and noticed that the PC Cohort site is closing down and with it one of the interviews would cease to exist. So here it is, saved for as long as the forum lives: (Don't worry, I asked for permission and the admin was nice enough to give it)
Tarn Adams Dwarf Fortress Interview
Dwarf Fortress is a game with no small notoriety in some circles since it’s first development release. Since those humble days, a large base of fans and supporters have cropped up to keep the game afloat through donations and kind words.
“Why” is quite simple. Dwarf Fortress is among the most intricate simulators ever made, and focuses on a concept never before seen in modern commercial games.
The exceptionalism doesn’t end there. The game itself is free and largely the work of one man: Tarn Adams. (with some help from his brother, Zach)
This is my interview with him.
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1. There’s some rumors that in a previous life you used to be a professor at Texas A&M – what compelled you to change your career and commit to Dwarf Fortress?
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I’ve been writing very time-consuming game projects almost nonstop since high school. I’d always been able to coast through my studies in the meantime up until I got into graduate school, pretty much. A few months after I started grad school, in December 2000, I put up the Bay 12 Games web page, and after that it was a balancing act between work and my game development hobby.
By the time I got my job as a professor, having that ultra time-heavy hobby had pretty much scuttled my math career. I had the degree and I eventually managed to get a paper published, but I wasn’t a very solid mathematician. Unless you’re a bonafide genius it’s very difficult to keep such a job unless you devote almost everything to it, and I had decided after my first year to quit. I declared my intentions to leave just before DF was released, although I really had no idea the game would be able to keep me afloat. I was more through with math than I intended to become a professional game developer. I had kind of thought I might end up teaching or something when things didn’t work out.
In any case, the Texas A&M math department was nice enough to keep me on for a second year in a teaching position, and that gave me more than enough of a cushion to maintain myself before I moved up to the Pacific Northwest in June of 2007. By then DF had already been out for almost a year — during my last year at A&M, some of the students had found DF on their own and would bring it up in office hours and before classes.
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2. How long have you been programming?
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I’ve been programming for as long as I can remember. My father taught me simple BASIC commands when I was very little. He did some programming for his job at the time and thought it would be important for us to know our way around computers, so he started us on them early and used games as a way to get us into it. I’m not even sure I was in school yet, it was so long ago. Of course, I didn’t really do
anything interesting at first and was mostly just printing text on the screen and so on. My brother and I downloaded a lot of old BASIC games off of bulletin boards and tinkered with them to learn as well. We wrote our first BASIC version of Dragslay, which was our first fantasy game and the most ancient direct ancestor of DF, around the time I was in sixth grade. It’s short for Dragon Slayer, but we only had 8 letters in filenames back then, he he he.
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3. If you could only add one more feature – any feature – to the game, what would it be, and why?
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DF features mostly tie into other features and don’t really gain their full power or interest without them, so it’s a hard question to answer. Practically speaking, if I were leaving the game behind without opening up the source, I’d probably add tutorials or something, so that more people could pick up the game. It’s really an unfinished game though, so being stuck with one more addition would be
more depressing than anything!
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4. What do you do in your free time?
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I still get a chance to play the guitar a little bit, and I’ve just finished reading the Water Margin, but I haven’t started another book yet. My brother and I find time to watch a TV show or play on console games a bit when we’re both around. If I’m lucky I get out of the house and can go out in the woods or something, but it doesn’t happen much these days.
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5. Have any games you enjoy playing? I’m partial to strategy games, myself.
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My brother plays a lot of strategy games on the PC. He’s currently on Hearts of Iron 3 I think. I never ended up getting into them, though I used to play a bunch of the Sim<X> games when I was younger.
We occasionally play some console games together in a sort of party atmosphere. Trading off the controller in the new Red Faction game in casual mode has been entertaining recently, but in terms of being into something for myself, there hasn’t been anything for a while. I had a DOSBox trip a few months ago, mainly to finally get through Ultima Underworld 2. I like the first one better, but it has always been bugging me that I never won #2. Now that that’s taken care of I haven’t been back to the DOS stuff, so I’m pretty dried out.
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6. Have any thoughts on the gaming industry as a whole?
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It’s very big now and the overall selection is quite diverse to the point that there’s something for almost everybody, and virtually everybody growing up plays games. I think that’s all very cool. I have microscopic niches I’m into myself, so I guess it’s disappointing personally that some of the interesting ideas from my favorite games weren’t picked up and developed to the level they could be at while other things have received a lot more attention, but I’m writing the kind of games I’m most interested in, so it’s not so bad.
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7. Any industry folks come snooping around and offer a briefcase of money yet?
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Ha ha, yeah, a couple of times, though it has all been in good faith so I wouldn’t put too sharp a point on it. It’s mostly concerned either using DF’s name as part of a name for some other project or using the DF setting for some other project without DF’s name, but nothing has come of it. Nobody has asked to buy the name and for me to stop writing and distributing my game, and nobody has asked to put DF in a box and distribute it. It’s just these side project ideas that come up now and again, a few times with firm dollar-value offers and sometimes just as ideas.
As long as we can keep creating and handing out our own free unaltered DF to the fans for the longest possible time, we are happy. So far the donation model has made the most sense for that, and I don’t see that changing. If some no-strings DF-related project that I don’t have to spend any time on were to magically materialize and the associated payment ended up supporting development of my own game for the next umpteen years, that would be cool and it would save our donors some trouble, but I don’t think it’s going to happen, because the DF name simply isn’t worth as much to other companies as it is to us, when you get down to it.
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8. You occasionally mention a concern of losing control of the Dwarf Fortress project- is that your greatest fear related to the game?
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At this point, I’m happy with how development is going, I’m pretty sure I can accomplish most of my goals over time, and enough people find and like the game that I should be able to stick with it for a while. This is one of the games we’ve wanted to write for a very long time, and anything that impedes the realization of our vision for the game are the things that I have a problem with. It’s hard to say what the top concern is really.
I’m vaguely bothered by mods that are pushing into full interface overhaul territory, not because I don’t think the interface needs an overhaul (it obviously does!), but because it might force me to slow development down to keep fans satisfied. That’s generally the context in which I’ve spoken about losing control of the project. The other context where control comes up is where the source exposed and having DF branches dilute my support and so on, but that hasn’t been much of an issue so far.
My only other worry has been having some direct competitor sweep in and do the things we’ve been doing and compromise our support in that way, but it hasn’t happened to any significant degree yet, as far as I can tell.
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9. Do you do anything to get “inspired?” I find myself at an impasse when I get writer’s block.
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Going out on hikes or to zoos is great for topping off my gas tank. I had a thing where I’d read the 1987 D&D Manual of the Planes to get hyped up as well, not so much for ideas as it just being a fun book and having a rulebook-reading habit from childhood. Zach and I both tended to read the rulebooks more than we actually roleplayed back when we had pen and paper RPGs around. The louder the music is playing the better I work as well. Pandora has been good for me, since I was getting tired of my CDs.
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10. Have any special words for the fanbase or the audience at large?
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Thanks for supporting the game! There might actually be a release coming sometime, somehow. It has been a while!
Oh, wow, I was in the nick of time. I copied this down only yesterday, then it occurred to me I should ask for a permission and now that I got it, the site is already down.
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Topic: Old PC Cohort interview saved from the abyss (Read 8316 times)