Build your own world with robots

CHENNAI: There’s an interesting correlate in video games — the games get more complex as the graphics get more primitive. Dwarf Fortress (DF) is at the very end of this scale — the text-based graphics of this game renders gameplay extremely counterintuitive, and even after spending hours playing you’ll still be left wondering about the endgame (Is there one? How do I win this?). DF falls under the sub-genre of roguelike games — an RPG with procedural generation as you progress.

Dwarf Fortress is actually just another indie game in an unheard corner of the internet — it’s free-to-play, and has been so since 2003 — with regular updates by its developers to up the quality (just bug fixes, not graphics). The idea of ‘emergent gameplay’ is what makes this game unique (DF is supposedly an inspiration for Minecraft).

Before the game starts, the player gets to pick certain characteristics of the world that the game will generate — age, minerals available, how savage the humans are, etc. It then takes a good five minutes to generate a random world — which is entirely text based. You are then given a few dwarves: you must assign jobs to them and build a civilisation by collecting items and managing resources. Seems simple enough right? Like some primitive version of Civilization? No.  

The ASCII graphics throw you off completely — to make it playable, it is absolutely necessary to throw on skins to the existing user interface and read the entire game’s wiki. There’s nothing in the game that even closely resembles a dwarf —you’ll have to read the instructions to understand what the random punctuation marks and smiley faces mean on screen. What’s key when you start the game is deciding where you set up the fortress. And this can get extremely confusing when you start out. The first time I played, I tried to ‘embark’ in the middle of an ocean 10 times before I figured out that it wasn’t land with judicious food and mineral supplies.

Despite how complex the game is, it makes you feel special once you get a hang of it, you know? Till then, as the cult followers of Dwarf Fortress say “Losing is Fun”.

 @quaffle_waffle

(This economics graduate spends her leisure time preparing for the zombie apocalypse)