Strike the Earth!
BY ALPER ÖZKAN (MBG/IV)
d_ozkan@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
It seems I am in a pinch again - a senior's work apparently never ends (well, at least it never ends if the senior in question keeps postponing everything until the last day.) Good thing I have this spare column! I don't tend to show it, but I'm a bit of a gaming enthusiast, and while the so-called "manic shooter" genre is my forte, I take the opportunity to procrastinate using any game. Dwarf Fortress is no exception, so this week's column will be devoted to this bizarre game.
Dwarf Fortress is an oddity. The premise is simple: you are in control of a number of dwarves who are tasked with carving a fortress in a mountain - hence Dwarf Fortress. What makes it odd is that it attempts to simulate every aspect of fortress carving, and for the most part, it succeeds. It may be the game closest to real life: physics are factored in to the point where fluid dynamics and melting points of materials become important factors. Generally, this leads to inexperienced players flooding themselves with magma (very cool).
Instead of an "HP bar" common to other games, Dwarf Fortress keeps track of every single organ and limb. Your dwarves have personal likes and dislikes; they tend to engrave or paint images of things they like on the items they make and may be irritable after seeing creatures they dislike. Of course, after all the effort to make your dwarves seem like little people, it wouldn't be fair to give you full control over them. This is the second important aspect of the game: you can tell your dwarves what to do, but you don't directly control them - they are individual people, after all. You are their boss, but they will gladly ignore you to drink and party (again, very cool).
With so much detail, bugs are inevitable. This is where the hilarity of Dwarf Fortress begins - you are the boss, but your employees are all insane, and the only way to fire them is dumping them into lava (where "firing them" becomes all too literal) or throwing them into a chasm. One bug is that the dwarf AI apparently makes dwarves believe they are completely fireproof - they will merrily go about their business while on fire, not noticing any problem. And when this "business" involves, say, anything flammable (such as alcohol dwarves are so fond of) your fortress will quickly go up in flames. Another source of great fun and imminent death (in Dwarf Fortress, those two go hand in hand) is the incredibly dangerous wildlife. In previous releases, elephants had increased aggression (perhaps they're permanently on meth?), often skewering any unwary dwarf. The problem with dwarf deaths is that dwarves may be quite obsessed with each other's clothing, and upon seeing an elephant victim's now-ownerless socks, a second dwarf will run after them, completely ignoring the elephant. He'll also get skewered, and a third would then run after the second dwarf's clothing, then a fourth would go after the third, and so on until a player left with a morbid conga line of dead dwarves.
There are many things to be said about Dwarf Fortress, though there is not enough space. So I will just ask you to give a spin (the game is free, simply Google it).
Do note the development log regarding coding the facial features and physical development of dwarves:
"03/07/2009: Worked through bugs and problems with appearance modifiers today (...) There was a dwarf with one eye bugged out and one eye sunken in with colorless irises and one quadrant worth of teeth ten times as long as the others and the nose shrunken down to nothing. He was also a little shorter than the average dwarf, and beardless, because it grew out those teeth instead."
That is one scary dwarf indeed.