Re-release: The History of Dwarf Fortress with Zach and Tarn Adams | The AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook

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Hey everyone, I'm Trent Custers, co-founder and studio director at League of Geeks, and this is The Game Maker's Notebook.

This is my chat with Tarn and Zach Adams of Bay12 Games, the creators of Dwarf Fortress.

So 20 plus years of development on one game, I think warranted a two and a half hour chat.

And it's an absolutely fascinating one.

We kick it off like we always do on the Game Maker's Notebook.

We talk about how they first interface with games, how games set their little minds on fire.

And I say little because they were like tiny children when they first started to learn how to program.

We talk about their games that they made as kids and how they grew up with them.

And then the games as young adults that formed the basis for Dwarf Fortress, their early attempts at commercialization.

And then we go through charting the 20 plus years of Dwarf Fortress's development.

We talk about those salient points, the big major features, the community brush fire that got things started when it became a cultural mainstay, including its entry into MoMA.

And then, at the end of the chat, we start to lean into how they met the broader game development community, including Tanya Short of Kid Fox Games, who eventually partnered with them to help them bring Dwarf Fortress to Steam.

We talk about that whole process, what it means, like the negotiations, the structure of the deal.

It's a very open conversation, including the logistics of how you even do something like that.

Take 20 years of development and not all of a sudden team up with some folks to get it onto Steam.

A game like Dwarf Fortress.

Now, If you care about video games at all which is probably why you're listening to this podcast if you're in the industry, if you're a game maker in any way, shape or form, I highly recommend that you listen to both parts of this chat.

Dwarf Fortress is a singular, momentous, monumental entry into our medium.

In fact, it just won the 2023 DICE Award for Strategy Slash Simulation Game of the Year in Las Vegas recently.

So it's got our tick of approval.

But the chat that we have here with Tan and Zach Adams is so open, so genuine.

They're such humble lovely, talented gentlemen that I really think there's something in here for everyone.

And I'm so honored to have had this chat with them.

Welcome to The Game Maker's Notebook, a podcast featuring a series of in-depth one-on-one conversations between game makers, providing a thoughtful, intimate perspective on the business and craft of interactive entertainment.

The Game Maker's Notebook is presented by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, a member-driven organization dedicated to the recognition and advancement of interactive entertainment.

Zach, welcome.

Thank you for joining me today.

Yeah, nice to be here.

Likewise, yeah.

Amazing.

Where are you joining me from?

Where are you two based?

So we're out in Kitsap County, west of Seattle, across the water.

Oh wow, amazing.

Yeah, just just took a ferry into seattle yesterday uh, with uh, with uh, with someone who was also interviewing us and uh yeah, that was nice to nice to visit the city.

So it's kind of a mix of uh being out in the woods and also being right next to seattle.

Yeah, have you always been washington state boys about half our lives?

Now what would you say?

Yeah, I mean, we were born here, but then we moved around the country and then now we're back.

The allure of Mount Rainier brought you back.

Yeah, yeah.

This is the best place to live, really.

It's such a beautiful state.

And Seattle as well, just surrounded by mountains.

I mean, if you can deal with the rain coming through as often as it does.

But yeah, it's usually around August September, because you've got PAX West out there and Now there's the.

We went up there for the GDC advisory board meeting last year.

It's such a beautiful spot.

We're out at Salish, which is like where Twin Peaks was built as the hotel from Twin Peaks.

It was a really cool like little nerd moment I got, but it's over these beautiful falls.

It's just such beautiful nature out there.

So usually on this podcast, we start it with, how'd you get into games and everything like that?

But I'm going to get there.

First of all, what I would love is, you know, you two are obviously the creators of Dwarf Fortress.

And Dwarf Fortress, I think for some, like if they don't know who you are or they don't know more about it, it's this

Decades now it's kind of been this legend, legendary game that stories have been told or people have seen like a great, almost mosaics or images drawn of the escapades that happen to people's dwarf fortresses.

But I think there is probably a population of people out there that know of it, know of its legacy, understand that it's, you know, it's quite important perhaps to our medium and that it's some kind of grand achievement which we're obviously going to talk about today.

But would you be able to actually explain to us and to our listeners, who may not be intimately familiar, what Dwarf Fortress actually is?

Yeah, so yeah.

Dwarf Fortress is a settlement management game where you have a, a colony of dwarves.

You start out with seven of them, of course, and dig into the side of the mountain to try and make your fortune, and always run into a little bit of trouble along the way.

But the real point of the game is that it's a gigantic, sprawling simulation.

And what we were aiming to do, And still aim to get to, is to make a fantasy world simulator, to have an entire world that's spun up, makes the map and then runs through hundreds of years of history.

And there's tens of thousands of people that have lived, maybe even a million things that have happened that it can list in a chronology for you.

And all of that exists and is ongoing.

The second that you're like.

Come into the game and plop your first little dwarf caravan down at the side of a mountain.

All of that history is sitting there.

And then you just become a part of the world.

Right.

And the history is going on.

I mean, it goes through the like hundreds of years before you start.

And it continues on as you're playing the game, all these thousands of characters beyond your sight.

And that's one of the biggest problems with Warforgers is that all this stuff is going on and you just don't see it.

You have no idea.

Amazing.

And I think another interesting point about the game that really I think catches a lot of people's eye specifically is that Well, what?

Until this year or late last year?

It was all ASCII art as well, right?

So maybe, Zach, could you explain what ASCII art is for folks who maybe aren't aware?

So the very first computer games were displayed in ASCII.

And ASCII is basically the English alphabet plus a bunch of symbols.

And that's all the computer could actually print on a screen.

And so, as kind of an art project or just because there was the easiest way to develop the game and all its features without having to worry about uh, drawing pixel art and that kind of stuff, we just used ascii art as kind of the matrix.

You look at it, you see all these crazy symbols and then you visualize in your mind, oh okay, a d is a dragon, a g is a goat, but a g is also a goblin.

So if you can solve that problem in your mind and keep on going, then uh, But it's it.

Also, it limited the amount of people that could get into it.

But the the stories that they had spread through the Internet and and helped us out.

I mean, that's the other thing with with Bay 12 and Dwarf Fortress is that for almost 20 years it existed only as as a

What would you call it?

It's only with the contributions of the... Yeah, the donationware, I guess you'd call it.

Something like that.

Amazing.

All right.

Well, these are all topics that I want to dive deep into, but let's take it all the way back to the start.

When the two of you were younger, what's your earliest memories of video games?

Because obviously they've had a major influence over you or, And even I imagine, some that aren't video games, perhaps Dungeons and Dragons or whatever it is.

What's the earliest memory you have of it sparking a fire inside your brains?

Okay, so we started very, very young with computers.

I remember my first memories of the computers comes when I was about five years old and my dad was teaching me how to program computers.

And it's like, and Tarn was even younger.

I mean, he's like two and a half years younger than me and started at the same time.

And I mean there's stuff like Bite Magazine out of that time that had like computer code written on the back of it that you could program into a computer and play a game.

And just games like that, which were just in ASCII.

Yeah. like net hack was not, I mean, there was no net, so just hack.

It was net hack.

That's it.

That's out there now is, is a role playing game and ASCII.

And then that, that was, that was the kind of games that were out there.

Even those, even that is a too complicated.

There were like, uh, I don't know.

They're kind of like Battleship would be one.

It wasn't Battleship, but it's like, you know, pick the coordinates.

Yeah, yeah.

It's just like, guess where the enemy is.

Yeah, it was like Star Trek, right?

Yeah, it was like Star Trek, kind of.

And yeah, those were the only type of games that the computer could show also that it could handle.

I mean, these computers were pretty simple.

Do you remember what that computer was in the early days that you were programming on?

I believe it was a TRS-80, a trash 80.

Oh wow, and was this so?

Was this an activity that you would do with your dad?

Did he kind of just teach you and set you off, or would you sort of code games together, or it is, it was uh, it was.

He would show us, he would program in those games.

We would uh like the beginnings of the uh uh, you know the proto internet where where we would download games from these bulletin board systems that were like run out of universities and stuff.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

And, uh, and he would download those for us and, Yeah, I remember sitting in a chair.

I must have been like five years old or something.

And he showed me what a for loop looked like, right?

Like for I equals zero, I less than 10.

And there was something like, I don't remember basic that well anymore.

It was like step one or something.

You say I can move one at a time.

And then you have like a locate statement, and then you can print the thing.

And I remember it moving across the screen, like the thing as the number increased, then the X coordinate would increase and move across the screen.

But I also remember him, once he showed me that, he kind of stepped back and drew it.

Just let me mess with it, change the numbers.

I could see it moving in.

Random spots and doing random things.

So it's like he would.

He would be there in the beginning to help us and he'd be there like if we had some kind of bug and the thing didn't compile or work.

But he also.

Let us get just kind of off on our own with it, including with those with those bulletin board games.

You download them or the ones that you type in, like once you type them in or download, it's just source code that you then run.

So it's just sitting there and you can also just mess with that.

Yeah.

So yeah, one of the earliest ones that we really became to understand was the Temple of Loth, which was a role-playing game that you could download, And it had the source code, because it was written in BASIC.

And we just messed with that game all the time, just changed all the creatures and stuff like that.

Amazing.

Made the goblins and the goats both G. You're like, something's not right.

They've both got to be G. Yeah, go ahead.

So these are your early days.

When did it sort of go from tinkering into some sort of serious hobbyist stuff?

Were you doing things?

Did you know, because you started so young i mean that's a hell of a five and two and a half is a hell of a head start on the on programming did you, um know from a very young age, going into like primary school or well, in australia's primary school, but you know, like into school and then high school Did you know that programming was something that you wanted to do?

Were you seriously trying to make your own games then?

Or did that come a little bit later?

No, since the beginning we were making our own games.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was not an occupation though, but it wasn't really a hobby either.

Right.

It was like we did it when we learned how to read, when we learned how to do like multiplication tables and stuff.

So it was just a thing like don't all the kids just sit there for eight hours a day writing video games?

And uh, and we got and we came in pretty early.

We started writing our own stuff.

I don't know when we started, like zach started writing a bunch of kind of sierra style like adventure games with with text graphics yeah, like choose your own adventure, or it was more than choose your own adventure but because it had all variables and stuff in it.

But yeah, it was kind of like uh, back then they had like uh, The Hobbit was one of these games that was made in Melbourne.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so the games I would make were kind of based on that.

They're like you know you enter the room and then you know the dwarf enters the room and then talk to dwarf, that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

I love the notion of going to school and learning how to write after programming.

And it's like, okay, we can use that for our programming now.

Text adventures have just been outlawed.

So weird, like going into school.

And then I remember being pulled aside, especially pulled aside in sixth grade for the kids that were going to go into algebra and

Like the guy would – there were three of us or something just staring up at him and he was like okay, now this is going to be hard, but I'm going to write this thing.

It's like X equals two.

And he's like, a variable is a bucket.

And I'm just –

I'll take it from you, pal.

This is the strangest thing.

I couldn't even understand what was going on.

I thought I had just gone into a complete alternate universe or whatever.

And so, like you just said, obviously it wasn't a job at that stage.

Coming out of high school, did you go to college?

Did you study computer science?

Or were you sort of beyond that?

What did you do for work?

Whilst you have this hobby on the side that's consuming all your time and attention, I guess.

Even in high school, what was it?

One of the games that we bought... that we got was a, was shareware.

It it uh, it had come with a price that you could.

You could uh, just use it, but then you could uh, you know, write up a check and send it in the mail.

And so when we were in high school, we actually tried that.

So it was like a job.

Oh, making your own shareware.

We tried to make a game.

And our games were actually better than a lot of the games that were for sale.

Especially the shareware, yeah.

Yeah, especially the shareware.

So we were like, oh, maybe we can make money off of this.

But that's the whole story, right?

That did not work.

And of course...

And I mean the story of Dwarf Fortress is about is about how it it came to the Internet around the same time that it's actually possible to do this.

This donation where, whatever you want to call it it's, it's that's.

We're right at the beginning of that, when it was possible.

And that's that helped her.

That was a good chance for our success there.

People were scrapping with, putting games and discos and baggies and taking them to Egghead Software and selling them.

And then people would set up their own kind of Stripe-type accounts and print out paper manuals and send them and stuff.

And it was just a very few people could make it that way.

And we weren't one of them at that time.

Yeah, but the invention of, like the PayPal button, that's what.

That's what made us able to keep it.

Keep it going later on.

Amazing.

So like before, were there any sort of major projects that you had, I guess, before dwarf fortress?

Like I know you guys were working on like um, There was something earlier on, just before Duel Fortress, right.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so the whole The kind of timeline there is like.

Even back in elementary school we made a game called Drag Slay, because you were limited to eight letters.

Eight letters, right?

Eight letters.

And it was a basic.

It was a basic game and we actually yeah yeah, we we have, we actually have that and got it running on a, on a uh, on DOS box.

And, uh, so that's still around.

Yeah.

No, we should, we should throw that out there sometime.

Uh, but, but it's, uh, um, that was a very simple game though.

And it was really kind of heavily D and D inspired.

I'm not sure if, like we were probably playing it was right around the age we got our first D and D book.

So when you, when I say something's D and D inspired, it's probably just games that were inspired by D and D that then inspired us.

Right.

We just knew what a hit point was basically.

But then we also got into like Cyberpunk, the tabletop RPG, Cyberpunk 2031, one of them back then.

Also based in Washington, right?

Based in Seattle, isn't it?

Cyberpunk?

I know Mike Pondsmith lives here.

I mean, I don't know if he's still at DigiPen.

I mean, yeah, it feels like a California game though, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And so...

Yeah, so we got into that, and that was one of the first experiences we had with a game that didn't have hit points.

It was like body part damage, right?

There's a Friday night firefight supplement part that comes with the well.

It's in the main box but it just goes through all.

You know how you might handle a system like that.

And as kids, we're just fascinated by that.

And so our next iteration of drag slay.

After I learned how to do C when I was like 13 14, we started doing body part damage.

I'm just going to start hacking off arms.

People can be thrown up everywhere, bleeding.

There goes your eyeball. just all that kind of stuff through that all in there because i mean computers can handle that stuff really well yeah and what i said what else a teenage boy is going to do with a computer teaching at a program right yeah yeah yeah so this is how the the uh and you know it's really a straight straight line from uh from that to dwarf fortress and the thing with the body parts is that The game was named, the game right before Dwarf Fortress is Sprawling, Sprawling is the wrong word because that's actually, well, we'll get to that.

But this complex game that came right before Dwarf Fortress was named after the body part damage in Drag Slay, which was in Drag Slay.

There was a variable that said how many arms you had.

That still worked and it was called arm.

Okay equals two right.

And so this next game we had was called Slaves to Armog, arm okay.

Slaves to Armog, God of Blood.

I love it.

That's beautiful.

And so that – I mean we could talk about like how that – Yeah, tell us about Slags to Amok.

That was the first major project – I mean not the first major project.

That was the major project before Dwarf Fortress.

It had kind of two iterations.

We started – the one that came right before it was.

We had – it was kind of pixel graphics in isometrics.

And we made these frames out of like, by rotating, like your forelimbs and your upper arms and your head and your body.

And we drew just pixel graphics for all those things.

And then had a frame editor so we could kind of make these key frames.

It wasn't really key frames because we didn't interpolate at all.

But it was – This is kind of like how Spore worked, right?

Yeah.

You're a creator from Spore.

It's like it – you created the body and then the computer kind of found out how it walked.

And yeah, i mean this is kind of in between these two versions.

Yeah, i mean that was the second version and the the first.

The first pixel one was just like a slaughter fest.

You just walked around hacking people's limbs off and stuff and then we kind of moved.

We were like okay, this is but the.

But this system is so cumbersome, right where you're making these drawing the pixel things.

So we're like 3D graphics, wave of the future.

But this was 2000, so we were already way behind.

But we figured out how to use OpenGL or whatever existed at that time.

I don't remember if it was DirectX, OpenGL or the one we picked up ourselves, because I did do UV texture coordinates manually for a little while.

When you used to draw your own triangles before we had any libraries.

But I think this was after something like OpenGL or DirectX.

I think it was DirectX.

I could be wrong.

But anyway, this 3D game, we decided we're going to make an RPG in 3D.

Games like Daggerfall had been out like four years before and stuff.

We're like, okay, if we're going to do this, we're going to have to do it this way.

Um, you know, if we're going to, if we're going to be able to actually um I mean competes the wrong word, cause we weren't really selling it or anything but we had a webpage.

Like in 2000, we put up a webpage to to let people play this game, as we were making it.

Yeah.

And at that time, were you sort of Bay 12 games?

Were you going under this name and everything?

Yeah, yeah.

It was bay12games.com.

That was the website.

Put it up in December 2000.

It still exists.

Yeah, and it looks about the same, too.

Even worse, really.

I think it looks worse than we did before because someone designed the original one and they used like this kind of a negative image of the international space station or something like that.

And had, that was kind of the image on the webpage.

It looked kind of cool.

And then at some point we just decided to redo the graphics.

But then it was just me trying like, Oh gosh, it's worse than my space.

Okay, if you leave it the same for long enough.

Basically, this aesthetic style will just come around in a loop.

And at some point we'll be on trending.

And I think, which will probably be soon.

To be honest, it's about time, but uh, yeah.

But then we glowed up the game.

So we jumped out of the cycle, but, uh, now it's, uh, I mean that, that, that, that, uh, Slaves to Armok though.

That was a RPG built from the bottom up.

We we had a very bad design philosophy back then where we we knew that, like our drag sleigh game, the C one was very complicated.

It was actually really fun game.

We have the kind of procedural maps and and run around uh, Just in this kind of just fighting things basically.

But the damage system was so interesting.

And you had these kind of party with you and so forth that you could hire and go to cities and so forth.

It was just kind of like, I don't know if it was like a Kenshi experience or something like that.

But it was kind of just this really entertaining game.

But it sort of collapsed under its own weight um, because i was still learning how to structure things, you know, and make them future proof, and so we're you mean.

When you say collapsed under its own weight, do you mean like technically, in regards to like bugs or, you know, tech debt coming from the game, or do you mean like in a design sense, as the player playing it?

Yeah Yeah, it was the design.

I mean, we're talking about Armach.

Yeah, no, no, no, sorry.

It was the Dragslayer.

C. Dragslayer.

Oh, C. Dragslayer.

That was a little earlier.

Yeah, yeah.

No, that was definitely... C. Dragslayer died because...

I was writing it originally when we had to structure things differently because of how much memory we had available and stuff like that.

And that led to certain decisions that we couldn't then carry forward.

And also, I just didn't know how to do modular stuff as well.

And you were saying then that informed your design philosophy for our mark.

Yeah, yeah.

It was a bad. bad decision actually.

The decision was we need to build from the ground up and we need to plan it first, which is, I mean, these are good things in a sense, planning first.

You know you like to plan first, but we wanted to plan out this whole complex situation from the.

From the bottom up meant like tissues bones, hair on your you know really.

Just kind of like you were doing like a race car game with 50 parameters on the tires, you know?

And we even had an editor where you could create these creatures.

And we actually had a tiny community.

And the community is really what made Dwarf Workers work.

But in the beginning, we had just a tiny, like, I don't know, about 10 people or so.

And we let them have this editor thing.

And they created, you know, the more crazy of these, of these guys created like one, created the bovine, which is like a cow.

Yeah.

He was Italian.

And he was like, in English, you just don't have a word for a cow.

Right.

There's bulls and cows.

But.

What is the like non non gender?

Just what is the animal?

And so he's like, it is called the bovine or whatever.

And so this is cow.

And that was I mean, we didn't really have any animals in the game except rabbits.

So we were happy to have that there.

But we're also like experimenting with materials and effects and stuff.

So I remember there was this demon that we made that looked like a big head with spider legs coming out of it yeah, but we had the.

The eyeball tissue was made out of a different material that was affected by sunlight so it'd catch on fire and so whenever you saw them in the daytime they'd be walking around and their eyes would just light up and burn and it just all this stuff.

Yeah, there's all these chemical reactions in these really specific uh uh body parts and stuff like that.

But how do you make a game out of this?

Because we're like let's throw in a magic system and you could teleport people's skin off their body next to them and stuff and rip their noses off.

It would update the models and stuff.

It's all really cool.

Right.

It's like what is a game if it's just about body part damage and that's it?

Yeah, it reminds me more of these kind of things you might see in your steam discovery queue where it's just like hey, take these stick figures and throw them in this saw or whatever.

Right, it's just kind of which is a whole genre now, i guess, which is it's fine uh, but it sounds like it sounds like the kind of game to get you on some kind of fbi list as well.

It's like body destruction simulator.

Yeah, we're like a little old for that.

I mean, if we were 10 years younger, I think we would have been on all the lists, probably.

So we're talking obviously, about Drag, Slay and Slaves to our Monk Lake.

How long are we talking about you two spending on these games?

Like how long on drag, slay until you, you know.

Then you put it on the shelf and then slaves to our mock.

Yeah.

93 to 2000 for drag slay, I'd say 2000 to 2004 for our mock.

And that's.

But of course that that runs right into the story of door fortress, because our mock, uh was was going along just fine yeah, and dwarf fortress came along and just sort of cannibalized it and sucked it right.

Yeah, i mean the whole time.

I mean the just certain example of how much time we spend making computer games.

The whole time that we had been making drag, slay and armog and dwarf workers, we had about five other projects going on at the same time.

We even had uh, we had one that was called space junk, that had like uh, there was like space the old game, space war, but it was with uh uh, modular spaceships.

I mean there's some, there's some uh, there's some games out there now thing where you could like yeah, exactly build out your ship yeah yeah, it was like it was on quads, with textures right, and this is like years and years before this kind of revolution that's going on on steam now with these kind of spaceship.

Yeah, these voxel ships yeah, and this never saw the light of day.

That was going to be my next question.

Yeah yeah, so did any of those other games see the light of day?

Yes, but only later.

When we got the webpage up, none of the old games made it in, but we started writing a bunch of crap.

While we were doing Armach, we put up World War I.

Medic, Liberal Crime Squad are the two games that people might have heard of or a few people played, and then there were like 15 others that were all worse, all stupider and none and none of it, except for world war one.

Medic and liberal crime squad reflect our old output.

Yeah, like there was so much cool stuff back in the past there, but door fortress took all the creative yeah.

So before we get on to Duel Fortress, I'm really interested to know, because you're making all these games and obviously it sounds like you two are the kind of guys that can go deep on something you know, can just catch your interest and go deep on.

You know the ability to teleport someone's skin off or something like that.

Or you know Imtan.

When we met in 2016, I remember you were deep in the middle of coding instruments for Duel um, for a dual fortress.

So when you have this kind of, this style of working, i would say like, how do you actually reach a point and where you get that realization?

And what's the process of taking something like say, drag slay you work on for seven years?

What's the process of going okay, this is, this is done.

We're going to put this on the shelf.

It's enough of that.

We've reached the end of this sort of this development conclusion, right?

Is it just because zach, i think, as you're maybe hinting at other games, take your attention away and it's a natural sort of parting with each game, or how do you go through that process of putting one down?

We run them into the ground until they're dead, until the design yeah right, until the design uh, just has some block.

Or i remember like, with like the third iteration of that space junk game we had.

We had one and We had this thing called the error that we did not understand at all because it was one of our – the error.

And it was like you play the game for about a half hour and then all the input stops working.

And we had no idea why.

It was just totally inexperienced.

And kind of like alluding to one of the things you asked before, we're all just self-taught.

No computer science education that mattered.

Like I did three classes in – in college, but I knew everything in them.

It was just pointless.

And and.

At a university, Washington at the time you couldn't go into a computer degree unless that was like your thing.

Like that's because of like the Microsoft connection, all that kind of stuff.

So I didn't do a computer degree.

But the error was it turned out.

Years and years and years later.

Yeah, I learned this later, later, later.

I was going to ask whether it haunts you still today.

Yeah, I know.

I figured it out.

I figured it out that we were using a joystick.

So there's joystick support on this game where you can rotate this ship.

And we weren't clearing the message pump properly.

So it would fill up over time with joystick input that wasn't being cleared properly.

And then the thing would just die, but only a half hour in.

And so there's no way for me to figure that out without understanding Windows architecture better.

So we were so angry about that.

It was a really fun game because that's like a forced exit, basically like something to use this stay on the space theme.

Someone just hit the airlock and you guys got sucked out of that project.

Basically like there's yeah, it's against your will yeah, it happened all the time, happened all the time.

So let's do it let's, let's dive into dwarf fortress.

When was when did the first sort of inkling of this game, this idea, this concept, come in during slaves?

Was it before slave sarmox uh development, or was it during it?

Like something started pulling you in a particular direction, some little brain worm?

I imagine it was one of the.

It was one of these, one of these projects we were working on simultaneously right uh, It was during Slave Star.

October 2002.

Right.

And it was also it was also just Tarn started this idea.

And then it was like when it became time that it looked like something that might actually work for a game, for a bigger game than than we.

Then he called me and then we were like okay, we can get this to work, but yeah yeah, you should describe a lot of these side projects are right, the games that are too stupid for zach to be involved right, it's a proving grounds and you need to come back with the hunt.

Yeah, of course right, like i had my, i actually had my own games.

I was writing at the same time and they met a similar fate.

But it's like you should describe what uh, what was?

What was Dwarf Fortress like?

Before it was Dwarf Fortress.

Yeah.

Cause we went so in October 2002, which is kind of like right in the dead center of all of these kind of text game side projects, I was like I want a game where I can mine.

Right.

I was like, like Dig Dug and Boulder Dash type of things.

And and uh, There's an old one called Spelunker, not Spelunky, but the main one I was thinking of was like VGA miner, miner VGA, depending on if you look at the title screen or the EXE file or whatever.

And you literally just go down to elevator and mine, get minerals and bring it back.

And so we're like okay, we're going to set up a mining game, because it's really fun, because you carve out the space.

And you're kind of exploring in this space, bringing things back.

I mean, now there's so many of these games like Terraria and stuff like that.

It was basically like a Terraria type game where you'd go out.

Except it was turn-based at first.

And you're like, it's called Mutant Miner.

You're a Miner.

And you get a pickaxe or whatever a shovel and you mine down and you do find minerals and bring them back to get some money.

But you also find, like these Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, mutagen canisters right to get and you bring back to the mutator and you start growing arms and other things that are going to help you mine better.

And you can also make like a cloning vat and like make a new miner.

And now you've got two miners that you're controlling.

And this is where I when I was just like spitballing this all in one day.

This is where the original design kind of started falling apart, because it's just like those old, like SSI games where you're controlling your party and then 40 orcs get to move.

It's like.

Everyone gets to move.

And so you're sitting here controlling these miners, and there's also, like some hostile, slime type creatures down underground.

And it was just like way too much.

Yeah.

And I guess at that point it had that puzzle element of like as you move, everyone else moves and things.

Yeah.

It was kind of like a strategy, like tactical RPG type thing.

Uh, and it just really, but, but the, the, the map was bigger than one screen.

So the camera would also like give you whiplash while I was shooting between the different people.

It's just terrible.

So yeah, so we took all of that and and and this is, and.

Then we're like okay, this is one, but I knew there was something there.

So uh, this is.

This is around the time.

I called up Zach and I Basically the conversation began like we need to make this into a real-time game.

It needs to be a game where you're more abstractly controlling these people.

You're not just moving them.

You're clicking on their goals and stuff like that.

And then we're like, And this whole mutant thing is just stupid.

So let's let's, let's think of something you know that's going to be more resonant and immediately just jump on dwarves.

Right.

Because we're all big Tolkien fans over here and crap like that.

So and so we we just talked about that for like it was like two days just like talk for like eight hours on the phone and call again.

And so you two weren't you you're living separately.

Yeah, this was down when I was in grad school.

So I was I was down in California for grad school and Zach was up in Washington working and.

So separate by a couple of states, but we were basically calling each other every day to talk about video games anyway.

So let's pause on this for a second, because this is an interesting sort of element of like how you're even collaborating together right,

Like how were you, what was your kind of version control?

How were you actually working together, excuse me, working together logistically?

Yeah, so I'm the programmer on the projects generally.

Zach had some side ones he was working on, but for the ones that were released on the website.

So we didn't technically need version control between us.

It was just design talk, though.

There was a lot of design talk.

And we just kind of wrote things down on tablets.

There was not a kind of internet sharing thing at all, maybe emails.

We've usually emailed stuff back and forth, like an email, a document, email it back and that kind of thing, and um, that that was uh, for at least seven years of starting in 2000.

Wow, and so how, how old, how old are you guys at this at this time?

Like what are you?

You said you're in grad school.

So for those of us outside of, outside of the states, Oh yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

This this would have been for me.

Math is weird too because, like generally, if you're going to get a PhD, you just skip the master's degree in the US.

But all of the all of the people coming from outside all had master's degrees coming in.

So so we're all different ages and stuff.

Yeah.

I must have been 22, 23 at this time.

Yeah, okay.

So you're in your mid-20s as well then, Zach, when you're... Yeah, I was like 25, 26.

Cool.

And you guys, what were... This is the thing that eludes me as well.

What were you doing for work?

How were you actually paying the bills?

What were you... what were you doing?

Was it actually was at this, at this point, was your website actually supporting you in some way, shape or form, or?

No, no, no, no.

The PayPal button came in 2006.

So six years, six years with nothing.

But those those six years happen to line up with when I was in grad school.

Yeah.

OK, right.

The nice thing about mathematics is that they need people to teach.

Basically every undergrad coming in, or most of them teach a couple of math classes.

And so grad students in mathematics get paid just enough to live.

Yeah yeah, a little step in to yeah, but it's not like you have to go find support for yourself.

That it's just um, it's just enough.

Yeah, okay.

And what were you up to at the time, zach?

Oh, i was just working whatever, whatever stupid job i could find.

I was like, just like, i worked at a gas station, i worked at the naval shipyard loading aircraft carriers with food.

Yeah, i just Stuff like that.

Anything that permitted you to focus your time on games.

Right.

Yeah.

Hell yeah.

All right.

So let's go back now.

So you get this call, Zach.

You have these two long eight-hour calls.

And then what's the next step from there?

Yeah.

So the result from those eight-hour calls was like we're going to make a game called Dwarf Fortress.

It's going to be about a group of dwarves, not a group of mutated miners, a group of dwarves.

Yeah, so once again, it was like Tolkien, right?

You just dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, and then die.

Yeah.

That was the log.

Balrog is there some way.

Right, right.

Well, you know, we don't talk about that because the token estate.

Yeah, no Mithril, no Balrog, no Hobbit.

Not in this game, yeah.

No, but the cool thing about it was because we've been into these roguelite games for so long.

Actually, it was right at this point in the phone call where we're like and then there's going to be an adventure mode.

Like this is going to be really that early.

Yeah.

So you, so you make this, this fortress.

And then there's, like your different craft workshops and mining tunnels, just the natural layout, like Dungeon Keeper or whatever, just this kind of simple layout.

That you've created yourself.

And then you're going to go in there with a character and explore it.

So you know where everything is.

Except it's going to generate additional information, like little diaries and stuff like that, for you to find.

And you're here to discover.

Rob as many treasures as you can.

And so your original fortress creates your maximum high score.

Your adventurer realizes up to that maximum high score if they don't get killed, if they can get out with some treasure.

And it's basically, in a sense, an arcade game almost because of that system.

It was turn-based, so it's a lot like NetHack or something.

Yeah, yeah.

It really is a roguelike game where you don't have a procedural map.

Yeah.

And, yeah, two-week.

Oh, sorry.

Sorry.

No, no, no.

Two months.

Two months scope.

October to December.

Two months scope.

What are we at?

Year 20?

Year 23?

I used to tell the anecdote of like, when we started Armello we were like let's just do a card game six weeks, you know, because we'd shipped a bunch of games together at a couple of studios and we're like six weeks.

And then it took us. what did it take us 2011 to 2015?

It took us like four and a half years.

And I tell that story is like, but you have just, Your joke is better.

The punchline is a little harder.

Especially because it's October to December.

It's one of those things where we're like, we'll be done by Christmas, you know?

Just like World War II or whatever, you know?

Just like the dwarves thought starting their little mine, right?

In and out, going home for Christmas.

Yeah, we dug too greedily in too deep and now we're paying for it, so okay.

So then what's the like?

So you start and you say, two months, when does it?

When does it start to sort of dawn on you that there there's more there like?

Because obviously i imagine, as you're approaching that two months, it's becoming very clear that this isn't a little thing.

Did the game just grab you like others?

You know how a project like grabs you and it takes you.

Did this one grab you like nothing else was there?

Did the?

Did the um?

The possibilities just sort of unfurl themselves in front of you.

What, what happened?

I think we started to notice the things that you know the rest of the industry noticed about Dwarf Fortress is like this stuff is really working.

Yeah.

Being able to dig out a room and then designate it as a bedroom, and then create a workshop and craft different things.

It's like we could see that this was going to be big.

Yeah.

Definitely bigger than Slaves to Armog.

Yeah, in 2002 help me with my video game history here like around this time, were there any?

Were there any real like colony sims out there, as opposed to like, i think, maybe tropico, those caesar type games and stuff like we never even played dungeon keeper too but, but we played dungeon keeper, those cleopatra type games, and There were a bunch of cool strategy games, of course, out then.

And even things like The Sims maybe were out right then.

Sims was out in 2001.

Yeah.

So there's all of that kind of thing.

And dwarves had like very Sims-y elements immediately, because you have these little people running around under their own power.

Yeah.

And more so than like a Cleopatra Walker, which is kind of good.

Yeah.

Cause the Sims, the Sims, you can make your own, you make your own house.

It's funny too, because when when I first went during the steam, when the steam revolution happened, when we were making we had a, I had my wife try to try to play dwarf fortress and she was a big Sims player.

So she, yeah. made a bunch of above ground houses like the Sims.

I was like, no, you're going to dig down or you're not doing this right.

That's amazing.

How did that go for you?

Was it the right decision safety wise or like of just building above ground?

How did you know if you're not digging down to the dangers down below Right?

Well, people don't know that you have to dig to build.

It's easier to build, and also you need the underground crops yes right and stuff like that flooding flooding yeah she just flooded herself yeah which happens to everyone so talking about people playing this game now i so you two are making it when was the first time that someone external to bay 12 or say your partners like actually got your hand their hands on this game so you did you have you've spoken obviously a huge part of dwarf fortress's success and the fact that you two have been able to keep developing it for so long is thanks to your community the was the community formed to some degree before dwarf fortress did you have a little band of Your own dwarves following you along on this little adventure?

Yeah, it was the slaves to Armak.

Yeah, the Armak people.

Really?

Yeah, Armak was going.

Yeah, Armak went until 2004, right?

There's this process we were just kind of alluding to here where from 2002, we get Dwarf Fortress starting at the end and we notice immediately that it's going to be a more interesting game, faster to work on, because we're doing text graphics.

It's in the same genre, roughly.

It's like a fantasy sort of role-playing game because of Adventure Mode, as all of our previous ones Armok Drag Slay, all that.

And so Armok just didn't have a chance.

But...

We had, you know, by then maybe 50, 60 people following our mock.

And so we had as, as Dwarf Fortress is sucking all of these features out of our mock, so easy to put in.

And we're still like promising and did for two years, these kind of our mock releases and stuff.

But eventually in 2004, we just kind of said, okay, we're going to just set Armach down.

We told people in the community we're going to set Armach down work on Dwarf Fortress seriously for as long as it takes to get a release up.

But to bring them along for the ride, knowing that, like Slaves to Armach was our, I mean even Sea Drag Slaves.

It was a fantasy world generator.

They had map generation.

Dwarf Fortress didn't have that originally.

We have this map generation and these all these things happening like sea drags.

They had these ogres and things and dragons that would attack cities when you weren't there.

Just this whole active world.

And we kind of didn't get to that part in Armog because we started from the bottom up or whatever.

But this was a promise for people like and a lot of people were looking forward to that because of the promise of games like all the Ultimas and where kind of Elder Scrolls looked like it was going at the time.

Yeah.

Like with that with Daggerfall being so much more procedural.

Yeah.

And then the subsequent ones that everyone was kind of looking at this all these 50 people.

And when I say everyone.

And saying like, okay, this is another promising candidate for a game that I'm interested in, right?

Yeah, there's some overlap there in the interests, yeah.

And then we tell them that it's going to stop, right?

And we're working on Dwarf Fortress, which is just kind of this thing.

They don't really know much about.

But to carry them along and to tell them we are going in the same direction, that is why Dwarf Fortress for, you know, 17 years was called Slaves to Armach, God of Blood, Chapter 2, Dwarf Fortress.

It has a particular ring to it, don't you think?

Yeah, it's got two colons, so it must be good.

Yeah, twice as good as a game with one colon, that's for sure.

The only thing we were missing is one of those, like, apostrophes in a random word, right?

Yeah, true.

But that's, you know, then the Tolkien estate might get a little bit too interested as well.

Yeah.

Okay now an interesting sort of element that I'm seeing come through here as well.

When you talk about this, when you talk about the community, you talk about the website, the PayPal button, trying to find your own little success in hopefully getting to print out some discs and put them in your own Grammy bags and send them out, is that.

I'm sure a lot of people perceive Dwarf Fortress and Bay 12 and the two of you as sort of maybe this idealistic, like non-sellout version of developers that are just, you know, slave away on this one game for 23 years and they're just so committed and they're sort of anti-capitalist or something.

But it actually sounds like that you did have some sort of commercial sensibilities from the start that you were looking to.

You know, commercialize this in some way, shape or form.

Am I correct there?

Like, were you thinking at this point in time, like were you just kind of tinkering and happy for people to play it, or would, every now and then, would you think like cause you're even talking about Oh, there's some overlap here.

We're not going to lose our community.

Or I mean, keeping them was important, not for monetary reasons, right?

Because they weren't monetized at that point.

Yeah, it wasn't monetized at all.

It wasn't how we were thinking about it.

But it's cool to have people play your game.

Like, these games don't work without players in a –

In a sense that's stronger than like.

Of course, the game needs a player, but we need the stories to be written and shared.

Right.

It's a community.

It's a community experience.

And we so we needed to have those people around.

They were giving us great input to, you know, and but we didn't have.

From the beginning, through high school college, all this stuff.

I think we were alluding to this before.

It was kind of one of these questions we only half answered before us.

We did not have any sense that there was a career possible in video game development at all.

In fact, we were less interested in making money.

The more it uh, the more money we made.

Really like when we were able to, when we were able to to uh quit our jobs and and survive solely on Dwarf Fortress, that those were the happy times.

We didn't have to worry about money really.

And we also didn't have to worry about, uh, the business side of it.

And it wasn't until later when, much later when uh, when the bills started uh, getting worse and worse that that uh, we had to start thinking about steam and all that.

Yeah.

Then the pressure, your hobby became commercialized.

Right.

And then the pressure it's.

They say, the fastest way to suck the joy out of your hobby is to commercialize it.

Right.

Yeah.

And if we, if we had health care, free health care and UBI in this country, like the same thing wouldn't have happened.

Yeah.

We would have just been doing dwarfs just just content with our content with how things were going.

But that was not the situation in the United States.

You know, we we had, you know, the health problems.

And yeah.

Yeah amazing, so it.

So it's kind of do you think that the your um how would i put it like your lack of interest in that's commercialization, let's say, came from trying things earlier and it's sort of not happening and just being like, because i remember when i first got into games I didn't even know that you could make them.

Like my approach to games was the complete opposite of yours.

I played mainly console games as a kid and our computers at home were like work computers that my parents had.

And they were scared, the classic thing that viruses come from games.

So you know, I had I think there were like four or five PC games that I ever played in my life at home because I had to launch a six month long campaign to like convince my parents that the work computers and their business as a result would be safe if I played a video game on them.

So for me, video games are kind of like a magical thing that came off a conveyor belt.

And so I actually had zero aspirations to become a game developer, because I saw no possibility of becoming one.

I didn't understand.

Do you think it was kind of the same in regards to commercialization for you two?

Because you'd had a little shot earlier on and then thought oh, this is just too much of a long shot.

And you just were so content just making the games, having people play them anyway.

Yeah, I mean, hardly even a long shot.

It still didn't seem like a possibility.

Like, they seemed like a super track, right?

It was like ASCII.

How could it possibly sell anywhere, right?

Yeah, totally.

I get it.

You're not even on the, it's not like just further down the path or you've got to try harder.

You're just doing it completely different.

And there was this.

There was this idea like like, when we talked about briefly near the end of high school, this idea that maybe a shareware thing could happen is the only kind of aspiration at all that we had about doing this.

And when we heard from literally zero people like no one, then we're like well OK, that then.

That just doesn't work.

And it kind of – it actually fits in with our other experience of this earlier on, where we had like Commander Keen as kids and we sent some money, I think, to Texas or wherever to get like an official, whatever copy of it or whatever, and we didn't hear back.

And so we're like this shareware thing is just a dead zone.

It's just nothing is there.

Yeah.

Not only does it not give, it also takes.

So Texas fat cats like sitting there with your cash.

Well, I love that.

And I love the notion of, you know, having this community that is especially working in simulation games.

It's almost like a you know this sort of thing, like if you code a tree to fall in the forest, does it actually happen?

If it's not rendered on anyone's screen?

You know like it's and when was the?

So let's let's jump ahead a little bit to when was the first release to your community?

How long were you working on the game?

Were you at that time a pretty you know?

I think it's become more of a trend that people develop games and they just get them out pretty early, early access or even open development.

Were you getting really early versions of the game out?

Or even back then, were you like version sort of 10 for the community is like six months of development or something?

It was four years.

I mean, 2002 and we put it out in August 2006.

We wanted it.

Wow.

And no, no, even play testers behind the scenes.

Maybe there was a few people, but not really.

And we put out one.

We went to like use net and put out one thing in 2004, like halfway in where we had our, our dragon, like our D, come in but then shoot this giant real time.

Uh, colorful in 16 colors, but colorful kind of blocks that faded out.

There was just like.

Unlike anything you'd see in any roguelike game or anything, it's just way more impressive looking.

And we're just like, Hey, this is coming sometime.

And then, two years later, uh we uh, Because we felt like it needed to cross a threshold where it would appeal to those roguelike people.

Like it needed to appeal to some group of people to prove that we were – we kind of turned a corner.

Well, I don't know.

I can't speak for Tarn, but for me, I remember one of the Usenet things was –

We wanted to be one of the five top roguelikes.

Yeah, the big five rec.roguelikes where there's like NetHack, ADOM, Lauren for some reason, Moria.

I mean, Lauren's great, but yeah, people don't hear of it.

And then you're like wondering, is that one of the big five or whatever?

We wanted to be in that list.

Yeah, just amazing.

He's on Dora Fortress, you know?

And it never happened, but yeah.

Well, where are they now?

Look at you, look at you, top of steam.

So, okay, so you release, so you're working on it for four years.

Before we get to release.

How did you form that vision of You've sort of given us one bit of inspiration that you just had, Zach thinking of an end goal.

But how do you approach a game like Dwarf Fortress which, like we said, is now 23 years in development and ongoing?

What does a 1.0 even look like in your heads as you're sort of moving towards it?

You knew that you had Adventure Mode.

You have this simulation.

What was the original scope of v1.0 that you wanted to release to your community and the world?

Well, the very original scope was that... Let's see...

I think your adventure would do this.

And it had something to do with Indiana Jones.

Yeah.

We had a whole weird scope with like with, like archaeology and Nazis and like 10 different ages that went forward and stuff like that that we were originally pointing toward this very different weird game about how adventure mode goes forward in time.

Uh, and that yeah, it's just the strangest thing.

And there was like the evil, even the evil archaeologists, they because i mean, i get that the first movie has an evil archaeologist which is just like you gotta have that then right, and and and it was just this, this whole strange thing, that that we were kind of aiming toward and still, and we were aiming toward that for like a few years after release.

Even it's kind of a secret, kind of.

But the funny thing was in 2006, when we released it, we had never told anybody about Adventure Mode.

It was a surprise on the release.

Oh, wow.

That it even existed.

And they just knew this Fort Mode game was coming like this weird.

Like you know, when we told the community hey, we're working on this successor game to our game, but it's like our RPG, but it's also a game where you control a colony of dwarves.

You just got to trust us.

It's like, and it just ended up having the, the secret RPG in it.

But, but it was.

It was like the time of the release, like the like cause.

The original release was I remember it was 023 or something like that.

Like we knew it wasn't 1.0 and we were very clear.

Yeah about that.

We had this list of features that constitute 10 that we still use today, like the steam version 05 is halfway through that list.

It's basically the same list amazing, and it was just checking off different things that we thought we would.

It's funny because the the list had like tutorials, graphics and all that kind of stuff and that constituted like one percent.

Like that was worth like 001.

Yes.

So we just ticked up the steam number just a teeny bit.

Cause we went from like 047 to 050 with the steam release after three years, which is, I mean we're going to take another 50 years to finish.

Well, you know, it's trouble.

So what was... I mean, you release it to these... At that point, was it still around 50 people?

When... In... What would it have been?

2006?

200 people, I think.

Oh, right.

So it had grown over time.

Well, really large.

Yeah, 200 people.

Right.

Bringing people in, yeah.

Yeah.

So, like, at some point there, something awful was created.

And we got...

They didn't pick us up until after the release, though.

Right.

Yeah.

So it was like the 200.

It's funny.

I think it was like we may even know the number of something like 213 when we checked it.

It's like because that number went up after the release.

But, but like four months before, there's just complete random luck here.

Four months before, in April, which is my birthday month in 2006, one of these 200 people was like you know hey, because we were showing screenshots and stuff, right.

Maybe even a few more little videos.

And they were like, you know, hey, we really, you know, dig what you're doing here.

I'd like to send you $75 for your birthday.

And so we're like, I'm sort of like, how does that even work?

Right.

We don't know.

And so, but someone's like no, you can just set up a PayPal tip jar.

And uh, and so it was literally one of your community members that alerted you to the fact that this could be, this would even work.

And then, and then it wasn't even thinking about it commercializing.

It was to get 75 bucks, and so it was you just to get your birthday present.

Yeah yeah, i'll set it up yeah, yeah.

And so we just, and we're like, when we set it up, we're like well, how do we show it to this person?

Well, you got to put it on your page, and so we just left it there, just threw it up on the page.

Yeah, and uh, yeah.

Then when we released it, like that month, we made eight hundred dollars um nice, which is a eight hundred dollars more than your original shareware attempt.

So yeah yeah yeah, that's like 875 if you count the old one, the 75 bucks.

So It was.

It was kind of like it was weird.

I mean, it's all kind of fits into this, to this, to this story of like you know, at like, two months before that, I quit my math job because I was like I didn't know that.

Like, we didn't even think that Dwarf Fortress was going to work.

We thought it was going to be popular, but I didn't think it was going to make money to live on.

Yeah.

But at that point, I didn't care.

Yeah.

We're just going to kind of see what happens for a couple of years, because I had some savings from the math job.

Yeah.

And Zach was still working.

And so we're just like, OK, we'll just see what happens.

Yeah.

And by now you're in your mid 20s, I imagine, as well.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

Perfect time to just throw caution to the wind and give it a shot.

Yeah.

28, 20 years old, unmarried, you know, I didn't have any independence or anything.

Yeah.

Well, the only dependents were, what, 40 dwarves or something like that?

Or seven to begin with.

And however many.

And they're all going to die anyway.

We're not going to send them to college, just like Zach's dog.

It doesn't go to college.

Don't have to worry about it.

Not a long-term investment.

Yeah okay so um, so you met, you make 800 bucks um.

Now again, we're talking about 23 years worth of development here and what like?

19 of them are post-release of 0023 or whatever it is when.

When was the like?

Was it in?

Was it an immediate sort of like um brush fire with the community?

Were they immediately engaged with it?

What was the initial response from the community?

Like, obviously we've heard you made 800 bucks, but their reception.

And when you, like, it's the first time, like you said, you had people actually in playing the game.

Okay.

They absolutely loved it.

I mean, that was the deception.

And they would go immediately.

I felt bad about this.

They went to a bunch of other forums and were just like – I remember this one guy was just like here ye, here ye, here is the game.

And I'm like, we hated it when people did that on our forum.

It's like spamming, right?

It's like spamming.

Yeah, we ended up making like a special area for people, you know, able to do that.

But but it was just especially because we felt guilty about having done it to so many other people.

But it's still that.

That that's why it got to like.

You know those students in the UK that wrote a really funny story before something awful.

And then.

Yeah, it's just like, yeah.

But when those websites like something awful started taking off, I mean.

I think it was a story of the elephants catching on fire and storming through and destroying the fortress.

Or the carp eating the dwarves.

Giant goldfish eating dwarves.

That just took off on something awful. like that, that was the big one.

I think that was, yeah.

Zach, if you could just explain for our listeners who aren't familiar with it what is something awful and what is this kind of inflection point that you're talking about for the game?

So I wouldn't know how to describe something.

Something awful is like a message board thing.

I think it's kind of like a forums type forum.

And it has a, it has an interesting like subscription structure where you have to like pay 10 bucks.

It's like a, it's like a humor.

Yeah.

Humor thing.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

And we don't actually know all that much about it.

We were not members.

Uh, I think it wasn't our mother.

Yeah, they said it.

They offered to let us be members so that we could read our own threads about the game, and we gave it to our mom because she wanted to read the threads.

So she became an expert.

We had really the first community manager for Bay 12 was your mom.

We called her the samurai.

She was out there like, like judging people and like telling us you know that this is, this is proper behavior or whatever.

And and, like you know, this is and you should always have clear decisions.

You know and uh, she did moderate before.

Basically it was pretty bad.

I love it, keep it, keep it in the family.

So um, it's this, because this is a really, really interesting part of dwarf fortresses development.

There's so many obviously interesting parts over the.

You know the 23 years that you've been working on this game and beforehand the titles that came before it, but you know, like the community and other things,

But one of them is just the word of mouth, these emergent stories.

And I mean, you obviously you create the simulation you put it out there into the world and i'm sure that the both of you as i mean we just had a build review of our game jump light odyssey that we're working on which is you know like a space colony sim on a ship like star blazers inspired And in the build review, a bunch of stuff happened that, you know, we hadn't, we've got the system set up there, but you don't ever think about those outcomes, you know, 10 actions down the chain of cause and effect of your systems.

So this, like, tell me about how you both felt. in and i'm kind of interested in two regards one is designers and creators like did it just kind of blow your minds what people are actually experiencing in this simulation or did it did it track with your expectations and then the other part is how did it feel just watching these stories appear and like did it bring a bunch of folks to the game from that as well it definitely is yeah it's like the primary uh way that news is spread about the game is the crazy uh the crazy stories that have occurred and it's just because it's so complicated it's like we were saying earlier it's like the the there's so much going on that you can't see like uh like the uh right now there's a giant weather simulator going on and it just, you can't even look at the sky in this game.

There's no way to, there's no way to see it, but there's like, it's happening.

It's happening.

There's like weather financing, human cumulus clouds and all that stuff.

And it's like, uh, there's rain shadows that cause the deserts to appear and it's, it's invisible.

Yeah.

But like but but it was just yeah, it was amazing to see.

We did not expect what happened.

Like we knew, like we had seen like forums like for these roguelike games right, where people would go on like Rektok roguelikes or whatever.

But they're like yeah, he has it.

Or YSD stories.

They're yet another stupid death stories.

They share them.

People really enjoy that.

But I had never seen – it probably happened quite a bit, but I had never seen a YASD story like in some other forum, somewhere that was just kind of – and then spreading virally around the internet, right.

Even though they're really funny because the game is very kind of – like if you understand in – net hack that you can like dip dip a sword into a fountain to make an excalibur or something it's a very like esoteric type of story yes especially because there's a lot of numbers too about like i have a plus seven this and stuff like that right so and that's oh we don't have numbers in dwarf fortress for that reason no it's similar to the body part damage it's like we want to We want to simulate everything.

Yeah.

Instead of someone saying I was low on hit points, they can say I had a broken ankle.

And, you know, people understand that that's going to resonate with more people.

And so we we, we knew what made good stories and we knew that our game was generating good stories as we were working on it.

But we didn't know that that was going to have this powerful effect on the Internet, because we didn't understand the Internet at all.

Like back at that time, we understand it a little bit better now.

But in 2006, we still had no real understanding of what the internet was like.

It was just forming too at this point.

Yeah, true.

You're kind of building it, I guess, as well, like, you know, in some way.

So did this in a design sense?

Did this kind of seeing these stories?

Did it pour fuel on your fire?

Obviously you're doing these kind of.

The whole point of this game is to create these simulation, right?

That has these effects.

But do you remember that there are like particular kinds of stories that you heard where you were like, oh well, if we do this in the game, then more of that could occur, or like, or was it just the more that you just stayed on track anyway, the more the more crazy shit they ended up happening anyway?

Yeah, I don't – the story has just happened.

I don't think we – Yeah, I mean they're inspirational in a way.

I mean, it's not like – very rarely kind of like this this this, especially when they're like building computers and stuff like that.

We just like sit back and like, OK, it was being in awe of people.

It's fine to just be in awe of people.

Yeah.

But it does let you know kind of what things.

But you do.

You do get a feel over time when you're making a thing like this, like what kind of mechanics are going to resonate.

And obviously seeing it happen is giving you feedback all the time.

And so I'm sure we're processing that even subconsciously.

Yes.

Processing?

What kind of feedback, what kind of I mean what kind of mechanics lead to better stories?

And then we end up putting more of those in the game.

Yeah.

And I like, it's just the norm now in video games, right?

We have live service games and early access and open development.

And I mean there are.

We have a community manager and a community content manager and a publishing producer right,

And these things, these roles, literally didn't exist in the industry when this was happening for you both.

They were sort of just coming online, what, like five years after or something.

Was there any kind of interaction with your community?

Do you remember requests that came out with that first one?

Were they like oh I, you know, because now when you release a game, it's like oh, everyone wants you to be able to change the FOV, or everyone wants to be able to, you know like, equip more weapons.

I'm just making stuff up here.

But was there, do you remember, any strong sort of responses for the community in regards to like taking the game in a particular direction, even if it's like small features or things they wanted to do that maybe weren't on your original roadmap?

And well, we have a entire like.

We had this website we were running and yeah, we have this entire section just for suggestions and that was yeah, huge.

We don't even read that as much as we should.

I mean, there's just so.

There's some bucks there.

It's so big and these threads like like someone will sit there and be like you need to put die in the game, but then there'll be like a 50 page thread about the history of die in the world and so forth.

Right uh, And and so what?

We ended up doing?

Sophistications of our fans with, like a system of like.

Okay, I'm going to bookmark this thread and put it in the craft section of my notes and stuff.

So like I can refer back to community knowledge on things, cause they do find all kinds of cool stuff.

And, uh, Yeah.

So it's just from the beginning, probably before the release.

I don't remember quite because we are Mark had a suggestion thing to think it's kind of already.

Yeah.

And the forum has grown over time.

Like we used to have a section, like we had seven sections in our forum just for different topics about the games.

And then we had one section at the end called Various Nonsense.

Now, you'd know now, never, never in a million years don't make that.

But we had to go through the process because this was before 4chan existed.

Yeah, that's it.

It's like the 4chan thread on your –

It came into being.

It just got way too way too screwed up.

Yeah.

Images were allowed back then.

Yeah.

And yeah, they started sharing all kinds of like like literature and so forth.

But it was funny though, because they had this one thread down there and they were allowed to move their own threads because there were so few of them that they would just.

They just kept it.

You know, they just cleaned up their mistakes, basically.

But someone went into the various nonsense section and made like the various non-sectioning moving battle fortress thread and would kind of move it throughout the forum and people would add to it.

It kind of reminds me now of when like Twitch people raid each other.

Yes, yeah, yeah, totally.

So people have been doing that from the beginning.

Once they have the tools to do that stuff, they'll just start inventing things, things like that.

Essentially, we had to break it up into five sections and uh, they all have purposes.

Yeah, the fun police came eventually, you know.

Okay, so sticking still with the original release and, you know, because it's such a fascinating time um, as a salient point in this game's development, those original stories that started to come to you through various methods, whether it be from your mum or the internet or whatever.

Was there one in particular for either of you that stood out that really blew your mind of like things that happened in your game or anything?

I mean, it's definitely Boat Murdered at first, right?

Probably Arch Crystals, but this is like way, way back.

Yeah, I'm talking about the release.

Yeah, the first one was Boat Murdered, as the something awful one on 2007, where they invented this thing called succession games, where you could pass your saves.

So you play a save for a year.

And or whatever.

But in this one, they played it for a year.

They write kind of from the perspective of a fortress manager.

What happened that year?

Yeah.

Diary of what happened that year.

And the game was producing some messed up stuff like these elephants that were on fire.

And like think like a butterfly dropped in a doorway and it means it couldn't close anymore, or whatever.

Just all kinds of problems that happened.

And they also incorporated adventure mode stuff into there, like going and visiting the old fortress afterward.

There was this, like, emperor that was on fire, burning, walking through the hallways and stuff.

And they went through like I don't know if it was 14 or 18 parts or something, just years and years later, trading the save around and some of the writers were just really good.

Yeah, i remember you get to like chapter three or four and then you're just like laughing your ass off or whatever.

And uh, that one got sent around everywhere.

So that was, that was the first one, but then there was so many other ones like the uh, hold on second time, what did you?

What did you call that first one?

Did you say boat murder, Boat murdered.

Yes.

Boat murdered.

What is boat murdered referring to?

It sounds like a particular event in that story.

It's the name of the fortress, actually.

Right.

The game will give you a dwarf name for your fortress.

Yeah, the dwarven language is actually has english translations to it, so that's uh okay right, it's hard turn wrote a bunch of, or he took a class in linguistics.

Yeah several several, several linguistics classes.

Uh what?

As i was trying to figure out like oh, i should double major and i'm like, And I never settled on anything.

I did so many different weird – because I was always a mathematician at college.

But then I worked in a genetics lab like grinding wasps with this drill and then pouring them.

I think I was trying to do animal behavior stuff.

And then I moved on to chemistry and that just didn't stick at all.

And then I moved on to linguistics.

I don't remember what else.

They tried to get me into economic geography.

Yeah, just yeah, there's a lot of stuff.

I never settled on anything, so i just had a math degree.

Yeah so, so you create.

So you created a game where you never have to settle on anything, exactly.

I mean, that's the thing.

You never get bored.

I mean you're working on a game for 20 years and literally never bored with it, because if you do get tired of what you're working on, there's like 50 other things you can write, at least like the side projects we were talking about a while ago.

It's like the uh, Like all of the energy from the side projects that were created.

Now are all going back into dwarf workers.

Dwarf workers have gotten so huge that they can actually accommodate all these things.

Yeah, it's the project of side projects.

This crazy stuff is happening.

We made 870 bucks.

There's stuff coming in from all ways from the Internet.

The possibilities of your game are now being like.

You're seeing them in the reflection of the community's plays and these incredible stories that they're coming together and writing.

What was the kind of release schedule from there on?

And I guess, what was the next big moment for the game that you can think of, whether it be in regards to features or sort of like a step ahead?

We've released a game in 2006.

We've got the donation button up.

What sort of comes next if you like zoom out and look at the life of Dwarf Fortress?

I don't remember which came first, but I think one of the biggest things that happened was when the game had its X or YZ.

Z coordinate.

The Z coordinate.

So like Dwarf Fortress is just one strip of a two-dimensional square that you're looking at.

And then we gave it a Z coordinate so you can see one slice above what's going on, a slice below what's going on.

And you can press a button to go up and down and see the different slices.

Like in the Steam version, you can actually look down and see like all the way to the bottom of the mountain Aeron, or whatever.

Yeah, exactly. but in a, because it's ASCII, you can't do that.

You can only show one layer at a time.

One layer at a time, but you can do that with this new, with this release.

And that one, uh, that was 2008, 2009.

Yeah.

That was a big deal.

Big, big, big deal.

I took nine months.

Right.

I remember, like we in a when we were making drag slay.

I remember we had a uh a discussion about drag slave, allowing you to look at up and down.

And we decided not to do it because of a?

Uh kind of a uh, was it a mind puzzle or or a puzzle that where you uh, how do you shoot an arrow down from the top of a wall?

And then for some reason we got it into our mind that that was impossible to show in in in just one slice at a time.

Yeah.

Cause you'd have to, in like in an ASCII game, like in a, in a 3d game, you can lean over, right.

Yeah.

Straight down.

But you, you know, it's much harder to display in the text.

So we're kind of like, But then we came back around to it because we were forced to put this back in, because when you're doing just one slice, like Dig, Dug or whatever, you've got moats.

You've got bridges over moats.

You could have a magma moat with a steel bridge over it, but then someone could pour water on top of the bridge and then there's water sitting on it.

And you have to come up with all these special cases, just all this special mechanical logic to make one layer work.

It was just like what if the water was actually sitting in memory above, in a different layer, so that everything can make sense.

And it just became so, so nice after that.

However, the thing with...

One slice.

See, in the original version, you get a nice cliff face.

You dig into it.

You hit a river.

Then you go further.

You hit a chasm that goes down into nothingness and there's bat people flying around and stuff.

Then you go further.

You hit a magma kind of river and then you go further and there's a bunch of demons and you die.

So that's kind of the structure.

There's a very kind of ordered structure.

To these layers that you're talking about?

Or do you mean before the layers?

This is before the layers.

There's one layer that has these rivers.

So let's take a moment here to pause, just for our listeners again, who may have just seen a screenshot of Dwarf Fortress or something.

Um...

The game is are we looking at a bird's eye view like yeah yeah, and then?

So, before the layers, you're looking at the game birds ivy you're, you're top down, you're watching your dwarves move around in your fortress and you're sort of digging from left to right or left to right.

Yeah, left to right.

Right is deep.

You see a bunch of little happy faces and a bunch of kind of periods and commas for grass and then there's just a bunch of like hash hashtags.

That's just like i am a wall Yeah.

And and then you can dig into that and then you see more like hashtag type things.

I mean, I'm saying hashtag is probably actually like an alt 178, which is a block.

But yeah, whatever.

There's just so people know it's like a solid thing.

You see the solid thing. thing as you dig deeper.

So, as you uncover one square, that becomes like a period, that's a floor, but then you're surrounded by these blockier looking things.

And then you dig again, you get another period and that's surrounded by blocks.

So you're looking down on this.

You can kind of tell that this is the stories that are spreading and not the, not the visuals that are spreading around.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

I just love like this when, cause I've done it before.

Obviously, I'm sure so many people have been through this process of like showing someone one of their friends.

Dwarf fortress.

Like, I mean just a screenshot as you're trying to explain it.

And the moment they see the art, if they're not familiar with games and ask you out, they're just like what the fuck is that?

Is that the game?

But it's so beautiful, how expressive it is and those the stories that come out of it.

Okay, so you add the layer, so we're going left to right, that's going deeper, but now you've added this, this other layer system where you can see behind and in front of Yeah,

And the problem with that is that you lose this structure, because there was kind of a built in story structure of hitting the river, hitting the chasm, hitting the magma, which was limiting in a sense, but also gave a very tight experience that we could play with and had for years.

Yeah.

Like tightening up what that was like and the progression, like you could only make steel once you got to the magma.

And there was a kind of a. progression of materials then as well.

Right, like a crafting or tech tree, mechanics and things as you go.

Yeah, and you can totally see it in games like Terraria that just did it that way, right?

It's basically Terraria tilted on its side at this point.

Great way to explain it.

Right, you have to go over this river, but then, when the 3D thing happened, I think Tarnas the mathematician can tell you that it's impossible to find a river in a three-dimensional cube, because it's just a line.

It's just a line.

So if you're digging around to left, to right, forward and back, you'll never find this line that's going through it.

But the original game, you automatically hit it.

Yeah, if you're just digging right, you're always going to hit a line that blocks you.

And now, so we had to like, well, how are we going to replace the rivers and water underground?

People were fishing and doing things with water.

So we had to have these giant sprawling lakes, kind of like these undersea type things.

Right.

But you would hit like tapping.

You would always hit those.

You would always hit those going down then.

And the same thing happened with the magma and the dry caverns.

And it just – but it loosened everything.

Like it just generally loosened everything up.

And this is something that's been, you know, gotten to be, you know, a worse and worse problem for the last 14 years where, since that's been in there where like, we have these really large layers that we need.

But it makes it harder to put in like little experiences like you found, like a temple that was buried underground or something like that.

Like you can do that, but it has to play nice with all the elevation slices and all the cuts and things like.

Games like Minecraft and stuff have been attacking these problems and come up with solutions for them.

And we're just kind of in a situation where our legacy code is just kind of older and harder to deal with.

So.

That's a whole.

Nother thing is this big map rewrite we're still planning to do in a few years to readdress that stuff.

And yeah, it's just essentially another Z coordinate size rewrite.

It just never ends.

And so that was the big one.

And Zach, when were you saying do you think that was the the, the Z coordinate thing when?

What year?

It was 2009, I'd say.

All right.

Yeah.

So not too long afterwards.

I mean, I think in the span of Dwarf Fortress' life.

Yeah.

That's what you asked for, right?

The first big thing.

Yeah.

Okay.

So you talk about it being looser in regards to the problem space and the design decision space that you're working within here?

That's obviously going to lead to this rewrite that you're talking about, but how was it for the players?

Like how, how did it change their experience and how was it received amongst your community?

I think it was, it was, it was mixed for that reason, right?

That, that some people wanted the origin.

There was a big, there was a big schism in the, yeah.

Cause we had speed runners, speed runners before.

Wow.

You know, But without the Z-coordinate there was no way to flood your fortress and kill everyone that way.

Yeah, which is obviously we need.

You've got to have that.

And one of these things that's fairly rare in games that we put in once we had the Z-coordinate was like water that goes down a tube and then up the other side.

We have water pressure.

And like a lot of games, like like Noida, for instance, which has really amazing kind of fluid systems and so forth.

It's just this game that has like a hundred different fluids or whatever.

It doesn't at least, you know, last I look doesn't have like a pressure.

It won't go up the other side because that's just that's just more, you know, CPU cycles.

It's harder or kind of a harder problem. especially with pixels.

Like for us, we don't have pixels.

We just have these larger tiles.

So it's easier to do things like pressure.

And that catches people off guard.

It's great.

Like you can see, just people get flooded because they don't expect when they.

Oh, I'm just going to pour the water down below.

It can't possibly do anything down there.

And it's like shoots right back up, floods the entire fortress.

Right.

That's one of the things that they say about dwarf orchards is that water is more dangerous than lava.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, because of this system and people's unexpected reactions from it.

Amazing.

Okay, so we're getting to 2009 or almost to 2010, but I mean, we're still...

We're still a decade away from where we are here.

So what's like... Let's just keep moving through these steps of development.

What sort of... What came after that?

Did you... Was there any particular influx of players from something?

Did the game... What's sort of increasing this game's notoriety?

Were there any landmark moments other than just some of these stories being shared?

I mean, I remember my first experience with the game, or well yes, experience with the game in the sense of hearing about it and like learning.

The legend of Dwarf Fortress was this incredibly beautiful long image that someone had drawn like an illustration about a dragon that they had awoken, or something like that.

And it stepped through it. in this incredible illustration.

I was like, what is this game?

And then I had that experience of like looking at it being like, oh shit, it's an ASCII game.

Okay.

Like beyond this, after the Z depth, what was one of the next big moments for you as well?

I would say the world activation.

Yeah, well, before that.

So we'll get to that.

So that's 2014, and that's definitely huge.

But the funny thing about this between 2009 and 2014, before the game is – because that was a big thing that made the simulation awesome.

Before any of that happened, we get the Museum of Modern Art.

In 2011, like this early.

Oh, really?

Oh, wow.

Okay.

Tell me about that.

Like the call, did they come through your mom as well?

Like is she your PR agent at this point in time?

How did you hear about, how did you know by getting in touch with someone?

We have sleeper cells all over the country of these tech workers.

The IT people.

The IT people that love Dwarf Fortress.

Yes, of course.

And so the MoMA.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

One of the people that worked at the MoMA.

Like an IT person from the MoMA.

Yeah, yeah.

He was an advocate for us.

And then the –

And this kind of was lined up with exactly the time when the New York Times Magazine published the article.

Because there's this whole other like parallel story to this of like when are we getting picked up by mainstream press and gaming sites and stuff?

And this was when, in like 2010 or 2011, we got picked up by the New York Times Magazine.

When Jonah Weiner came in, stayed in town for like five days or something.

It was four or five days or something, or maybe I four or five, it's hard to remember.

It's happened so many times now.

But like, like they're just just wanted to write about the game and just came like in situ, like lived with you for a bit and watched you guys work and yeah yeah, just did interviews and and and we hung out or whatever.

I remember we went to the city, that kind of thing because we were always living near seattle and stuff.

But yeah like, Like the – yeah, we did go to the city actually.

And so that put us on like also like New York radar.

It's like now we're over on the East Coast and this is kind of – and this is kind of like that also influenced the decision, because I guess they just got together in a coffee shop like –.

Jonah Weiner and Paul Antonelli, the curator of design at the museum.

And Paul Galloway handles all their computer stuff and also now does that kind of thing as well.

And somebody else.

It might have been the person who organizes 256 in Brooklyn, who You know.

So this is like kind of these people in that scene.

Yeah.

And now they're talking about Dwarf Fortress.

Yeah, they're talking about Dwarf Fortress.

And the thing they had to decide this was before any.

I mean, there were games in museums and like these limited sets.

That's what I was thinking.

This is not just early for Dwarf Fortress.

This is early for games in general.

There were no games at museum of modern art.

They picked 14.

The 14 games that went into museum of modern art were all came out at the same.

I mean, all were announced at the same time in 2011, and it was.

There was like the sim sim city eve online oh, that's right like.

And then the guys from eve uh, they actually invited us to iceland and i had never been out of the country before And it was all because of this MoMA thing.

Yeah.

We went to Reykjavik and in like 2011 or 2012, we were just, Hey, we're MoMA buddies.

And they were also doing something like their big anniversary, like fest at that time.

And I was just, that was just a great time going out there and meeting, meeting people and stuff.

And including like like one of their big concept artists was like also did dwarf fortress like fan art for their like the beasts the beasts in the game.

You know, and had been doing it, you know, for like years previous.

And, you know, we met them.

That was, that was just, it was just all lumps together.

Those games, both of those games as well.

It's like you know, you might not think of them at first to put them on the same sort of on the same sort of shelf or on that same track, but like Eve tracks, you know, in regards to its stories and its possibilities and its community driven aspect, it tracks so similarly to the war fortress in those on those metrics.

It's amazing yeah, and i love the phrase as well, i love the phrase tan um moma buddies.

It's like yeah yeah, we've met, we met.

We met like um, we haven't met like the people that made like the sim sim city and stuff.

But i remember, like cat cannibal was one of the game, like adam saltzman and stuff, we met, we met up with.

Uh, He was actually also a MoMA buddy invited to this Eve thing.

That's where we met.

All the MoMA buddies were there.

Yeah, I don't remember.

Was that it with all three MoMA buddies or was there four?

I don't remember.

I don't remember all the MoMA buddies.

I just remember being interrogated at this panel with all the MoMA buddies, this Icelandic professor who who, like he went by a single name, his name was goater or something right, like like prince or beyonce or something yeah, he's just this big santa looking dude comes up to me and it's just like what does this game tell you about the medieval mind?

And i'm like this is giant audience, a giant audience.

I've blank blanked so hard, just absolute worst.

I think academic panels are one of my favorites.

You know, you go up there to talk about your game and you can get a little heady about it.

But sometimes they just shoot so intellectual that you're just like that gap there is massive.

Yeah, it's like I see Name of the Rose.

I mean I can tell you about, like if Christian Slater is a monk or something, I can tell you about that.

Yeah.

Give me a, give me a launching.

So, so the game gets accepted into MoMA.

Like now, it's like it's an understatement to say that like the mainstream has picked it up.

You know, like you're culturally in, like one of the cultural and you know, like cultural centers of the world in New York you've, you've been, you know, enshrined in culture, in the mainstream culture.

And that's sort of noted as a cultural, you know, seminal piece in the medium.

And you're still, in the meantime, you're still working on this game.

There's still features to come and everything.

Zach's not even full-time yet.

We didn't even have enough money until, like, Zach was still working.

And it was...

And here we are in the MoMA.

You got to get time off work for your Reykjavik trip.

Yeah, exactly.

That's literally.

Okay.

And so then you were mentioning Zach.

There was something else that I think Tan, you said MoMA came first.

What was it that the other moments?

Yeah, much like the Z coordinate.

Oh, the world activation.

The world activation.

And the thing with that was that we haven't even talked about the.

What does that mean again for our listeners?

What's a world activation in the Realm of Dwarf Fortress?

Right, so there's fortress mode, adventure mode, but there's a mode we haven't even talked about yet, which is legends mode.

And it's the entire history of the world, for hundreds of years, that the game is sitting there generating, before you even started, Dwarf Fortress.

And there's like thousands and thousands of events, like this dragon destroyed this village or this dwarf slew this important goblin.

And all their lineage, like this begat him, begat him, begat him.

Yep, yep, yep.

But it all stopped as soon as your fortress started and the year zero or whatever.

And the world activation was all this stuff just continues on.

Outside your fortress.

And you're existing in it as like, Like you say, all of this stuff that you're not seeing is just still continuing on outside of your fortress.

But at this point, it actually can help your... It actually can visit your fortress.

Because all of your dwarves are from these...

Well, maybe not the original seven, but the rest that come are from the outside world.

And so is the adventure.

And adventure mode is also in the outside world.

Oh, like they're a character from this lineage.

It's not just something that's spawned at the start of the game or something.

You have a choice.

Yeah.

And there's like these interrelationships between the modes that we're also developing at this time where you can like retire your adventurer.

But now that the world is active, your retired adventurer can come and live in a fort that you play later.

So they'll actually come there and be a citizen.

But then you can retire your fort.

And so all your dwarves are still alive.

You don't even need to die anymore, right?

Yeah.

Some people opt to keep them alive without going out.

But then you can play adventure mode and come and talk to your retired adventurer.

That was a citizen of a fort you retired.

And you can ask them about the things in their life.

They can tell you about the monsters that you killed back when you were playing.

Wow.

And it's just all gets so tied up that way that we were just exploring these kind of relationships around this time as well.

So this is going to be this is?

It's such a funny question to ask because I actually don't even know how you're going to answer it, Tan.

But maybe you've been asked before.

We're saying all these things, right?

Like you can go into this fort and talk to your adventurer and they tell you about you know the things that you slayed when you were them.

But really and we know that the game is ASCII, so I'm sure people again who haven't played the game or just kind of loosely familiar with it, they've got an idea, they're able to run the simulation of what we're talking about in their head.

But How are you actually again, I guess in layman's terms of folks here, but the procedural generation that goes into this, like what's involved in like writing up this, this text, like when you say he's your Explorer, tells you about this thing.

I imagine Tan, obviously you're not sitting there writing out all this text yourself.

How, how is this presented to the player?

How are you actually activating and presenting all of this information that this game has?

Like Zach, you've spoken about so much of it isn't presented as well.

It's invisible but tan like.

Let's just drill into that example you said of like, going to your adventure, walking to them.

What?

What's involved in that?

How's that presented to the player?

How is that generated?

Yeah, so if you're a um, if you've, if you've, i mean some, some additional people listening will understand roguelike games at least.

And yes, that you have a little, you have a little at sign moving around and that's what it is an adventure mode.

We did that as an all.

There you have the at sign that you are that moves around.

And then there are all the other characters on this grid, on a screen, and you can walk up to one, and one of them will be your old adventurer.

So in this fortress.

So you walk up to them and then I think you have to press like K and move the cursor over them.

That's what we had to change for the same version.

Yeah, that's all.

You can press enter.

It pops up a giant menu because there's so many things to talk about.

And you can ask them something along the lines of like tell me about your past, or something like that.

And you select that.

And then what this does now is you have this character.

That's a, that's a creature that has a.

We actually have this this, this structure called the soul that lives inside the creatures.

And we actually made it into an array in case we do possessions later so that all souls.

So that's future-proofing for you.

We haven't used it yet, but it's been there for decades.

We haven't used it.

It's ready to go.

And so it actually will query the active soul, whatever soul is currently controlling this body, and then go into their personality, into their memories, look through the events.

It stores a bunch of ID numbers to store the events that they have seen.

Now, the events are from like way back in world generation.

We need these.

It's just a simple structure that says what happened.

It's just a type, a type with some ID numbers and, just as in the year, whatever this killed.

This, for instance, it's very lightweight right.

Incredibly lightweight.

And there's just a million of them sitting around.

But in this in this adventurous head, it's everything that you do.

And we don't have to worry about this like taking too much memory or anything, because the player can only do so much in their lifetime.

And so, so there's just a few events sitting up there, a few important events.

And so when you ask them about their past, they can query the list of events in their head.

They can even sort them by importance, however that's rated.

And then you've pulled an event, but that is just a little structure with these ID numbers or whatever.

And now we need to turn that into text.

Yes, sir.

So we have, you know, hundreds of, or maybe something like a hundred something types of events.

And every single one has, just like a string creator, and the string creator takes a context so that it can.

It can shorten names that are like the person talking will just refer to themselves as I or whatever.

This is another problem with localization.

Yes, there is no very, very difficult.

I bet.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah.

If you plan in advance, I mean, we had a chance, but that that chance.

Well, now now with money, the chance returns.

Right.

I mean, it's possible to.

So think about it anyway.

Think about it.

But yeah, so you can kind of rebuild these sentences and then you can display the sentence on the screen.

And I'm not going to be voice acted anytime soon.

It's unless we have the text to speech.

Yeah.

Well, actually, it's much better than what I'm used to, isn't it now?

Yeah, we could just use anybody's voice and get sued.

Okay, so now let's talk about the world activation again.

Had you been teasing this with the community?

I mean, like talking about your interaction with the community now.

What year was the world activation, first of all?

2014.

Okay.

So now we're what, like 12 years into development.

When we talk about community now around Bay 12 and Dwarf Fortress, you've got the donate button up.

What are we talking about in regards to the size of the community in regards, like active folks?

Because obviously there's chatter going on around the internet, but people that are there for every release talking to you on your forums.

We've gone from 50 to 200.

Where are we sort of at now?

Yeah, we're at a few thousand active accounts, like maybe three or 4000, as the years march on a little bit that have logged in at least once a week.

Yeah.

And so there's always a churn of like 300 active people, something like that.

So my next question is like how active are you with that community in regards to?

Are you two just kind of like in the zone, coding away, creating this thing and like oh, there might be something coming, and then you drop it on them, or are you actually talking to them and very open about your development as it's going along?

I absolutely have to engage with the community because we're begging for money yeah, we're also.

We're also making sure that uh, you know that the, that everyone's happy and that there's no going on.

And so we're moderating, we both are full-time moderating it.

Right.

So now it's gone from just having like a few people tagging along saying Hey, can I maybe throw you some birthday money to.

You're actively moderating and managing this community, engaging with it.

And Tanya, you just said you're, you're begging for money.

So like, let's talk, talk about that situation.

Cause I know it's actually a place apart in like the wolf, you know, fortresses and Baytel story.

And eventually, you know, I'm getting together with Tanya and kit box and the steam thing.

Right.

So what's your sort of living situation at the moment?

And you know this like a year.

It sounds like you're now actively talking to the community about donating, as opposed to just Hey, we have a button.

Where are you at in that regards?

Yeah, in 2014, it would be just in the in the midst of it.

So I quit my job in in 2007.

No, sorry, 2006.

But they let me stay on till 2007.

That was very nice of Texas A&M University.

Thank you very much for the extra year.

Uh, and then I moved back up to Washington where, where Zach was at, in an apartment I lived in for maybe 13 years after that.

And, uh, until just recently, it's not like 2020 or something.

And, uh, cause I did a pandemic move.

I remember that in 2020.

So, so yeah, 13, 13 years.

So usually in the apartment up there and just just um.

That's the situation I'm living in in Silverdale, Washington.

Yeah. and which is West of Seattle.

And the, the.

Just I mean that that was basically unchanging for and and how much sort of, because i know you, you've been quite transparent about how much you're making every month on the game right, like you were actually publishing your donations as well to the community.

Am i right in saying that?

How many was that from like day one when you started getting donations, or did that come a little bit later?

Uh, i think it was day one.

Uh, if it wasn't, it was a few months later.

I mean, we just decided that that a way, cause the number was 800 and 800 is pretty good and you want it to be a little bit bigger.

So you say you're like, okay, so I will just let people know exactly what's coming in.

This is going to be like fluctuating, and we want the downward fluctuations to be something that people can see.

Yes.

Yeah.

And we did, we did a bunch of other stuff too, to, to, to drum up the donations.

Like we were giving out like crayon drawings for the longest time crayon drawings, like drawings of uh people anybody, and there's no amount associated to it because we didn't want to deal with sales tax stuff or anything.

So anybody, they could even ask for them.

I mean, that rarely happened, but you you, You could get.

Zach drew one thousand five hundred of these maybe.

And he also like the one that was even more popular was we would we would.

So way back.

So this was a strange thing that happened.

Like the first time I got my PayPal donation, like it sends you an email to your inbox that says like you have gotten, you know, a.

It's not a donation, but it just says you've received money.

Right.

And and then you just have that sitting there and it gives you the person's email.

Right.

And so the first time it was that birthday person.

So I probably just wrote back today.

Thanks.

You know, I got over here.

You know, the button works.

But then.

When you release the game and suddenly you've got, like you know, 50 or 60 of these sitting in your, your inbox, and just by Gmail or whatever.

And I was like, well, I need to reply to every single one of these and say, thank you.

But then I got bored, just bored out of my mind just because I doing that and I didn't want to copy paste a form letter although i eventually ended up doing something like that yeah, yeah and yeah and, and i didn't want to set up an auto reply.

So what i started doing just weirdest thing is just i put a little, a few ascii characters and then, and then i just said, like the dwarf is being attacked by a crocodile, and just like these, just this is silly little messages, And then we formalized that very quickly into a thing called an ASCII art reward, which was, and then we eventually called them story rewards as well, which was Zach, who's a better writer than I am, would write an actual like paragraph story that is also illustrated up at the top, with a few ASCII characters.

And Zach made more than 3000 of those, I think. amazing so i would i would hope that the look forget about the game in moma are the crayon drawings in moma as well zach no they're surprisingly it's kind of hard to find them anymore yeah right they did make it into the magazine article though yes oh they did right you know in 500 years will be like an original zach adams crayon drawing was found in an attic somewhere in delaware well they're probably worth you know you know they'll be worth more when we're dead but they're probably worth more now yeah the classic artist issue i'm i'm never going to do another one so it's a limited number yeah exactly they're all signed too yeah So how much around this time, how much are you making in donations a month?

And Zach, when?

Like is this are we getting close to the point where you're now on it full time as well in 2014?

Uh yeah yeah, this was i think you went full-time in 2013, is that that?

That strikes me as like the correct.

I remember, no well, i met my wife in 2013, so i think uh, i remember i was having trouble telling her what we were doing.

I was just thinking that i mean like, even if you, For example, my business partner Blake is just like loves his war games, you know, like miniatures and things like that.

And it doesn't look like your typical guy that's interested in like if we're going to stereotype in like painting miniatures and things like that

When he met the woman who would become his wife, there was definitely a moment where he had to tell her about how much he was into miniatures.

So I imagine telling someone trying to explain to your new partner about Dwarf Fortress is a whole other level than that.

Yeah, yeah.

Actually, she Googled me.

She Googled me.

We are in the age of Google at that point, sure.

But, yeah, like I said, she only played The Sims.

She rarely played video games, which is good.

You just have different interests or whatnot.

But I had trouble telling her about how we –

Because I was half living off contributions and half living off working at the Circle K.

I went back and looked in 2014.

So for five months here, this is what it looks like.

May 2014.

We made $3,700, June $4,900, July $15,000, August $6,000, September $4,500.

Was July just all that $15,000?

Was that like a summer people just sitting indoors in the air conditioning with summer?

No, 2014 is probably the world activation release, actually.

Oh, right.

Of course.

And so it's just like, boom, just big spike.

And then back down, back down to you know.

So maybe we're making 40000 a year split between the two of us.

Yeah, so it's still.

It's still like you're on the game, but it's still like mega living.

And i think zach, you were saying too that you're like splitting it between your, your other job and you know what's coming in from contributions as well.

Yeah, so when did i don't remember when i quit anymore.

Yeah, 2013 was my guess, like right at that time where we're like we're like it's 20 000 for each of us, but Zach doesn't want to work the Circle K anymore.

Come to think of it, I think it was right before I met my wife.

We met in November, so I think it was that year before then sometime.

All right, let's move things forward then.

You're both now working on the game.

You've had world activation.

It's like now this Legends mode is now spilling into the rest of the game.

It's going on as people are playing.

We're getting closer.

What's the next big step?

So an interesting thing we should probably mention around this point in 2014 is We had that Eve Fest in 2011 where we met the MoMA buddies, but we didn't know any other game developers.

We didn't know anybody.

No one at all.

We don't go to events.

Never been to PAX.

Nothing.

We actually thought that game developers stole ideas from each other.

And we're just cutthroat.

So you were like stay away.

Yeah, yeah.

Because you only hear the bad stories, right?

And they do exist.

And so – but it was around this time, 2013, 2014, that we met Kepa Owai from Rocket Cat Games.

Yes, Kepa.

Yeah.

So that was cool because he lived like 10 miles away from us.

Oh, right.

Great.

Yeah.

And then and then through through Kepa, we went to PAX and the PAX panel on procedural generation.

And on that panel I think there was like Ryan Clark and maybe Zach Aikman was there and Tanya was moderating.

So that's where this is when you met Tanya.

This is when we met Tanya as well.

Right at this time and also met at the indie booth or the mega booth, that's what they call it, the indie mega booth, where there's like 50 or 60 stalls at PAX.

Everybody knew who we were.

And we had no idea.

We had no idea about this, no idea at all.

And they were just like wow, it's like it's.

You know, tard and zach make more fortress.

And uh, that was just um complete shock, absolute 100.

Yeah, that must be, that must be absolutely surreal.

Because now, just to give folks i think probably the majority of folks here who are listening much like they know what the dwarf fortress is, they'll know what the mega booth is.

But for those who don't, The indie mega booth was something that existed for a number of years.

Maybe like, oh, I want to say almost like eight years or more.

But basically, at PAX, a bunch of folks would come together and they would buy a huge amount of space and then they would actually just sell that off to Indies so that Indies could get some premium space at PAX and they could come together and, you know, pull their resources and the folks at the top who are like running it at the time uh, Kelly Wallach, Chris Floyd, some others

They would make sure that there were deals with sponsors.

So, you know, Alienware would supply the computers and everything.

And, but it was, it was curated as well.

So you would submit to be a part of the Megi, the Megi booth, the indie Megi booth.

And that was and it was hugely beneficial to.

It was kind of like a rite of passage to indies who are looking to commercialize at the time or get their, get their games in front of more eyeballs.

I mean, we did, our first mega booth was PAX West in 2013 or something like that.

And you know, I think you two as well, you know it was would have been around the similar time that you, you jumped into the, into the mega booth.

But the interesting thing is that there is like a lot of independent game developers who you're meeting for the first time, but folks that at the time were quite um notar, notarizable like online like, for example, you know, the Vlambeer crew or whoever it may be, the Super Meat Boy crew, stuff like that.

And so I can imagine to walk into this huge area of the show and there'll be 100 independent game developers and they all know who you are.

It must have been an incredibly surreal experience.

Yeah, yeah.

Especially because we'd heard of a lot of those games too, right?

Like you're saying.

And yeah, that was just the whole kind of paradigm shift for our heads there.

Look, these are, you know well, now you've got these people yeah yeah yeah, it's actually.

It's kind of funny because we went to PAX, but it's like when you talk about, like commercializing dwarf workers, we were mainly there to like help out with other people's.

Yeah yeah, we volunteered.

We were volunteering at the death road booth.

We volunteered for four days to talk to ourselves, just just.

We couldn't even speak.

That's actually a great question.

Did you?

Did you show the game even?

Or were you exhibiting your game or just hanging out?

We never showed Dwarf Fortress until the Steam stuff.

Until the Steam stuff, and we never submitted to IGF or anything like that.

Up until this moment, we had considered ourselves completely separate from NDA.

You do get into PAX free.

When you do that though yes exactly, you get the exhibitor pass, which also lets you stay on the floor for the, for the parties, after you set up and stuff.

Yeah, that was great, it was a great experience, and we, we tried to yeah we we, we went to packs a number of times after that as like speakers and stuff.

Yeah especially, it's right in your backyard as well.

It's such a great and it is, it is and it still is to this day.

It's not even like there was like a, a golden days where that was happening.

It was a real hub for community.

Even you know, I was just at PAX recently and it's just filled with developers who are like helping each other out.

And you know that community you make such fast friends when you're there, you know, sort of in the trenches of that show together.

Do you remember what games you volunteered on the booths for?

We were there for Death Road with Kepa and we literally were sitting there hawking the game and kept like amping up the number of like oh, there was like 2000 different interactions with the items because we completely forgot, or whatever.

But we sold it.

We sold it.

The game did all right.

We'll see what we do in our park.

Hell, yeah.

Okay, so where are we at now?

So you mentioned this is the first time that you've sort of now become part of a community around this same time that the world activation stuff has come out through meeting Kepa.

And just for our listeners too, the Tanya that Tan mentioned before is tanya x, short of kitfox game.

So one of the co-founders there and she is the kitfox is the studio that helped you get onto steam, so which we're still a fair way away from.

But when did you first start talking to tanya or did she approach you or anything about steam?

And you said something interesting before tan, which is like You wouldn't have done Steam if it wasn't for a couple of particular reasons you know, like health insurance, for example.

So how does that conversation even come about?

And at what year did that conversation start happening after meeting Tanya?

Well, for one thing, that people have been telling us to join Steam for years and years and years.

And so, uh, it is these people though, that we had not met before.

So it's really just starting at this time.

Cause I I started going to GDC um like 20 2016.

Maybe there's that thing we did in Korea as part of this too.

I mean, we um met a bunch of people there and uh, I remember at GDC like Charlie Cleveland was really asking me to get it on Steam.

It just saddened me.

He took me aside and just put me in a corner in a room and was just like you know, you really got to put this game on Steam.

That's the – they make Subnautica.

Yep, Unknown Worlds.

Yeah, Unknown Worlds.

That's right.

Yeah.

And I was like, I was just absolutely not having it.

Right.

But you know, you definitely planted like this path forward.

If we, if we were going to get into money trouble like that, that a lot of people said.

Like you know, you're going to be able to make it on Steam if you just give the game a facelift.

Yeah.

It's going to do well.

So we could do that by ourselves.

Yeah, of course.

Right.

So tell me when you say you were like just so against it at that point in time.

I'm interested to hear and why?

Because and I just I'll do a little parallel with us right.

Like we're making a game at the moment.

We're making two games, right?

One's Jump Light Odyssey.

It's at Space Colony Sim.

And then the other one is Solim Infernum, which is a- We played the original.

I was going to talk to you about that.

Yeah, yeah.

Because, yeah, congratulations.

That's awesome.

Yeah, I got that on my wish list already.

Yes, gotcha.

You better too as well, Tan.

Because I've got Duel of Fortress in my library, so it's there.

I'm going to buy it.

Well, so Solium Infernum for the listeners is just for the context of the podcast is it's a reimagining of a game that came out in 2009.

And there are so many similarities to your story with uh Vic Davis, the original creator.

He's based in Athens Ohio, and tame at games, not through the community or anything like that.

Like he was making civil war, um, virtual tours on like DVD ROMs or CD ROMs essentially.

And with macro media director was like, I'm going to make a strategy game made on again and empires.

And then ended up making Solim Infernum um, basically with a software program designed to create DVD menus.

And everyone was telling him the same thing.

Like you've got to get this game onto Steam.

But for Vic, in talking to him through his business earlier, like the civil war you know on virtual tours that they were, they're selling the CDs and stuff like that.

Amazon had become like a bit of a like was had become this middleman and it like cut out the whole book industry and everything.

So Vic viewed, you know, steam as a potential middleman.

Right.

And it's, and we've had chats with him.

We recorded a, like a similar podcast thing where.

It's interesting, like looking at people's as steam is building up it's you know it's.

It's potential to make money for folks and it's growing a market share.

I think a lot of folks viewed it as that way is like is steam the big, the big middleman come here to take a cart?

Like, and we do it independently.

But there are also tech concerns as well for Vic in regards to just getting the game onto Steam.

Like you said with the ASCII thing, he just couldn't get it onto Steam on his own.

What were the concerns for you with Steam?

Was it just like a reticence to even open up that can of worms?

Or was it a similar concern in regards to someone coming along and taking a share of your cash?

Sure.

Well, to tell you the truth at least for me anyway it was like for the longest time I thought Steam, like right before, I thought Steam was just kind of a monopoly that shouldn't exist.

Yeah, that's exactly what Victor told us.

It's a similar sort of thing, yeah.

Yeah, it's such a complicated relationship with Steam because we I mean they're around here, right?

We actually, we've been there a couple of times.

And actually when we say we hadn't met developers, like when was that Steam tour?

That was early on.

That was before we met anybody.

Oh, so had they reached out to you?

Yeah, just reached out to us to go tour the place, you know, and it was, you know, interesting.

We, you know, go check out, you know, check out what seems like our valve or whatever.

And and like so.

So we're like over there and we see them, you know, as people running this this, this company and stuff, and not as like, this faceless thing or whatever.

And I kind of soften that up a bit.

Also, we just got softened up on the idea of having a Steam library ourselves, because I hadn't gone on Steam until way later.

This is just DRM.

Why the hell do we need this?

Yeah, of course.

But the thing is, I mean, the people are there.

And there's this whole – I mean, there's so many parallel stories here right, that we haven't gotten to.

Like another parallel story way up here is all of the Dwarf Lakes, the Dwarf Lake games Memoria Prison Architect RimWorld, all that stuff.

They're on Steam with, you know, millions of players.

Yeah.

And so...

In near the end.

When we're considering, you know, going on Steam, a huge consideration is that the people are there.

Yes.

Like the game was going to be successful.

It's a proven market already for your game.

Like there are games that literally were probably inspired by Dwarf Fortress on there making all of this money with the millions of players.

It's proven already.

Yeah.

It was.

It was just a no brainer that like like, by the way, by the time we got to that point like, 2018 is when we signed the contract.

Yeah.

Um, it was a no brainer.

He just had to, it was going to be steam and we, we put itch in there as kind of a like.

We still believe, you know hopefully, that some, some market, you know some storefronts going to, you know, be out there fighting the good fight.

Yeah.

So now I, I absolutely love Tanya.

She's super impressive woman.

So I'm not surprised that everyone else is telling you to get onto steam and, And she's the she's the one that manages to like, convince you.

But how tell me how that came about?

Like were you convinced and you went to Tanya, or did she come to you?

Or how did the relationship with Bay 12 and Kit Fox come about?

So after we met at that panel, we kept talking.

And in fact, we wrote two books together in between the procedural generation.

Yeah.

So we wrote those together.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

We were both co-editors and I would just kind of go through and do the tech, the tech stuff.

And Tanya knew everybody.

And it was not a stark.

I mean stark division like that.

Um, like she did, she did a bunch of review on the articles as well and i also reached out to some people.

But that was kind of the vibe of the, the ending relationship.

But i still i remember the the, the conversation we had.

We were at our favorite restaurant in seattle and tanya mentioned the fact that she would, she would do this for us or and uh, And I think Tarn, I mean I had, I was, I had finally was like yeah, that sounds like a good idea.

Yeah.

And I mean, we, we were, we were brought around because the health stuff was right there.

Right here.

Right.

This is OK.

Yeah.

So there are concerns going on in the background where your, your donations and your lack of health insurance is going to assist you.

And so many things together too because, like our at this time, also sometime back in, like I think it was 2015, we also got the Patriot.

And that changed the dynamic of our crowdfunding a great deal, because we had some subscription-based crowdfunding on PayPal, but not a lot.

And we're still getting the majority at that point from just one-time contributions.

But then Patreon is a subscription-based model.

And that when we, when we, when we signed up for that, we immediately shot up and like doubled our income or something, because so many people were waiting for an easy orange button to press, not the big sign up sheet that PayPal had and stuff.

Yeah.

And also it's consistent, I imagine, too.

You're not waiting on people to come back and repeat donate when there's a release or new players.

And yeah, we went down and visited their offices in San Francisco when it was very small.

I mean, it's funny because we went and visited the offices again in like 2018.

It was for a for an interview we're actually doing with no clip.

Uh, that the the cat video that Danny did.

Yeah.

And, uh, yeah, Danny was actually just, yeah.

Danny was here last week actually.

Uh, or no, not last week.

Yesterday.

Danny was here yesterday.

Danny is leaving today.

Yeah.

They just, this, this, this, this, yeah.

He just, you know, spent three days recording here.

And uh, The Patreon, though that's a complicated relationship, because when we went to visit with Danny to record, just in the place we happen to be recording their offices it had grown to such a gigantic business by that point that we weren't even known to them.

We were no longer – like we got the VIP treatment originally because we were one of the biggest things up there.

Back in 2015.

And then now we're nobody.

Yeah.

And and which is fine.

But the problem is is that they, you know they've made a series of kind of questionable decisions, you know, as it relates to like teasing, you know, NFT stuff and all that kind of thing.

Just a million a million decisions about cutting trying to get rid of their one dollar donors.

And yeah.

All this stuff that would cause these problems.

And I don't remember which one it was, but it was during one of these times, also this dinner with Tanya.

So we had.

All right.

So you're kind of there's that frustration going on in the background.

There's that.

And you know, you're like this is, this is like Jared Kushner's brothers, the vc on that thing, and stuff.

You're like and that's becoming a bit of a minefield right, and that stuff.

It's like yeah, that was, this was like.

You know trump, trump is president, now kushner's in there.

What year all this all together?

This is like 2017, uh yeah, and 2018 somewhere in there.

So we're just in the midst of all this crap and we're like patreon is like literally going to vanish overnight sometime or something is what we were thinking at the time.

Of course, they're still here.

But it was one of these things where we were just like, okay, we need to parachute.

We need to get out of here.

This health bill I wouldn't – if I had the health bill he had, like his wife's insurance, covered it like I'd be screwed.

I'd just be gone.

And so – uh yeah, we're like okay, we're finally.

This is what it took to finally hire us to consider steam yeah, to dock into the to the mothership, the valve mothership yeah yeah okay, all right, and so that's 2017.

Um, the game released in correct me if i'm wrong is last year right Yeah, December.

December last year, right?

So we've got now in true Bay 12 Games fashion, it's like five years from one point to the next.

Tell me a little bit about that working relationship in the early days.

How do you even go about?

I mean, like God bless Tanya for even taking on the project you know like, how do you go about?

And there's two things that I'm really interested in here is like how do you structure a business deal where you're helping someone, like you know, folks like yourselves, in a situation?

We've done a similar thing.

We early on the Goose Game crew, House House, right?

Like we co-developed their first game.

They were just kicking off as like the first game they ever made or something, or the second, I think that Nico had made.

And they were like, help, PlayStation won our game and we're in this thing.

What do we do?

And so, you know, we helped them get funding and everything.

It was a bit of a co-development thing.

And then they went off and obviously did amazing things.

And so Tanya, working with yourselves in a similar situation.

First of all, what I'm interested in is how do you structure a business deal like that, where someone comes along and you know what's it now almost 15 years or 15 years into the process and is going to take you on onto steam?

How, cause there's, I mean, you've known Tanya for a long time.

You've had a working relationship.

Sounds like a perfect, perfect coupling there, but, How does that unfold?

How does that come about?

Yeah, I mean, you've got to set up the contract for the bad days, right?

So it's like yeah, so we just drew up this contract in roughly November 2018 and just decided okay, so what we don't want to do at Bay, 12 Games here, the two of us hire anybody or think about anything.

Learn, learn any kind of employment law or handle any extra tax burdens or anything.

We don't, we don't understand that stuff.

We, we could learn it and kind of I mean, our leverage coming in is we've got this gigantic game that is going to do very well on Steam.

Of course.

If it gets a facelift, and also that you know if the deal is driven too hard, we will do this stuff ourselves.

We'll figure it out.

And so, but it was all amicable, of course.

Yeah, of course.

It's almost like the perfect coupling, because Tanya has all of that experience that you're talking about as well.

So she has average in that regard too.

And she has also.

Another thing we were looking for is kind of the, not just the ability to get like our contractors or whatever we're going to get of the money.

Right.

Yeah.

We can't pay for it.

We can't pay for anything.

Yeah.

So it's an upfront investment that's happening as well.

Yeah, absolutely.

And then, and then also Tonya, had Victoria Tran at the time, who just community management, like community director, communications director.

Yeah, we would be able to reach out to press people, reach out to more people that we could talk to.

Do more moderation stuff, yeah.

Yeah, I think they did.

A thing they did that was also really smart was the people that worked on the game.

They reached out to the community, the Dwarf Workers community.

Very clever.

And hired the artists and people out from our fans, so they understood what was going on and they were really self-motivated too.

Because of that yeah, there's no no on onboarding.

For some of these people uh they, they knew certain things about the game better than we did, because they've been modding for you know 10 years or whatever.

I think I remember hearing some urban legend about George RR.

Martin has a guy that he calls if he ever forgets what's going on in the world of his books.

He's like, where's this character at this point in time?

And some dude in Scandinavia somewhere tells him.

Yeah, we've got the wiki.

There's many times that I've forgotten how to play my own game.

I am just a funny anecdote like that.

Recently we had to do like you know we're announcing the game, these games, or I had to do an on mellow steam update or announcement.

I'm like, Oh God, how do I, it's been ages since I've done a steam announcement.

Cause we've got folks who do that now.

And I went to do it and I'm like, Oh, I've got to, bring up the documentation.

I went to the documentation and the example images and like the best case use is Armello.

It's like our game.

That's embarrassing.

Okay.

So you've got the contract in place.

You've got this beautifully amicable relationship.

It seems like a perfect pairing.

You've got folks from the community.

Now talk to me about like, technically, how do you even begin this?

And you're obviously developing Dwarf Fortress alongside this.

So now you've got one game, one version, that's being brought up on one side whilst you're and they're trying to catch up to you and like, however many years of development and bring it along forward, whilst you're continuing to, in your wild ways you know, continue to develop dwarf fortress.

How do you even embark on a technical and logistical project like that?

And keeping in mind that we also signed a three-year contract, i love it even.

That's like a long time already.

It's a long time and we didn't make it by two years.

We missed that, But more than more than no no no, no.

Four years.

It took us four and four in a month.

So, yeah.

So we have we had.

The problem also is that we have the existing community and they have to come along for the ride.

We hadn't announced this to them at all.

And that announcement came a few months later.

And the agreement with the community was that there's always going to be a free version. which is-

Yeah, that's a big thing.

I mean, that's not usual when this type of thing happens.

But we're going to have a free version that's completely compatible and feature like you can move saves between them.

The features are in line.

Wow, I didn't know that.

I didn't know about that.

Not just on release, yeah.

Not just on release, but up into the future too.

We're always going to be releasing them simultaneously when we can.

We screwed that up right in the beginning, but.

Now they're simultaneous.

And yeah, it was just, yeah, our release date was just, we had to release the game as it is.

Yeah, but the, yeah, so we had that whole thing to deal with, which was super stressful.

I remember not sleeping like for two weeks before we made that announcement.

But of course, I was just like, yeah, cool.

You know, you explain things well.

You just have to explain things well.

We explained why we were doing it because we hadn't done it up to this point for the reasons we were talking about.

And so we just I mean, when you want to communicate with people, you just do it.

Just say exactly what happened and why.

And yeah, never.

You just explain it clearly one time and you're just not going to have to really take questions.

Yeah, and also they're not just there for your game.

They've been along for the ride.

When you explain the impact that it's going to have on you and your lives, and then the ability for Dwarf Fortress to continue on into the future too.

I can't imagine how you would not be behind that as a community member.

Yeah, you still worry, though.

But but technically, yeah, then then we're like, OK, we made this announcement.

Everyone's cool.

And we have a few problems.

One problem is that we are dead in the middle of the villains release work.

That was going to take, you know, a year and a half or something, and we want to get it up, finish it, instead of having all these promises dangling.

And so it's funny we signed this three-year contract and then for another year we work on just the villains and the ascii release and get that out.

So we're then in 2019 or whatever, and haven't touched the steam version yet.

Now, that's what i was gonna ask because, like i know, it's like a, you know, a company director or someone working on a game.

It's so we always talking about focus at our studio.

You know and like how we're spending our time.

I can't even imagine how you two went about continuing to develop Dwarf Fortress whilst having another team trying to like run alongside you.

Even just the back and forth of telling people like oh, that thing does this, or here's that thing that you need, or that communication, even if they're doing the bulk of the work.

So you sort of went heads down on, on the villains release and then came back to that at some point.

Yeah.

And this gave Tanya some time to spin things up too, because it wasn't going to spin up instantly.

And so, you know, she was, she was looking for all the right people.

It didn't didn't take too too long to find them, but also like this amazing soundtrack we have getting that, getting that kind of sorted out.

We have.

So we were listening to like some audio files and stuff of some initial music while still working on the villains release.

So there's a bit of a bit of work going on.

But not, we were not like um, because i was i i don't, i didn't use version control until three months ago, so i couldn't really spin up a version easily that would have the graphics in it.

So we didn't, i wasn't working with artists or anything to like right, letting them, letting them see what was going on in the game and stuff.

So it was not until like 2020, the beginning of 2020 where we get the villains release up.

We also wind down the Cran and ASCII rewards at this point.

Yeah.

Okay.

Literally spending, you know, days a month.

Yeah.

Tons of time.

And then, but, but because it's us, we're like, Last call.

And yeah, so we had 500 more to do.

Just like, yeah, I just like, Zach, you just had a thousand yard stamp.

Yeah, that's fine.

It took a long time.

It took a long time to get so.

Once you did get it spin up, how many folks on like over at kitfox were working on this thing with you.

So originally, originally had the two, two artists, we had uh mike mayday and uh mef who did the masterwork um, like big mod scene both of them like big mod scene people And then, and they did such good work

Like, uh, like I was talking about the self starters and stuff like that.

They, uh, they helped us with the, the ramps, like the three dimensional ramps of it.

When they uh the way they all fit together, like there's so many common uh, They're combinations of those.

So, like a, like a, you know if a corner looks different than a, than just a ramp going from east to west.

And then like, if a ramps next to another ramp, it gets even more complicated.

I don't remember how many, there's like several sprites, several sprites.

Yeah.

If you do every combination, it's some kind of like three to the eighth type thing you don't want to think about.

But then we knew they were able to narrow it down.

So they're solving problems for you.

They're solving problems.

Yeah.

No, they're really doing like And also with like the – like dwarves are built out of little pieces, kind of like our original Armat game, the one before.

And so we kind of went with the same thing.

And so from my end, it was so weird, this experience.

From my end as, like the programmer here, I'm like I've been doing these side projects my whole life with like pixel graphics and stuff.

And suddenly all of these skills coming up again.

And it's just like, okay, this is easy.

I can just do these things together, no problem.

And it's like, yeah, the same.

It was like the main thing.

Thing that helped me make the dwarves was that space game where you're blowing pixels off of the.

It's the exact same thing and uh, and and then so.

But but then mike also like drew the pieces and glued them together and stuff, and so that was the first, the first group of artists there, And then we were also at the music, which was a whole other thing.

We originally had Dabu on there, who's our kind of musician and sound designer person.

And there was a whole kind of kerfuffle there because there's a mod called SoundSense.

And there's like literally two albums of music.

Made for SoundSense for free by someone named Simon Swerwer.

And so from the beginning, the community is like, you got to get Simon on the project.

You got to get Simon on the project.

And little do they know, we're like negotiating with Simon to get on the project.

We can't say anything for like a year, for like a whole year or something.

And so we're like, yes, well, yes.

We'll look into that.

We know, great idea.

How do you like this new Dabu track?

And it's cool because Dabu stuff was cool.

So it was like well-received.

It was well-received.

They're like you know it's good, but there's this other two albums out here that you guys really don't look at.

And then we were able to announce, you know, and then, and then, of course, like the, the first week, you know, there's problems with the, with the, with the art.

Yeah.

The first set of artists.

So we had to, we had three, we now have three artists working on the three new artists.

Yeah.

And and then, and two of them um, experienced dwarf people again and and one one just someone who likes to draw animals, and we're like okay well, you can all use this, let's do it.

Yeah, we got animals.

Yeah yeah another, they're still, and they're still working, like right now they're drawing all the baby animals.

Why not draw 300 baby animals?

Yeah, it did make sense before, but now that it's so successful, i think People like animals.

Yeah, right.

One thing is true.

That's tracked in games for sure.

Animals sell units.

Something that we've discovered in you know, first of all, in just on two of our games actually right,

So our Mellow was a paper prototype, first of all, but we knew that we wanted it to be digital.

So we reached a point where we're like okay, we need to take this now to digital, but we designed it to be digital first.

We just prototyped it on paper.

But one of the interesting challenges for our development was that actual translation and communicating those things.

And now we're running into that again in Solium Infernum, where something as simple as in Solium Infernum, you'll remember you submit your turns and it's a simultaneous turn system.

So everyone, once everyone submitted their turns, the turn then transpires and you log back on.

And it's just because, you know, it's play by email or it was the original.

And so you send your emails and the, you know, the game master crunches them and sends it back to your safe terms.

You load up the game and the pieces are around the board and you're just seeing the results of what's happened.

But in the new one, we're actually showing all of that happening.

So you can see your legions marching across the board and the battles as they happen and all that sort of stuff.

And just that one decision to actually visualize combat brings up all this raft of issues like sequencing and everything that Vic just completely could avoid, like a certain percentage of them, because it was just like you say.

You don't see it?

Were there major challenges that came about by actually trying to communicate things more aesthetically, like one that immediately comes to mind is even just changing the design space of the game, like i imagine you have a goat and a goblin.

You know, assets now, as opposed to them being the same thing, which changes even just a small area of how you experience the game.

Was that something that you discovered going through this process of like this facelift, so to speak, of the game?

Yeah, absolutely.

The, I mean the, the.

The facelift though, was more the, the UI and all that stuff that I mean we had.

We had drastically changed.

Like even the way the doors work, the, the way they, the way they work.

They pick their own jobs without you deciding which ways they should work on.

There's just like that, the way that works, the way all the input works.

It's all completely new and different.

I think a point here that's important that we glossed over is the text.

The fact that the game displays in text the original and that doesn't work for some people.

That's not actually the main problem.

The main problem is the UI is trash.

Yeah.

Yeah, we got, you know, you got WASD on one side, and then you got...

U, K, L, M on the other side.

And it's completely interchangeable in all the different menus.

It doesn't matter.

Right, okay.

So there's no UX consistency over the years or anything.

And you had to set the labor, the labors that the dwarves would do like.

Does this dwarf fish?

Do they mine or something?

You had to press three buttons, VPL, to get inside of the menu.

And then you're editing essentially a spreadsheet, one column at a time, but there's no mouse support.

So you have to go down with the plus key and then press enter on the different ones.

Sometimes it's not the plus key.

Sometimes it's greater than less than.

Yes.

No consistency whatsoever.

And there are a bunch of mods.

Like the whole modding community that developed around the game –

It's kind of centralized around this utility called DFHack and we have a working relationship with them now at this point.

But then there was a utility called Dwarf Therapist, which essentially exposes the spreadsheet to the player.

And I don't know which direction this goes, but that's essentially what RimWorld's interface looks like, which is fine when you only have a few, but when you have 200, that's a 40000.

You know elements of the spreadsheet or whatever.

And and so we had to come up with a with a different method, and we were kind of, you know, partially inspired by mods here, of these labor automation mods, but also we came up with our own system of uh, job auctions and work details and stuff that sort of replaces the old VPL system.

Yeah, it took us three years or you say four in a month, but three years when we were just working on the UI to get all this stuff right.

I mean, it took a while huge, and there's like none, like none of the fun stuff, like like it's been hard.

It's been hard, that part's hard but the uh, but at the same time we had to learn how to be project managers.

Never manage like kip fox will hire the people, deal with any kind of issues yeah there, but they're not creatively directing the Right.

Okay.

Right.

So you are, yeah.

So you're interesting.

Okay.

Right.

Music lead, all the lead type things, you know, but they're bringing so many skills to the table that I don't, and we're not like a lead lead lead because we don't actually have the skill, but we do have to, make the decisions you know about major stakeholders you're being consulted all this sort of stuff yeah yeah it's just time and it is a skill set in and of itself which i mean only to each other have you had to do for what 25 years or something yeah yeah so we just had to learn this you know learn this not overnight because it took three years but We got better at it and just made sure that people were always unblocked while we're sitting here working on UI stuff mainly.

Yeah.

But if they're like, hey, I've got a new palette here.

We're going to try the dwarf clothes and stuff, then I immediately have to switch gears, make sure that goes in, make sure they get a build out so they can keep working.

And um, so you do are.

We're actually working actively on the steam version as well, alongside the, the ASCII free version too.

Yeah.

This is, this is all on the discord.

I mean we we, we took some uh Shortcuts so that the we didn't have to really work on the free version, the new free version at all, maybe just a couple of weeks, because the interface that you see on the premium graphical version, you'll notice that the text is all still fixed with font.

And you have all the borders of the menus and all the buttons, like a button at the bottom of the screen, like the pick to when you're going to go mine.

It's a four by three grid, actually, that lines up with the ASCII grid.

And those are ASCII characters.

So you can press a button and it will just completely be replaced by ASCII.

Yeah, just do it in real time.

Switch between the free and the non-free graphics.

So in a way, you're not actually maintaining two games.

You've got one version that has just one skin, right?

Yeah, there's only some drawbacks, like uh the, uh the dwarves skip going from one fit, one cell to another.

It's sort of seamlessly moving.

So that's just some things that would be challenging.

Like sliding menus and stuff.

You can't make them pixel slide.

They'd have to chunk slide.

I mean, it's fine.

I mean, that's workable.

I think people have gotten used to it.

Yeah, there are still occasional complaints about all of these things.

It's amazing what you get used to.

I remember when I was a kid, like I said, we only played on consoles and we had this old CRT, like in the like in me and my brother's room, and it would.

It would do this thing where it would just like vertically jump, like bounce, just constantly, like it was some sort of tracking issue or something, and kids would come over, you know like as my parents would be having a dinner party or something, and we boot up golden eye or something, you know shadow gate on nes or something, and this screen would start bouncing and they'd be like whoa, what's wrong with your TV?

And my brother and I would just be like, don't worry, you'll be used to it in, like, 30 seconds.

And sure we finally gained for years on this TV that like, tracked and like, would jump an inch back and forth for the entire time you were playing.

Okay.

So absolutely incredible achievement this, this steam release, and i think obviously the shock waves are felt across the industry when it was was announced.

And then also, i mean we spoke about.

We spoke about you tracking your, your month's revenue and, you know, sharing that with your team, one of the I saw the game obviously hit top sellers on steam.

And then I think the next thing I saw about your success was on Twitter.

Someone shared an image of your monthly earnings.

And it was like the month before was like 30,000.

And then, December was like $7 million or something.

And the graph just went like, it didn't even like keep it in Twitter's preview.

It just went off the screen.

So what now?

Like, what does it mean for you now that you are on Steam?

I mean it's great to hear that you've just got this one version that you're driving forward, but you've got this huge new influx of community, this relationship.

Have you been set up with Kitbox in a way where you sort of can now like, for example, we did with um house houses, like we got their game out?

You know, push me, pull you at the time.

And then they sort of undocked from us and went off and you know, made Goose Game obviously incredible success.

You know very proud of us, you know helping them in whatever small way we did to be able to achieve that.

But are you now in a, you know, in a period or in a state where Bay 12 can now move on and make this, or is this an ongoing collaboration with Kit Fox that you will have, you know, for as long as you can sort of see ahead or as long as the game is successful to a particular degree?

Yeah.

We have no interest in managing, uh, yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Cause we need the artists.

We're still working with the same three people.

Uh, they, they have, um, they have things to do.

Um so uh, we have brought on a programmer and uh, For the first time, this is Putnam from our community, one of our kind of modders for over a decade probably.

We actually met them at one of the meetups that we had many years ago.

And as of January, we have a programmer on the project that has the source code of Dwarf Fortress, the first person ever to have it. aside from me um and what a moment for them as well modding it for 10 years and then finally getting let into the jacked into the matrix huge yeah because they get the first it wasn't like one of the first things they did was like like uh they're they wanted to like continue to to uh do do uh favors for df hack rather than even working yeah yeah yeah the modding the mind we're happy you know for them for them to go through and just you know let their modding instincts take over because they've they've sped up the game you know by you know 30 or whatever case and just these little things because i'm I'm not a trained programmer and I'm also not a modern programmer.

Like all this stuff about modern CPU architecture where you have to worry about like like prediction, like the CPU can tries to see in the future, and stuff like that.

Yeah.

And you just have to do.

You have to structure your code a certain way to stuff that I didn't even know about.

And that said, that that relationship is great.

And we're also not handling their paychecks for their hiring or anything about them.

We don't know anything about that, except that we we obviously paid able to pay Tanya back their initial investment in terms of the structuring, because you're interested in the contract.

And this is all public information.

They get 20 percent.

That's the deal.

Yeah, it's great.

And the deal was to continue working together.

For you know, I think it says five years or something like that.

And then reassess.

Yeah, that's fantastic.

It's really great.

And just like a huge shout out to tenure as well.

What an incredible. incredible undertaking as well.

And, you know, helping you both just reach this milestone.

And you know, in short, you know, helping you both change your lives as well.

You know, like you know, take the game this far and then to be able to just take it into a whole new era is really amazing.

There are two more questions that I have for you today.

The first one is you've spoken about the Steam release being 05, the version number, or something right.

And you've got this list.

What are some of the big things, like Zach Tan, that you have on your minds that you're happy to talk about?

Like when you think about this idea of a fully realized simulated fantasy world.

What's coming down the road, whether it be in 10 years or two years or something?

What's still on the table for you?

We're just going to clean up for a little bit still here.

Yeah, that's it.

We're going to make sure we don't make a big mess here, but then we're just jumping.

The first thing we're going to do is finish the villains release that we kind of postponed it.

Adventure mode.

Yeah, adventure mode.

Adventure mode is not even done.

We didn't even release the whole game yet yeah, so so adventure mode first, but that's also kind of the villains release and adventure mode are kind of the same thing.

It's like the same thing.

It's like what we did right, what we did for dwarf, where we did for dwarf mode, with the automatic uh the, you know, reworking the, the job system and that kind of stuff and the ui.

We're going to do the same thing with adventure mode.

We're going to make adventure mode really work And like as it is now, even in the free version, it's kind of like really free form and not, you know, you have the ability to do whatever you want, but there's there's no real game to it or meaning to it.

And so you know we're going to we're going to work on that make adventure mode really, really good when it gets uh, when it gets released, and we'll finally get to the, the myth magic release that i talked about at gdc.

Yeah, it's 2016.

Yeah, it's still on the list.

Everyone we're it's.

We haven't forgotten.

Yeah yeah exactly, all right now, because this is the thing that Duel Fortress is most known for.

I would love to hear from both of you over all of the years.

What, what is your favorite story that you have heard about your own game?

Like what's the whether it be the craziest or just you know, feels like it's your game most fully realized in someone's experience, or the funniest.

What is, what's the anecdote of the story? of some players little fortress that is really stuck with you over the years well for me it was arch crystals i don't know about you it's like the the min max the ultimate min max i've completely destroyed this game and completely wanted that they made an entire tower of glass that goes down into hell and has a zoo of demons that are all captured it's like this game is mine now i've beat this game incredible it's like the architect of the matrix like sitting in their room above their glass yeah they've they pumped the lava up from the bottom and for no reason just pumped the lava all the way up 200 levels into a giant green glass tank above Like the trees just sitting there, this glowing thing while there's also like demons in cages down in hell in the hell zoo or whatever.

These are the demons like the Balrog that are supposed to kill you.

I'm like, no, you're going to the zoo.

And that and also that that game ran for like 400 in-game years.

It's like longer than the history of the world.

This they were playing this game.

Holy shit.

Does this person work for the NSA now or something?

Or they do whatever they want, do whatever they want.

And that's it.

They're a God now, basically.

Yeah.

And it kind of points back to what I would.

I mean the thing that shocked me when I, when I was doing it,

So, so, I mean, I do have a soft spot in my heart for the, the cat tavern book.

So just go look up cat taverns on YouTube.

And you'll find this like Dwarf Fortress cat bug or something like that.

But the other thing that – I mean this is just more as a programmer and stuff, because I had no idea when we started this that people were putting computers in games right.

That you could build a computer inside a game.

Maybe it's seen something like a little animation or something like a circuit board, like a virtual circuit board.

And so now people were using like a hundred thousand mechanisms to make like these water or like vampire powered computers that would have like the entire game of space invaders that was playable with levers and had a score list and a display made out of draw bridges that would flip up and down and stuff.

And I was just like, that's it.

Yeah.

That's excellent.

That's all.

People building computers in your games.

Yeah.

Okay.

We've done it.

Well, hey, congrats as well on winning the Dice Award for what was the best strategy game?

Yeah.

That was so cool.

Yeah, we were at the Elden Ring table too, so we got to see them popping up and down.

Elden Ring, yes.

Yeah, amazing.

Well, yeah, 23 years in isn't bad.

But hey, I'm looking forward to seeing you both at GDC.

Thank you so much for hanging out.

I know this is the longest episode I've ever done.

It's a big chunk of your day.

I know Danny was just in town pointing a camera in your face.

So thank you so much.

Thank you for sharing your story with everyone here and congratulations on all your success with the Steam version.

I'm really excited for the next 25 years of Dwarf Fortress.

All right, there we go.

Thank you.

Thank you for joining us for The Game Maker's Notebook.

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[Two Decades of Dwarf Fortress: A Conversation with Tarn and Zach Adams]-[Re-release: The History of Dwarf Fortress with Zach and Tarn Adams]

📋 Summary

Two Decades of Dwarf Fortress: A Conversation with Tarn and Zach Adams

The Genesis of a World Simulator

The ASCII Aesthetic and Early Tinkering

Design Philosophy: "Slaves to Armok" and Iteration

The Power of Community and Emergent Storytelling

Navigating Commercialization and the Steam Era

Looking Ahead: The Myth and Magic Release

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Two Decades of Dwarf Fortress: A Conversation with Tarn and Zach Adams]-[Re-release: The History of Dwarf Fortress with Zach and Tarn Adams]

📋 Summary

Two Decades of Dwarf Fortress: A Conversation with Tarn and Zach Adams

The Genesis of a World Simulator

The ASCII Aesthetic and Early Tinkering

Design Philosophy: "Slaves to Armok" and Iteration

The Power of Community and Emergent Storytelling

Navigating Commercialization and the Steam Era

Looking Ahead: The Myth and Magic Release

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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