they were on the right track. With a bigger fanbase,
it became more important to properly maintain the site’s forum, as it was their only form of
marketing and the only way to talk to fans. After all, this was well before the existence of social
media. Zach and Tarn put in a lot of effort, every single day, to make sure the forum’s not
plagued by trolls and conversations stay on topic. At a certain point, the two developers
started sending personalized rewards to fans that donated money. These were either stories
written by Zach or a piece of crayon art drawn by Zach and colored by Tarn, adding even more to the
personal nature of the brothers' passion project. With his new job as full-time indie developer,
Tarn left Texas and moved back into his parents’ house before finding his own place closeby
in Silverdale. While he was living his dream, his older brother Zach couldn’t say the same.
After graduating, Zach got a job at an Amazon warehouse and later at a Naval shipyard. He
was dealing with some personal problems so Tarn wanted to be there for him. It was also a good
opportunity to collaborate more easily on Dwarf Fortress again. Zach has said that once Dwarf
Fortress started to take off, it saved his life. The brother’s maintain a list of about 2,600
ambitious features they plan to implement for version 1.0. Tarn admitted however that not
all of these features might make the cut, since that would probably mean he won’t be able
to finish a “completed” version of Dwarf Fortress in his lifetime. Zach and Tarn always have five to
ten new features on the horizon to implement next, choosing the ones that make the most
sense to add after the previous one, with interconnecting themes and logic helping
their decision-making. “If you want to just say, ‘I’m doing Dwarf Fortress political intrigue
now,’ but we don’t have notions of law, property, customs, status, economics of any kind, and don’t
really understand personal interrelationships and territories and things well enough to do that
any justice. So it gets kicked down the road.” Tarn draws bubble graphs, Venn diagrams, and
other ways to think of all the features and their connections, leading to stacks of pages,
post-its, and text files filled with ideas. He likes the notion of being able to hold the game
in his hands. Working on multiple varied features helps Tarn to maintain focus and stay motivated.
In contrast to more regular game development where coders have to perfect their work before release,
Tarn and Zach have the freedom to experiment and completely shift focus when necessary. Since
they’re always working on multiple features at once, the brothers simply rotate into the
next topic whenever they feel like they’re hitting a wall. This gives them time to come
up with fresh ideas for the previous topic. Most of the time, Dwarf Fortress is all Tarn can
think about and a normal day in his life goes as follows: he wakes up around 3 p.m. and proceeds
to work on Dwarf Fortress until he goes back to bed around 6 a.m. 100-hour work weeks are common
for Tarn, though it doesn’t necessarily feels like work to him. “I don’t have, like, a life or
whatever. Why would you take time off when you can write Dwarf Fortress? That’s not bad. The 100-hour
weeks are not all necessarily on Dwarf Fortress. It’s, like, 80:20 or something, and the 20 is side
projects and stuff. Oftentimes the side projects that I spend time on, 3-4 hours in the evening.
You sit in front of the TV and not watch it, with a laptop on your lap, writing a myth generator
or something, right? That’s kind of how it goes.” During an interview with New York Times magazine, Tarn admitted he’s also not that interested
in having kids. He wants to stay focused on his passion project and he feels kids might
be too much of a distraction. Furthermore, as Tarn got older, his interest in finding a
romantic partner dwindled to the point he’s just not anticipating it anymore. For many years, his
cat Scamps did provide plenty of companionship, but he sadly passed away in June 2022. Tarn
immortalized his beloved pet in the game. As mentioned before, Dwarf Fortress used to
be a fully 2D game, only utilizing an x- and y- axis. After a while, Tarn and Zach felt
this was too limiting and wanted to add 3D architecture and 3D fluid simulations.
Unfortunately, they had no idea how to implement something like that within a world
of text graphics and weren’t willing to dive into such a big challenge. At least until they
encountered a certain design problem. In short, players are able to build bridges to cross
rivers, as well as build flood gates to control water flow. However, when the brothers
added aqueducts, things started to get very very messy and complicated because of the lack of 3D
architecture. So, after about five months after releasing the initial alpha version, they began
experimenting with adding a z-axis to the game. One thing the brothers immediately discovered
is that world generation had to be completely overhauled so that rivers and chasms
would now be giant open lakes and caverns, filled with interesting things to find
and collect. According to two developers, the main downside to this, is that it now
felt like less of a game overall. The clear objective of going from left to right to discover
interesting things to expand your fortress with, had now transformed into something
where players could dig and advance in any direction, not knowing what they
would stumble onto. To Tarn and Zach, the upside of having total freedom to build
more intricate structures and having a more interesting world overall with endless
possibilities, far outweighed the downsides. Needless to say, this major update
proved challenging to program for Tarn, who called it one of the most mind-numbing
things he has ever done. Not only did he now have to take details such as fluid
mechanics and cave-ins into account, but he had to go back to all the function
calls that relied on the x and y-axis, and see how a z-axis could fit in. This new
and improved 3D version of Dwarf Fortress, even though on the surface it visually still
looks the same, was publicly released in 2008. By now, the gameplay loop looked more like
this: you generate a world, build a fort, you eventually lose, the fort gets added
to the world, you start a new fort or play adventure mode, lose, it gets added to the
world again, and so on. Losing is very much part of the experience and Tarn even describes
it as the entire engine that runs the game. It’s why Dwarf Fortress’ motto is “losing is
fun!”. The important thing to the brothers was that when a player loses, their impact
on the world would persist and be visible in the next playthrough. An example would be
encountering the ruins of a previous fort or bumping into an old friend or enemy you made
during your first time playing adventure mode. Although the art style is simply made
up of numbers, letters and symbols, generating a world requires quite a lot of
CPU power. Even modern computers struggle a bit during the process, thanks to Tarn’s
extensive programming that results in highly detailed landscapes. He and Zach
specified everything to the extreme, from geologically accurate ore deposits to river
erosion capacities, climate and economic patterns, narrative and historical texts constructed in
real time, systems that model animal migration, the list goes on. These elements also
change and evolve as the game progresses, and the player’s fortress and the surrounding
world builds up its own history, potentially spanning over hundreds of years. The story
of a fortress’s rise and fall isn’t scripted beforehand, but generated in the moment by all
the dizzying amount of variables. Sometimes this can make for funny situations and accidents,
that even startle Zach and Tarn themselves. “We didn’t know that carp were going to eat
dwarves. But we’d written them as carnivorous and roughly the same size as dwarves, so that
just happened, and it was great.” Another fan-favorite mishap was the drunk cat bug.
After Tarn had added more poisonous effects when sprucing up venomous creatures, dead
cats started piling up in people’s games, especially around places with alcohol. They
would start to vomit all over the floor, causing them to ultimately die. He couldn’t figure
out what was causing this, and even enlisted help to find out what was going wrong. As it turned
out, an old footprint code would cause alcohol to get on cats’ paws from walking on spilled
beer or wine. They had the ability to lick themselves clean and after doing so, caused
them to ingest the alcohol on their paws. Unfortunately for the cats, one number was off
in the so called “ingest-while-cleaning code”, meaning the small creatures would ingest large
amounts of alcohol, sending them through all the symptoms of alcohol poisoning, which was added
along with all the other new poisonous effects. In-game incidents like this provide insight into
the inner workings of the brothers’ captivating brains, that fuel the mind-boggling amount of
detail and variables in Dwarf Fortress. All these elements construct one of the most complex
simulation systems in modern games, making it just as much a story generator as a fortress management
game, just like Tarn and Zach envisioned it. Fun fact: while the brothers mostly use the internet
to fact check things like the weight of gold, there was one time they couldn’t find the density
of saguaro cactus wood. To help them out, a Dwarf Fortress fan ordered the cactus wood, determined
the exact density using liquid displacement tests and informed the indie developers about the
results. So not only is it now in the game, it’s also easily searchable on the internet and
all because of Dwarf Fortress and its community. The brothers grew up playing computer games
with notebooks in hand and logging their journeys in detail, as well as competing with
each other to get the highest score. Therefore, they aimed to create an experience that would
log your adventure in captivating detail, while also providing a way to earn a high score.
This desire was the spark for the game’s Legends mode. It lets players explore the records of their
world in the form of extensive production logs and diaries that the player can read through,
ranging from retelling epic battles to a poem written by one of your dwarves. All of these
elements add to the player’s score. A direct major influence for this mode was the game over
screen in the video game Hack. As you can see, it details how the player died and preserves
that information for future playthroughs. Before working on Dwarf Fortress, the brothers
had also experimented with something similar in an earlier side project called Fantasy
Slaughter. This game featured cards with environments the player had to choose between,
which eventually would lead to you facing an opponent. After the player died, they could
consult a huge score list with statistics, like how many dragons you killed
and how many items you collected. In Dwarf Fortress’ Legends mode, they took it
to a whole other level by allowing players to create grand narrative arcs in their own fantasy
worlds. What the brothers had not anticipated was how fans started producing entire animated
videos based on in-game stories. During the first year of the game’s existence, Something Awful
forum members passed around a single fortress, creating an infamous story called Boatmurdered.
One player would play and save its game, then send the file to a next player, and so on,
meanwhile documenting the fortress’ downfall. Boatmurdered was featured across several gaming
sites and made the front page of MetaFilter, a popular blog, which alerted many
people to the game’s existence. It’s no coincidence that stories like this
happen all the time in Dwarf Fortress. A lot of the game’s detailed variables are a result
of Zach’s creative mind. See, in order to come up with what elements go in the game, Zach
writes a good amount of stories first. Then, the brothers isolate all the elements that
make the narrative interesting and even possible in the first place. These then get
programmed into the game by Tarn, making it possible for Dwarf Fortress to generate similar
narratives as the one’s Zach wrote. What’s more, the brothers even share these breakdowns of
Zach’s stories on the Dwarf Fortress website. Dwarf Fortress was made with a
combination of self-taught C and C++, using a free version of Microsoft Visual
Studio as the development environment. Tarn basically cobbled together his own engine
using OpenGL and SDL, which helped to port the game to macOS and Linux. Tarn prefers using his
own engine over something that already exists, like Unity for instance, though he does
admit it can be a real pain if he needs to accomplish anything other than text graphics.
He uses the audio tool FMOD for sound design. The game has been in development for so long
that Tarn occasionally runs into bits of his code he hasn’t seen in years, specifically when
he’s implementing new features. These bits of old code can cause unforeseen problems, requiring Tarn
to always double check if everything is working as intended. For instance, if teleportation were
added to the game, it would influence economy, diplomacy, espionage, and many other systems,
making it extremely complex to implement. People from the Dwarf Fortress community have
offered to go through all the lines of code for him to clean it up where necessary. However,
Tarn prefers to do all the alterations to the code himself and have full control over what goes
in. Another reason for not letting fans help him, is that Tarn worries he would end up more
as a project manager, which is something he’d never want as he loves programming too much.
Additionally, he and Zach have very deliberately decided to not turn Dwarf Fortress into an
open source project, knowing there’s people and companies out there that would copy the code
and sell it in the form of a different game. While having no desire to be project managers,
the brothers do their best to keep the community informed on their progress. Aside from regular
updates on their website, Tarn also answers 20 to 80 questions every month and does his best to
look at all the player suggestions. “There’s tens of thousands of threads on there now and I make
sure to read the opening post of every single one, and the discussion if it’s something that
needs a discussion. There’s 13,000 topics and I’ve read every one. Most suggestions can’t
go in, obviously. They’re good, but, you know, we already have a plate that’s full. There’s only
so much you can do… but it’s all cool and they give us a lot of feedback. It’s great having
a group of people coming along for the ride.” The community also plays an important part
in bug tracking and, as mentioned before, the creation of mods. Fans provide mods that
make the game more aesthetically pleasing, add more items and creatures, fix vital bugs
and more. All of them are backed with the full support of Tarn and Zach. The community also
maintains an extensive wiki, and funnily enough, the two developers even consult the wiki
themselves when working on the game. Fans also organize meet-ups where they wear homemade
Dwarf Fortress shirts and share their love for the game. Tarn and Zach occasionally even join
these meet-ups to connect with the community. Back in 2011, Tarn, now 33 years old,
was offered a job at a big game studio, though he never disclosed the name of the
company. He rejected the offer, saying he prefers working with just his brother and not
being part of the competitive gaming industry. Another company offered Tarn and Zach a 300.000
dollar deal to license the name Dwarf Fortress, but they felt this amount would not compare to the
long-term donations they would receive over time. The following year, important features like
abilities, syndromes, detailed cities, tombs and more traps were added to the game, as were
vampires, werewolves, necromancers and undead. As with every new version update, donations
increased and eventually stabilized again, making it viable for Bay 12 to keep relying on
fan’s donations. Every year around Christmas, donations would also momentarily increase. In
2013, donations averaged about 4000 dollars a month. That amount is of course before taxes and
is split between the two developers. Naturally, the game’s active player base kept growing as well
and Dwarf Fortress was now being downloaded about 100,000 times a month. Despite that, in 2015,
Paypal donations started dropping below 3000 dollars. This motivated Bay 12 Games to set up a
Patreon account in an attempt to increase funding again. Thankfully, this worked and allowed
Bay 12 to keep Dwarf Fortress free of charge. After a decade since the original
release, Bay 12 released version 0.42.06, symbolizing they were 42% into finishing version
1.0. Right after, the brothers began working on a myth generator and magic system, which would
usher in a whole new way for players to create and experience their own stories. “I haven’t
done anything remotely like creation myth generation before. It’s exciting. It’s like
starting a whole new game. And it really is a separate project. And then it just becomes
one of the little cogs in the Dwarf Fortress machine. They're all separate games in a
way, but then the interconnections start to grow and you have a common framework, but
they’re all very different from each other.” Procedural myth generation would allow
Dwarf Fortress to simulate gods, demons, heaven or hell and anything in between. The
ambitious magic system on the other hand will be one of the most difficult and impactful changes
to the game, something that’s going to take a long time to implement. Tarn and Zach have gone on
record saying they aren’t afraid to just take the game, pitch it on the ground, and put it back
together if necessary to achieve their vision. The brothers love the idea of implementing magical
abilities that would extract a heavy cost as the game progresses, an idea that’s taken straight
from the Conan The Barbarian movie. They want to do more than just create a set of spells depending
on your level and work with the possibility of making deals with spirits and otherworldly beings,
and having to maintain a social relationship with them. Dwarves could chop down the wrong tree,
angering a tree spirit in the process, and then would be able to interact with them, with many
magical implications as a result. Additionally, Bay 12 plans on adding tools for players to edit
maps and myths themselves. Essentially, this would mean you could play god, shaping the world and
its deities as you see fit. Zach gave the example of being able to recreate the world of Westoros
and live your wildest Game of Thrones fantasies. Sadly, finishing the magic system and myth
generation would have to wait. In March 2019, indie developer and publisher Kitfox Games,
announced it was partnering with Bay 12. Though Tarn and Zach had always strived to stay away from
the more mainstream gaming industry machine in order to maintain their freedom as developers, a
family health crisis made the brothers reconsider. “This is primarily because the healthcare
system just really sucks, and I got sick, and it ended up costing a lot of money, and
my wife's company was able to pay for it with their insurance. But if the same thing
happened to my brother, we'd be wiped out, Bay 12 would not exist. And so, that was the
original reason why we're doing this. It's also exposing the game to a wider audience that we
haven't reached before, so that's pretty cool.” The illness Zach had to get treated was skin
cancer. After removing a tumor on his nose, it grew back within a matter of months and
resulted in Zach needing partial reconstructive surgery for his face. Unfortunately, cancer
runs in his and Tarn’s family as their parents have been dealing with the disease themselves
for years. On top of that, Zach has been on expensive medication for many years to treat his
bipolar disorder. The brothers don’t like sharing health related news with their fans, seeing
they don’t want people starting a fundraiser, but Zach opened up about it during a
Vice interview, shortly after the Kitfox announcement. With Tarn and Zach now being in
their forties, it’s no surprise they’re getting increasingly worried about their health and the
potential cost of treating more forms of cancer. Before signing a deal with Kitfox, other indie
publishers also expressed interest in Dwarf Fortress, but Tarn and Zach needed someone that
was willing to go beyond the standard tasks and also be in charge of things like hiring extra
developers. That way, the brothers would be able to focus solely on development. Tanya X.
Short, co-founder of Kitfox Games, and her team were more than willing to take on all those
responsibilities. The first order of business was to create a commercial version that could
be sold on Steam and Itch.io. Tarn and Zach sat down with the team at Kitfox and thought, “What
would be the best possible commercial release?” "So basically the whole process of commercializing
the game meant we really wanted to think about all of the things that were making people bounce
off of it. And it's a long list. Because the text graphics are actually very bad for some people.
And then the keyboard input was nonsense. There was no mouse input at all. No tutorials to
speak of. People like to say, ‘I pop open Dwarf Fortress and then I also have the wiki on another
computer running’. And that's probably still true, but that’s not a good ad for the game. So we
added tutorials, tool tips. We changed the flow of certain menus, completely rewrote other menus,
and we even changed the AI behavior of the dwarves in certain cases. This was just a process of
trying to maximize the number of players.” Their plan was to release it in a couple of
years so time played a factor in some of the design decisions. For instance, developing 3D
graphics would be too time consuming so the team settled on a top down 2D pixel art aesthetic
instead. Kitfox hired Mike “Mayday” Madej and Patrick Martin “Meph” Schroeder, mostly known
for their tileset mod packs on Dwarf Fortress, to create pixel art of every single element.
Musician and sound designer Dabu was hired to create a fully-produced premium soundtrack. Before
the official release date was announced, the Steam page stated that ‘time is subjective’, a reference
to the games’ uniquely long development cycle and a statement that the game would be released when
it was truly ready. To put fans of the original at ease, they also stated the classic version of the
game will still remain available for free and will receive the same updates as the premium version.
On December 6th, 2022, after about three years of dedicated teamwork, Dwarf Fortress’s premium
edition was officially released. According to Tarn, the response to the commercial version has
been mostly positive, although there’s a vocal minority on the official forum that claim the
brothers sold their soul to the devil. Overall though, the community was very excited about
all the changes and this was evident when the first sales numbers came in. Kitfox had estimated
Dwarf Fortress would sell 160.000 copies in two months’ time, instead selling that amount within
24 hours of release. After a month, the game sold almost half a million copies, blowing away all
pre-release sales estimates. The brothers’ health insurance problem, the main reason for doing
all of this, was taken care of overnight. Tarn and Zach thanked their fans. "Dwarf Fortress
is a wild success it seems, but it is all an illusion without you. None of this was possible
without the support of the people that helped us out. Along these amazing 20 years, by far the
best in my life. We win... and it’s your fault!" To help manage the existing community and the
influx of players discovering Dwarf Fortress for the first time thanks to the premium release,
Kitfox hired content creator ‘SalfordSal’. More surprisingly, a second programmer from
the Dwarf Fortress modding community, with the username ‘Putnam’, was also hired.
The brothers describe it as a historic moment, since it was the first time someone other than
Tarn and Zach has seen the Dwarf Fortress source code. It’s a big adjustment for Tarn. Even though
Kitfox handles most of the hiring and marketing outreach, Tarn still has to manage people
to a certain degree. As mentioned earlier, he never wanted to become project manager
but he and Zach realize they have to adapt. Ultimately, they’re happy more people are
discovering and actually playing the game now. Their current goal is to keep the operation
light enough so they can just keep going with what they have. In the past, Tarn has mentioned that
even if version 1.0 would be finished one day, he and Zach would just continue improving the
game for the rest of their lives. For now, the brothers have years worth of features
left on their list to add to the game, with the enormously complex magic and
myth system on the top of that list. Though the brothers are now millionaires,
they remain remarkably calm under these latest developments. While Zach has mentioned
he and his wife plan on buying a new house, Tarn admitted he hasn’t had much time to think
things over. “It's just a ton of money, but it's also for 20 years. So when you divide that by 20,
you're kind of back down into normal tech salary range. Which is still pretty high, obviously.
I'll have to rework… my, uh, whole life, figure out what the heck's going on there. I don't really
have any ideas or plans right now. I've just been thinking about dwarf stuff. We don't have plans to
sell Dwarf Fortress 2 or whatever in five years, right? It's just the same game. So this tail
off this game, for however long it goes, that's it. We have to be responsible with what
we've got, now, for the rest of our lives really."
