You may have heard of the infamous Dwarf Fortress...legendary procedurally generated ASCII game with an absolutely impenetrable interface and steep learning curve, often resulting in hilarious "rise and fall" type stories. These are two really cool stories-told-in-illustrations.

http://www.timdenee.com/oilfurnace/
http://www.nzfortress.co.nz/forum/showt ... hp?t=20768

lol, hilarious. When I read the title of the post, I thought this was some weird form of team fortress 2. With midgets.

Hehehe...i'd buy that!

Dwarf Fortress stories are always so awesome that they make me want to try the game, and I made a few attempts but the incredibly counterintuitive interface and the non-graphics (even with a custom tileset which makes things a little easier to 'see') are so hard to get over.

Just to give you an idea....this is the game "vanilla", without tilesets



yeah...

With a tileset (there are a few)



And then there's Stonesense, which was developed to be able to show the game - in real time - in simple 3D. The catch is: you can only VIEW the game in it, you still need to use the clunky interface and the less fancy graphical display to actually build/play the game.

http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2009/11/sto ... rf_for.php

Unfortunately, the maker of the game (who is constantly working on it) lives of donations and has no intention of updating the interface or integrating the 3D view in his game...he's happy to continue in ASCII. I still hope somehow someday the game gets a fully working 3D view though. Using your imagination to imagine tens of levels down- and upwards on a flat 2D map is...painful.

yea, I've heard of dwarf fortress, and have absolutely no desire to experience a painful ascii interface. I finished playing games in ASCII when I quit going to BBS's in the early 90s.

Hehehe. It's doable with a good tileset that translates the ASCII (I can't look at ASCI myself either) but there is so much to learn...I've literally been trying to teach myself the game for days and I haven't come much further than producing a few beds (from trees I chopped) and doors, and setting up a workshop. And now my dwarves are likely going to start dying of thirst since I don't have any alcohol and happen to be in a hot area. There were some spring showers but they dried up qo quickly that my basin plans failed and my underground mushroom cave flooding was a failure too.

On the bright side, I've struck Platinum and gold on my search for drinkable ground water (9 layers down and ZILTCH). If my brewer can survive long enough to make some booze from plants I may make it to a cooler season.