The articlegameplay, story, development, reception
Gameplay
Dwarf Fortress has three primary game modes which take place in worlds created by the player, where most of the elements are randomly generated.
Fortress mode, a construction and management simulation of a colony of dwarves. There are no objectives, with the player being free to decide how to go about managing the colony and making them interact with the environment, thus making it an open-ended and sandbox-style game. Since there is no way to win, it only ends when the entire colony is defeated by the various possible threats, or the player decides to abandon or retire the fortress.
Development
One of Tarn and Zach Adams' early works was a text based adventure game called dragslay, written in the BASIC language and influenced by Dungeons & Dragons. This was the brothers' first fantasy project. In high school, Tarn Adams taught himself the C programming language and developed it further. dragslay would later have an important influence on Dwarf Fortress.
Adams explained his interest in fantasy games, that he had grown up "surrounded by that sort of thing ... along with generic sci-fi, generic fantasy is part of our heritage." Years later, before entering graduate school in mathematics, Adams began working on a project he called Slaves to Armok: God of Blood. It was named after a deity in dragslay, originally named for a variable "arm_ok"—which counted the limbs the player still had attached.
Reception
The game received attention mainly because of its emergent gameplay, ASCII arts, complexity, poor interface and difficulty. Many reviewers described the game as unusually difficult to learn. It has been compared to other simulation games like SimCity and The Sims, Dungeon Keeper, and roguelike games like NetHack. However, reviewers praised Adams' independence and attention to detail.
Gamasutra said, "There have been few indie gaming success stories as big as Dwarf Fortress." Wired magazine, following one of its updates, described it as an "obtuse, wildly ambitious work-in-progress [that] mashes the brutal dungeon crawling of roguelikes with the detail-oriented creativity of city-building sims."
Legacy
The game influenced Minecraft, which reviewers considered a more user-friendly version of Dwarf Fortress. Adams says he is thankful for the Minecraft developers citing Dwarf Fortress because that drew more players to his game.
RimWorld developer Tynan Sylvester said Dwarf Fortress "amazed me because of the stories people wrote from it. I read generated tales like Boatmurdered and Gemclod and was fascinated by how the player and game could work together to create a narrative that actually worked. I wanted to push that even further – and to do it in a way that's approachable, and without falling into some of the design traps that have, in my opinion, marred Dwarf Fortress."
