I'm back in the UK, returning from my two year stay in Japan but I'm currently relaxing. Also I'm moving from an overloaded portable to a roomy desktop machine.
Life update: Teeside cancelled their game programming course, I'll now be going to Hull instead. I'm guessing it was due to lack of interest or they lost a lecturer - I wasn't told anyway :D
I intend to upate this blog with the contents of my lessons. The programming books I was reading are currently being shipped from Japan. I'm mainly catching up on games I missed. Oblivion is fun but buggy - a step down from how stable they got Morrowind. I've got the seasoned schemer and I'm waiting on the little schemer, as I want to learn scheme, all of sudden.
My main project defitently isn't forgotten but I'm doing no programming at the moment, as I build up my development system again.
The main reason I decided to write this post was to highlight a very curious game - Dwarf Fortress.
At the start of the game, a very large, very unique world is generated.
You may then choose from various mountains - here your dwarfs are to create a new settlement.
They can dig into the mountains and creates halls, bedrooms dining areas and the like. They'll need food to get through the winter. Each dwarf has a different skill set but they can ply their hands to anything. The caves might be attacked or flooded so it's important to build doors. You master mind the construction of this new settlement.
The big difference is it's all ASCII! It looks very much like a rogue like, in fact there's also a roguelike in the game, once you fortress is abandoned. It enters the game world as ruins and in the roguelike you can battle the ghosts of the dead dwarfs and loot their treasure.
The interface is daunting but workable once understood (It would benefit greatly from some streamlining). Defintely worth checking out and struggling through the interface problems - theres a massive amount of depth, it's alpha but still very impressive.
Check it out here.
3 comments:
Welcome back to the good ol' Europe! :]
I wish the universities here in Finland had courses in game programming...
That Dwarf Fortress -game sounds like an intresting concept. I was kind of hoping it was not some ASCII-based game... the step to try it is a bit higher for me at least because of that.
Sounds very Dungeon Keeper'ish to me, though. I liked that game a lot some years back.
Looks very much like a NetHack clone ?
Despite the question mark, this really isn't a question is it lighthammer?
Also Nethack-clone isn't a commonly used phrase, shuffle a little closer and I'll tell you why...
Shuffled, okay, good - Nethack did not float down from the heavens in some glorious parthenogenesis no it came from a game called Rogue, hence it being called a rogue-like. So there can't really be any clones of nethack unless they're pretty much identical to nethack. Instead we use the term "rogue-like", you'll see the phrase used a few times in the post, but possibly it passed you by in your excitment to add a comment.
In any event Dwarf fortress, (there's clue in the name) is about a fortress full of dwarves - that you control! It's quite and worth playing. Maybe you should also try nethack too? In nethack you control a single character and dungeon crawl. The graphics are similar, there's a little overlap in the games but to say Dwarf Fortress is cloning nethack is really an injustice to Dwarf Fortress.
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