After Action Reporter

Remember Bronzemurder, the illustrated Dwarf Fortress story? Well, Tim Denee has been at it again and has produced the story of Oilfurance, never a tale of greater woe has been told before. Woe and laughter. It’s great, go enjoy!

Every month or so Toady, coder of Dwarf Fortress, releases numbers on the donations fans have made to support the project. Yesterday the stats for April were released and Toady revealed that fans had donated an impressive sixteen thousand dollars! Release months are always great months for Toady’s bank balance (he survives solely on these donations) but April has to be one for the record books! Well done Toady (on releasing the latest version) and good work fans for keeping Toady going. And, if you haven’t already, why not go donate? For interest, here’s a graph showing the month-by-month donations to Bay12.

A friend pointed me to a list of the MIT Comparative Media Studies theses for 2009 and the wondrous sight of a thesis on storytelling in Dwarf Fortress by Joshua Diaz. Josh’s paper, is an interesting read and if you love Dwarf Fortress you should have a look. It’s long, 225 pages, but great to look through. With a focus on how Dwarf Fortress creates “tellable moments” there are a lot of neat excerpts from AARs old and new. Dwarf Fortress: It’s practically art!

One of the best things about Dwarf Fortress is the way it lets people tell stories. Fortresses rise and fall on a mis-placed lever, a dwarf accidentally dropping a baby into a well can lead to massive civil works and then emo-death spirals see manic dwarfs bashing each other to death and making fine leather skirts out of each other’s skin.

The good news is that despite the bugs in the just-released version the potential for telling stories is now even greater than before. Take the case of the dwarf whose head was ripped off by a skeletal goat, or the adventure-mode player who stabbed an NPC guard to death with the crossbow bolt that was lodged in the player’s chest.

I can’t wait to play this some more!

At long last the new version of Dwarf Fortress has been released! You can get it from the Dwarf Fortress website, but if you are like me and love the MayGreen tileset then have no fear, you can get it from here.  The final Mediafire link, “newest fixed version” is probably the one you want. I have had it up and running and it works fine in windowed mode, not so good in full screen.

If you are wondering what changes are incorporated in the new version then read this Google Docs change log. And for anyone wondering, I am considering doing a whole new tutorial series but I am not sure it is required. Let me know your thoughts on the matter, if you have any.