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The reason all the game design coding perverts love dwarf fortress is because tarn Adams succeeded where every single one of us has failed: he made a weird procgen system that does solely what he wants to do and is never focused on User Friendliness and rather focused on "can I simulate an entire world's history" and cares more about what weird shit he wants to add then about best coding practices and is the sort of project where you spend 3 months researching plants to try and figure out what makes them edible so that you can decide how to generate a garden better without ever considering how the user will interface with the garden
and people loved it and bought it
everyone wants to do exactly this sort project of project where they never have to consider "game design" or "win conditions" or such dumb things and instead be called cool and sexy for the way that they made weather randomly come about because of their atmospheric conditions simulation
only he, god among game devs, has succeeded at making his weird personal expiriment sexy like that and we're all jealous and in awe
every single one of us has an angel and a devil on our shoulder, and the devil is saying to make dwarf fortress cause we want to so bad and the angel is telling us to not make dwarf fortress cause it would never work, and somehow he did both. yes dwarf fortress is a marvel, but more then that, it's what every friend i know has gone "dang what if i just did X" at least once and given up on it cause it'd never work... it'd never be viable... it'd never make money...
i want to make a dwarf fortress SO BAD. it's an instinct at the heart of every systems-focused designer: to make a system so beautiful that it needs no explanation or elaboration to be loved
Until a developer is thirty-five, they still think, every so often, that under the right circumstances they could make the baddest motherfucking procgen game in the world. If I joined a roguelike gamedev channel on IRC and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was bankrupted by AAA gacha dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to generating curiosity from Perlin noise. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad. Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he played Dwarf Fortress. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to make the baddest motherfucking procgen game in the world. The position is taken.
