That game be crazy.

EDIT: sorry, I thought there was still a site achievement for being the first to post.

Though I can't see anything about it now, so I guess all those months of trying to do it was a little bit of a waste :(

EDIT2: Hang on, where did all the Steam/Xbox/PSN achievement stuff go? Did none of that stuff make the move during the site update? :(

Yo.

WAZZUP

Sup.

@godmil: Cheevos are super time consuming to put up cause whenever the services change something on their site, the scrapers that get the info break on the GB end.

are those hexagons in the back? or just stupid squares.

Dwarf Fortress content? This makes me a happy man.

Hello.

I love Dwarf Fortress and in its current (Beta/Alpha) state it is both the best city management game out there AND the best sandbox RPG. Look forward to watching this when I get home.

I love the idea of randomly generating entire worlds and creatures and content like the Dwarf Fortress guys do. Must be the computer scientist/programmer in me.

These guys seem super cool and nice. Good interview guys

Huh. Those guys seem pretty chill. Which one is the programmer?

I hope Dave comes back and continues his feature on Dwarf Fortress. The new RPG mode features sound really cool too.

Great interview, Patrick.

The game seems pretty cool.

hoe about some fuking GRAPHICS

Oh how I wish I could sit and play DF. I always get bored after a few hours of carving out bedrooms for all these dwarfs. My first fortress I played for many hours until I realized that one stupid dwarf sold our anvil before I took it out of the wagon, and without an anvil you can't make stuff and you can't make another anvil so the fortress was going nowhere.

Too bad this game will never be anywhere near finished.

What charming guys!

Yay for Dwarf Fortress, also the brothers seem like really nice people.

I like this guys so much, while big publishers have been focusing on "cinematic" experiences, they been working on AI, Mechanics, Simulation Routines and what not.. ya know the stuff that should matter to make a GAME.

Check this article: Julian Gollop on "Brute Force" design

I wish I could play this game, I tried but the time killed me

I kinda think stuff like Dwarf Fortress, EVE Online and to some extent Minecraft and Ultima Online are some of the strongest contenders in the "are videogames art" debate. These are games that are not really attempting to do something that can be done in any other medium (whereas most games try to imitate the narrative structure of a film or TV series - the story is told linearly and with minimum player interaction - for the most part the player is expected to watch as the story unfolds inbetween tangentially related missions, rather than taking an active part in it or the game's world). The stories that emerge in these largely unscripted games, where player input - whether it's between the player and the complex, near chaotic systems of the game world, or largely unrestricted interactions between players are unique to the medium, and is something that was pretty much the holy grail that visionaries in theatre and TV could only dream of 50 years ago.

@flint0 said:

That's what the usermade tilesets are for. The brothers make the game, the community provide the graphics.

Dwarf Fortress is something I envision myself playing in my old age, when it finally get's some videogame features. I'm shallow that way, need something more than pure abstraction, but I'm completely fascinated with the idea of DF.

Great interview!

love DF

Drew Scanlon: master of the "MTV sway".

Eve and Dwarf Fortress being in the same room is cause for a singularity to collapse in on itself.

I was super interested (almost excited) to watch this interview as soon as I saw it existed and the watching itself was really interesting too.

I read the New Yorker (?) article on them a year or so ago but as the creators of this legendary game that is so unique I was curious to see if they were very partiuclar individuals to be able to create that. I've never seen them interviewed in a video before and they were more ordinary than I thought they might be, which was kind of nice and I don't mean that as an implied sleight on them. It was just good to be able to hear their perspectives almost purely because of everything that has been built up in my mind over the years of hearing about this game that continually crops up, always sitting out there on the edge of this scene.

Thanks for catching them Patrick.

This just made me even more sad that Dave's gone :(

The minds behind wet chicken knees.

I really tried to play it and think it's absolutely brilliant, I just wish it was more user friendly.

Dorf Fort is great.

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD

Tarn is the programmer. He's the one on the right side of the video.

Innocence is not a name, and neither is Tarn.

Nice interview.

What a great and unexpected thing to come out of an event unrelated to anything remotely similar to Dwarf Fortress. I really enjoy looks into the indie developer world, and Patrick seems really good at asking the right questions and getting these people to open up about their thoughts and processes as developers make these games.

Awesome interview, can't wait to see more stuff from the fanfest or other locations where you guys go.

DF is great, the stories that have happened in the succession games from the SA forums are amazing. Boatmurdered and the rest, all amazing. Wish I had the patience to play it without third-party hacks, but it's just so darn complex... Oh well, maybe ten years from now.

Dwarf fortress is definitely one of my all time favorite games, I would have loved to have a longer interview, still pretty cool though.

PS. Why do you need that music?

Also the game is extremely power hungry because of the amount of calculations it has to do.

I would be unlikely to really work with 3D graphics. Besides after you've been playing it for a while your mind does the "rendering" for you.

I think we need some more Dave Fortress.

I got to learn Calculus from Tarn when he was a professor out at Texas A&M. I still remember the last day I had class with him and he mentioned that he was moving back to Seattle to work on DF full time. crazy.

Hooray! DF content!

I'd love to have a podcast with guys like Tarn or Chris Hecker where they just have a big roundtable about game design theory.

I've dabbled in this game for years and I've only ready articles about these guys. Nice to see them on video talk about their game.

Tarn easily seems like the most normal doctor of mathematics I've ever come across.

And everyone needs to take the time to fuck around with DF. If you don't feel like building huge mines, just sim the world and read the story and jump into the world in adventure mode and strangle wolves with their own intestines. Good times.

Giant Bomb needs to revisit Dwarf Fortress. Maybe convince Vinny/Drew to get into it?

Nah, the game is power hungry because all of the code is single threaded, if it was multi threaded and using the GPU for graphics rendering it would be 100% doable, never going to happen though.

I really don't mind anyway, the user made tilesets are more than enough for me, phoebus's are pretty nice, and DF is the greatest thing ever, can't play with the ascii stuff though...