Dwarf Fortress 2 open beta coming soon (design notes - part one)

After Dwarf Fortress won the Ascii Dreams Roguelike of the Year 2007, Tarn Adams and I started corresponding by email, discussing our shared love of the roguelike genre and where we thought the genre was going in the next few years. I believed then, and still firmly believe, that I saw procedural content generation replacing the need for level designers, which meant that we could throw aside the shackles of tunnel like level design and replace it with roaming open worlds, generated on the fly as you explore the landscape. Tarn aka the Toady One was drawn to the idea of having a 3d graphics engine based fantasy world and that he'd made significant architectural mistakes in going with a tile based design and would need to start again from scratch to met this goal. For a while, that is all that Dwarf Fortress 2 consisted of: a long email chain brainstorming ideas and filled with blue sky thinking.

The release of Spore was like a body blow. That so much impressive developer talent that ultimately been wasted creating a universe filled with curate's egg worlds left us both feeling devastated and at a loose end. I particularly had high hopes for the game, and felt Will Wright had betrayed both himself and his team by deciding to go with cute, instead of (r)evolutionary.

It was about this time that Tarn was contacted by Sam McGrath, of Project Offset fame. Offset Software, as it is now known, had been acquired by Intel, and Sam was concerned that much of the original concepts for the project would be delayed or diluted by the corporate culture that Intel was imposing. Project Offset, for you not familiar with the concept, was an engine designed to allow rapid prototyping and development of 3d art assets using procedural techniques - which Sam had turned into an impressive set of technology demos with the intention of building an open fantasy world. I've included one demo below, just so you can see where we were starting from with DF2: