I don't know the scope of it, if it's the entire world. RimWorld has this caravan thing throughout. Merchants can come to your city, but you can't send them out. We haven't done much with fire, we haven't done much with how the wind works, say, or how trading works. But there are certain things we didn't touch, for whatever reason. We cast a long shadow in a sense, because there are certain things we've just done to death. I guess this would be hard if you haven't played them, but are there aspects of them you know of that make you go 'oh, why didn't I think about that?' I feel like for a lot of creators, if you're drawing inspiration from something, you're like oh I love this game, but I I could do this better.Įxactly. But I still feel weird playing a game and seeing callouts to my stuff. If you look at my forgotten beast, randomly generated creatures, you'd just go oh, Starflight (opens in new tab). It's no more than any other game developer, and I've drawn inspiration the same ways. It is a little weird to see in some of these games, something that looks like a Dwarf Fortress description, or something, in some way or another, and you can tell where they drew the inspiration from. Sounds like it's less that it bothers you they might've drawn inspiration from Dwarf Fortress, and more that the parts they took from Dwarf Fortress aren't the parts you like to play. I don't get it.Ĭolony management game RimWorld is often compared to Dwarf Fortress. It's odd, it's really odd that it's not my thing. So it made sense, it's not like we hate, but I would never pick up RimWorld or Gnomoria, or even things like Prison Architect that have kind of mentioned Dwarf Fortress. My brother actually does play more than I do, and he was more into things like Tropico, and stuff. But it doesn't mean this is the sort of game we were ever playing. So I think it really helped the simulation that we did do this. It forced us to consider things that we were not doing down at the scale of one person looking through one person's eyes. And probably better for our social simulations to have so many agents, dwarves, running around at the same time. It's been good in the long run, obviously, for whatever reason. But that didn't come together, so this random side project suddenly becomes our fantasy game. It's just the strangest game in the world. We were writing this horrible game, the 3D one. So the Adventure mode was your original goal?
We were really interested in this narrative simulator and stuff, but the economic feel of it, the survivalist feel of it, is not something we're interested in. That kind of came out of a weird sequence of events.
Part of it might be, I'm not sure the Dwarf part of Dwarf Fortress is a game I'd play, necessarily. I don't know if there's some phenomenon like that, where people don't like listening to stuff that said 'you influenced me.'
It would be nice to be articulate about this. I just don't want to feel my DNA in anything, or something. But if you're playing a game that came out after-no one's really lifting stuff, and that's not how it feels, so it's not that. Because I could go back and play Caesar III or Tropico or something, these Dwarf Fortress-feeling games that came out before. It is a little odd-I've never played any of the games that have said they have something to do with Dwarf Fortress. RimWorld (opens in new tab) is probably the most well-known currently. I guess there have been counter-examples, a number of successful colony management type games, now.